almanac – Kathleen Jowitt

One a penny, two a penny

April 3, 2026April 3, 2026 kathleenjowittLeave a comment

Tray of wonky but beautifully golden brown hot cross buns

I used to be a bit of a hot cross bun purist. Good Friday only. This was the rule when I was a child: I don’t think they were in the supermarkets for so much of the year, and anyway, we didn’t go to the supermarket all that often.

Marrying someone who didn’t grow up with that rule meant that there were hot cross buns in the house more often. I still didn’t buy them outside of Holy Week, you understand, but if they were already there then I might very well eat one or two.

Then in 2024 I was suffering with a diseased gallbladder, with any injudicious consumption of fat resulting in excruciating pain and vomiting, and at a phone appointment early in Lent the dietician recommended hot cross buns as a suitable snack food. So I ate them all year until I had my gallbladder removed in December. And by that point the rule was well and truly broken.

I can’t see myself making them more than once a year, however, because what with the mixing and the waiting for the yeast to froth and the mixing and the raising and the forming into bun shapes and the waiting for them to rise and the making pastry and laying out the cross shapes and the baking and the glazing the process takes all day. Granted, there was some hanging out of washing and eating lunch and a trip to the swings and some weeding in between all that, but I don’t think the buns lost out. That’s just how long they take.

I actually made them yesterday, Maundy Thursday, knowing that this morning would be taken up with church and vaguely remembering that they take a while. I’m glad I did. Even allowing for the fact that I don’t do the Three Hours these days, there wouldn’t have been time.

Anyway, there were hot cross buns for Good Friday. The symbol of the cross is obvious. My mother always used to say that the currants were for the wounds of Christ, though there are far too many per bun.

My recipe (the Good Housekeeping cook book) calls for 100g or 4oz of currants between a dozen buns, and even if you assume that the currants weigh as much as a gram each, that’s still at least three too many. As it is, I can count as many as that in the quarter that’s left of the bun I’m eating now. We’re looking at something more like Saint Sebastian.

There’s also mixed peel in there. I am not aware of any symbolic value attached to that, though if pressed I’d say it was something about bitterness.

If you have no daughters, give them to your sons. I do have a daughter. She is usually partial to a hot cross bun, though these ones were Different and therefore Wrong.

One a penny will not cover the cost of the ingredients, never mind my time. Two a penny, doubly so. Never mind. I enjoyed making them and I am enjoying eating them.

And my husband came home yesterday with another two packets from the supermarket. But those keep, so we’ll be eating them through Easter week. Hot cross buns!

Candlemas

February 2, 2026 kathleenjowittLeave a comment

A clump of snowdrops, dotted with raindrops

The snowdrops are out for Candlemas, as they should be. It’s been a grey, heavy, sort of a day, no shadows to be seen because there was no sunshine to cast them, so I suppose we’re plodding on into spring. The days are longer. There are buds on the trees.

A presenter on Radio 3 said earlier that Candlemas is the Christian festival of light, and, while I suppose that isn’t entirely untrue, it’s far from being the first thing that springs to mind for me. If I told you that Christmas is the celebration of the mystery of the Incarnation, I’d be correct but pedantic. But for me The Presentation of Christ in the Temple is in the same size print as Candlemas. The light is figurative, although it’s coupled with the physical light of the lengthening days. I rarely manage to get to church in the evening at all these days, so miss out on the candlelit procession which in any case was not much a feature in many of my previous churches.

For me, it’s most poignant as the hinge between Christmas and Holy Week, looking back and looking forward, prophecy and fulfilment and prophecy again. It calls back the glow and the glory, the paradox of God entering God’s world and God’s temple all but unnoticed, and it warns of the sword and the falling and rising. It picks up the disquieting note of myrrh and underscores it: this child was born to die.

Icons of Luke the Evangelist, Mark the Evangelist, and the Mother of God with the Christ Child painted on untreated wooden boards

Last week I was able to see these icons by Sonya Atlantova and Oleksandr Klymenko, which are on temporary display in Ely Cathedral. They’re painted on fragments of ammunition boxes recovered from battle zones of the war in Ukraine. The symbolism is obvious but no less effective for that: war and death transformed into love and beauty – but you can’t, shouldn’t, mustn’t forget it. Look at that hole where Mary’s heart is.

Loving anybody leaves you open to the certainty of grief when you have to leave them or lose them (it’s the anniversary of my father’s funeral today, too, Lord now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace); the alternative is, of course, monstrous. Parenthood makes you vulnerable, or, perhaps, aware of how vulnerable you are, how very little you can do alone to protect those who look to you for protection. Candlemas is, for me, when we understand a little more deeply what Christmas means. This child is born to die, because all of us are, and even if this birth and this death change birth and death for all of us, it isn’t going to hurt any the less.

On a lighter (ha!) note, I recall from the Journal of Saw It Somewhere Studies that jam tarts are a traditional Candlemas treat. The shape recalls the Christ Child’s cradle, apparently. This was never a part of my own tradition, but I was making chicken pie for dinner and had some pastry left over, so here we go.

Twelfth day (note to self: things get better)

January 5, 2026 kathleenjowittLeave a comment

A car parked on a snowy street. Someone has written "MERRY XMAS" in the snow on the rear windscreen.

It snowed overnight! We don’t get much of it round here; in fact, it’s been almost exactly a year. So either the perpetrator of this mild act of vandalism is keeping the full twelve days of Christmas, or else someone’s driven in quite a long way without clearing their back windscreen.

Anyway, this time last year we had a pathetic little dusting of snow, and I was in bed, in a good deal of pain and unable to keep any food down, as the leftover gas from my gallbladder removal surgery fought its way around my abdomen. (What sorted it out, for anyone in similar straits, was a little pill called Wind-eze. The packet wasn’t very clear on how it works, but it does.) Today, by contrast, I was able to walk across town in my Wellington boots, stopping at the cathedral to walk the labyrinth (still in wellies – that’s a first!) and eat the last cherry cream choux bun in Caffè Nero. So, contrary to my gloomy posts of the last month, I can and do get better.

And it really was ridiculously beautiful. See: