by Ed Balls
4 tbsp fish sauce
A handful of coriander leaves
A handful of mint leaves
2 limes, quartered
A few more coriander leaves and mint to garnish
METHOD
Put the chicken stock in a heavy pan. Add the garlic, lemongrass, whole chillies, half the chopped chilli and ginger. Bring to the boil and simmer for half an hour.
Put the noodles into a saucepan, cover in boiling water, cook for 4 minutes and then turn off the heat. Add the prawns and fish sauce to the stock, and simmer for a further 5 minutes.
Turn off the heat. Remove the lemongrass, ginger and whole chillies. Add the beansprouts and handfuls of coriander and mint leaves.
Drain the noodles, put into bowls, ladle over the soup, sprinkle the remaining chopped chilli, mint and coriander and serve with a quarter of lime on the side.
VIETNAMESE SALMON
Serves 4
INGREDIENTS
4 salmon fillets
4 garlic cloves, peeled and finely chopped
2 tbsp fish sauce
4 tbsp honey
2 tbsp lemon juice
½ tsp ground black pepper
2 tbsps fresh coriander, finely chopped and an extra 1 tbsp to garnish
METHOD
Mix the garlic, fish sauce, honey, lemon juice, black pepper and coriander in a bowl and let the salmon sit in the mixture for at least 30 minutes. Preheat the oven to 180°C/350°F/gas mark 4 and lay a large piece of tin foil across an ovenproof dish.
Transfer the salmon, still coated in the marinade, onto the foil and wrap it around the fish in a loose parcel to stop the marinade spilling out. Cook in the oven for 18 minutes.
Remove the salmon and juices to a serving dish and sprinkle over the extra tablespoon of coriander if you have any. Serve with rice and perhaps some broccoli stir-fried in some hot sesame oil with garlic, chilli and a tablespoon of soy or fish sauce until tender.
BLACK BEAN SOUP
Serves 4
My mum often made soup for Saturday lunch, usually tomato, mushroom, celery or leek. She’d sweat the vegetables slowly in butter for ten minutes, pulp them in a mixer and then blend with chicken stock, salt and pepper and some cream. If there was leftover chicken, she would dice that up and throw it in too. I often make those simple, healthy soups, especially when there are leftovers or vegetables getting near their sell-by date. Or when I’m on a diet.
But sometimes it’s worth making the effort to do something more laborious. One favourite of mine is clam chowder, although it only really works if you buy fresh clams rather than using the tinned kind. My other favourite American-style soup uses black beans (dried or canned) and is also well worth the effort. The cool tomato salsa and sour cream on top offset it beautifully, and it’s definitely healthy.
INGREDIENTS
1 tbsp olive oil
2 garlic cloves, peeled and finely chopped
1 medium onion, peeled and finely chopped
1 medium carrot, diced
2 large green jalapeño chillies
1 medium glass of red wine
2 × 400g can black beans
1 litre chicken stock
Juice of 1 lime
Salt and pepper
Tomato salsa
300ml sour cream
METHOD
Heat the olive oil in a heavy pan, add the garlic, onion, carrot and chillies, and cook over a moderate heat for 7 minutes. Add the wine and let it bubble for 2 minutes.
Rinse the beans in a colander and add them to the pot, followed by the stock. Bring to the boil and simmer for 30 minutes.
Remove from the heat and add the lime juice (saving a tablespoon to mix into the sour cream), salt and pepper. Make the tomato salsa.
Ladle half of the soup into a blender and blitz for a few minutes until smooth, before adding it back into the pot and bringing the soup to a simmer.
Serve in bowls with a tablespoon of tomato salsa and a tablespoon of sour cream on top.
13 GROWING OLD
My parents moved back from Italy to Norfolk in 2001 and four years later we started to realise my mum’s memory was becoming a problem. She was getting increasingly forgetful and we were all becoming used to having the same conversation with her again and again. She was still functioning normally, however – driving the car, doing the shopping, cooking for my dad, even coming up to London to look after our kids when we needed help. And if we ever raised mum’s failing memory with her, we were crossly dismissed.
