A recipe for life

On the shelves here at Lush Places are fusty-smelling two old books. One is a green contacts book. Its cover is faded and the edges battered. The other is an equally faded maroon recipe book. It has a chunk out of the spine.

- Michele Hewitson

When Elizabeth Jane, my pet ewe, was a lamb and allowed to gallop around the house, she pulled it off the shelf and attempted to eat it. Perhaps she thought there was a recipe for biscuits inside. She is partial to a biscuit.

You have to be really quite old to remember when the details inside address books and recipe books were painstakingly hand-written. I bought the green book when I got a job as a feature writer at the Herald. This was about a hundred years ago, when there were still jobs for that almost extinct species that is the journalist. I suppose at least I'm not yet extinct - or dead - although it can be only a matter of time.