One Saturday evening the whole family was sitting around the dining-room table at my parents’ north Norfolk house – Yvette, my sister and brother, their partners and the six chattering cousins. Mum had made a big chicken casserole which I carried through from the kitchen for my dad to dole out. Yvette fetched big serving spoons and my sister carried through the vegetables. We all passed round plates of steaming chicken, began to tuck in, and then, knives and forks in hand, we all stopped and looked at each other. The casserole looked fine, but when we cut into the chicken it was completely raw. The casserole should have been in the oven for at least an hour and a half, but Mum couldn’t have cooked it for more than ten minutes. No one knew quite what to do, the silence awkward and painful, until my sister Joanna said breezily: ‘Maybe it just needs a little bit more time in the oven’, and we all cleared the plates back into the pot and reheated the oven. My mum just sat there looking bewildered.
We knew that evening that her dementia was real and getting worse. A few weeks later we were all round for dinner again and this time Mum had made lasagne – her signature dish. In fact, she had made two full dishes since there were so many of us. One of the lasagnes was perfect – my mum’s lasagne at its best. But the other was a soupy mess, meat sauce and white sauce mingling but with no pasta in the dish at all. This time no one said anything. We carried on talking and laughing while Yvette subtly made sure that everyone had a little bit of pasta on their plate. And, in many different ways, we carried on saying nothing and working around Mum’s emerging dementia for years after that.
Looking back, and I know it’s the same for so many other families, the biggest regret is that we couldn’t get Mum to acknowledge what was going on and let us talk to her about how she wanted to deal with it while there was still the chance to fully include her in that conversation and allow her some proper ownership of the situation. But at no point was she ever willing to do that, and we never felt able to push it. When we suggested notepads or noticeboards where she could make lists, she’d just dismiss us as being silly. And as the dementia progressed, she would forget what we had said anyway. She was strong, proud and private. I don’t know if this was something she would ever have felt able to face up to, even to herself.
Steadily, as things became more serious, life became very hard for my mum and dad. By now, they were spending a lot of their time in a house they had rented in the centre of Norwich, which was much more practical and accessible. While we’d all seen enough depictions of dementia, or read enough accounts, to understand the impact it will have on someone’s memory, I certainly didn’t appreciate the extent to which it would affect my mum’s moods, often making her upset and angry. My dad coped amazingly well for quite a few years, but he found it harder and harder to manage, while my mum resisted having anyone else in the house to help out. Finally, a full ten years on from those early signs, she started to try to leave home to return to her long-dead parents in another part of Norwich. When my dad locked the doors in an attempt to keep her safe, this just added to her frustration.
When we visited during those years, I saw and experienced first-hand the stress my dad dealt with every day. He had taken over doing all the cooking – mainly reheating supermarket meals – because my mum couldn’t manage to cook anymore. Sometimes when we visited, we had large takeaways delivered or took our whole tribe to a local restaurant. But my dad also wanted to have the whole family in their home eating together as we had always done. At his request
, I cooked my version of Mum’s old lasagne recipe, and, much to my surprise, a cheese souffle that I often cooked at home became a great favourite of my dad’s, and he’d regularly request it when I rang to plan our visits.
I also took over the cooking of the Sunday lunch. For my mum, this was all very destabilising – someone else in her kitchen, using her oven, usurping her role. I had to be on my toes, because if I lost concentration for a moment, she would dart across the kitchen to open the oven and start taking things out, declaring them cooked. If I got ingredients out, she tried to put them away. And if I asked her to help by peeling vegetables, she would take offence at being given the menial tasks. If my dad came in to try to assist, and sensed the stress in the room, he’d unfortunately make things ten times worse by starting to do the washing up while I was still trying to cook.
These were extremely stressful moments, but it was increasingly tricky for my sister or brother to lure Mum out of the kitchen on some pretence. Strangely, while the dementia was increasingly bad, at the same time she could be razor sharp and ultra-resistant to any attempts to divert her attention. That kind of active, high-functioning dementia is very difficult to deal with. However hard you try to be caring, it’s so easy to lose patience when someone is sharing the same space but operating on a totally different plane. I would snap, ‘Stop that, Mum, they’re not cooked yet’; but then feel huge and immediate remorse that I was telling her off for something she couldn’t control and didn’t understand. I’m sure the same thing happened to my dad again and again. He’s not the most patient person, but he tried and tried. Then I would hear him say, ‘I’ve already told you. That’s not what we agreed. That’s not what we decided.’ Mum would become upset and he would too. A few minutes later, though, my mum had forgotten all about it while my poor dad carried the burden of those moments for hours and days afterwards.
Throughout all these more advanced stages, the doctors and experts continued to be astounded at how effective my mum was at covering up her memory loss, bluffing her way through situations where she clearly had no idea what was going on while sharply telling off any nurse or doctor who tried to prod or poke her or spoke out of turn. She was a very unusual case of a healthy and articulate and high-functioning elderly woman with very serious dementia. It eventually became clear to everyone, after much soul-searching and experimenting with different care plans, that full-time care was the only safe option, and she moved to the dementia wing of a Norwich care home.
A friend of mine was temporarily the director of Alzheimer’s Research UK, and she spoke to me about the experiences she’d had with her own mother. Increasingly, she explained, you can’t have any conversations about what’s going to happen and it’s even harder to have conversations about what has happened. Your parent will just live in the moment, and when you are with them, you must do too – just try to make every present moment as happy as possible. She told me how much her mum loved dressing up, but that when she opened the wardrobe, her mum would sometimes say crossly, ‘I don’t like any of these clothes.’ My friend learned there was no point in having an argument; it just upset her mum when she said, ‘But you chose them’, or tried to persuade her that something in the cupboard was nice. Instead, she learned to just nod, shrug her shoulders and turn away. She would then wait a minute, come back and open the same wardrobe all over again. By that time, her mum had often completely changed her mind, saying with a smile, ‘Oh I do like that jacket, let me try that one on.’ This is the reality of coping with dementia – you just have to live with them in each moment.
Eventually, as my mum’s dementia advanced, she became much calmer, giving up a little of her fight. She returned to a simpler state and would spend hours looking at old family snaps; photo-books that Yvette put together using family photos; and special dementia-suited picture books with familiar poems or phrases in big print alongside old-fashioned scenes from the 1940s and ’50s. Sometimes she would talk at length about what she saw and recognised. It was deeply impressive and humbling to see how our children could sit down with their nana again and again, with the same photo-books, and chat away with her about what they were looking at, having the same conversations over and over.
Gradually those moments when my mum would talk at length became much less common, and it felt as if she was retreating, disappearing. When we all got together in a big family group, she was often very quiet, sometimes anxious and agitated, as if she didn’t know who anyone was and was finding it all too noisy and bewildering. We learned, however, that far from trying to quiet things down, if one of us then broke into song – an old hymn from church or a song from a musical – Mum’s face would light up and she would start to sing along, and maybe even lead the singing as she had done years ago.
Singing has always been an important part of my mum’s life – she and my dad met for the first time in the church choir when they were fourteen years old. We went to church every week when I was young and belted out the hymns. At our wedding, my mum organised over twenty family members and friends to rehearse in the morning and sing Psalm 23, ‘The Lord is My Shepherd’, at the wedding ceremony. Even now, with much of the rest of her memory gone, her ability to remember the words of hymns and songs has remained. She can seem totally zoned out of my conversations with her, but then if I start singing ‘Lord of all Hopefulness…’ or ‘And Did Those Feet…’, not just the words and the tune, but also her memory and personality, all seem to come flooding back. In the old days, when the whole extended family would get together for a meal, we would sit around the table and eat, laugh and argue. Today, when Mum is there, we sit around the table and eat, laugh and sing.
We still try to take her to Norwich Cathedral when we can, for evensong or the annual carol concert. One time I was at the Sunday morning service with Mum and I smiled encouragingly each time she looked over at me. After a while, she turned to my brother on her other side and whispered loudly: ‘Who is that man and why does he keep grinning at me?’ Andrew just laughed.
I inherited my love of music, and especially the music of English cathedrals, from my mum and dad. I’ve always listened to choral evensongs to concentrate, stay calm or to relax – at work and at home. When the BBC asked me to choose a deceased hero of mine for their ‘Great Lives’ series on Radio 4, I chose Herbert Howells, England’s greatest twentieth-century cathedral composer. Howells was a man who knew great tragedy in his life, losing his only son, Michael, to polio in 1935 aged just nine years old. Michael’s death inspired Howells’ greatest writing, infused with sadness and hope, perhaps the most powerful, spiritual cathedral music anyone has ever written. But he never recovered from the loss of his son, and struggled with his faith until, at the end of life, in his nineties, he told his daughter, Ursula, that he could not believe in God.
Unlike my mum and dad and brother and sister, I was never confirmed in the Church of England. I’ve always kept an open mind but, like Howells, I’ve been a lifelong agnostic who loves church music. One of the great evenings of my life was to be invited by Sir Stephen Cleobury, the master of music at King’s College Cambridge and president of the Howells Society, to sit with him in the King’s organ loft as he played Howells’ music and hear Stephen talk about how Howells himself had sat with him many years before, as he played that same piece in the organ loft of Westminster Abbey. It was Sir Stephen’s last ever visit to King’s. He died from cancer just a few short weeks later, and the music and memory of Howells was a great comfort to him. It is the spirituality and optimism and hope of Howells’ music that speaks to me too. I don’t need to know there is a God to believe we can live good and fulfilled lives. But nor do I need to reject the idea. For both my parents, hope and belief has sustained them in their later years.
I recently had the privilege to film Who Do You Think You Are? for the BBC. I traced the struggles of my, to my surprise, Scottish, great-great-great grandfather on my dad’s side, and my great-great-great-great grandfather on my mother’s. Our family was shocked t
o learn of these ancestral hardships, but I know my mum, if she could understand, would be proud to know what her forebears had endured and sacrificed to make the world a better place and protect the welfare of their families.
The day after we finished filming, I sat alone in Yorkshire staring out at our garden, overwhelmed by sadness and loneliness and thoughts about mortality. I had spent a fortnight recording the obituaries of my ancestors from nearly two hundred years ago: men with families, hopes and dreams, who faced struggles and made mistakes, and will have sat around tables with their families eating, laughing, perhaps singing, and wondering what the future would bring. It’s all too easy as you grow older to be haunted by the thought that you too will eventually be gone or living a shell of your former life.
Nothing really prepares you for parenthood, for your parents getting old, or for facing the realities of death and loss. But making that BBC film about our family’s past drove home to me that it’s in the here and now that we live our lives and make our contribution. We owe it to ourselves and each other to make the most of every day. So that day in Yorkshire, I shook myself out of it, and resolved just to enjoy every day I can, laughing with Yvette, cooking for our kids and singing with my mum, living in the moment, opening the wardrobe again each morning to take a fresh look at what’s inside.
My dad has now moved permanently into the centre of Norwich, just ten minutes’ drive from my mum’s care home. She is safe and well and eats voraciously, wolfing down the cheese straws and sausage rolls my dad is now baking at home most days to take in to her; this in addition to a full English breakfast and a three-course lunch every day, with dishes like chicken curry or fish pie that she would not have dreamed of eating before. It remains very important to my dad to have my mum and all the family round the table for Sunday lunch. Important for him and for all of us. So I do the cooking and Mum arrives in a taxi with her carer just before the meal is served. Most of the time, she is so different to the active, sparky, arguing, caring mum we all grew up with that it’s difficult to recognise her as the same person. But then, sometimes, if I make a funny face or sing a silly song, she will turn to my dad or Yvette, roll her eyes and give them the same look she’s given them so many times over the years.