Dear Friends,
A Friend
A friend is like a flower, A rose to be exact,
Or maybe like a brandnew gate That never comes unlatched.
A friend is like an owl, Both beautiful and wise.
Or perhaps a friend is like a ghost, Whose spirit never dies.
A friend is like those blades of grass You can never mow,
Standing straight, tall, and proud In a perfect little row.
A friend islike a heart that goes Strong until the end.
Where would we be in this world If we didn't have a friend?
I have been inundated by email from ladies across the globe who want
to see a picture of Annikki's prize-winning 2001 Ginger Bread House
Cake. I am, therefore, attaching the picture of her year 2000 creation
which is a peculiar type of a Finnish Barn which stores the hay
through winter.
It is called a Latto and the construction is remarkably simple. The green
hay is the green (and yellow) string sweets that children love. The kids
just adored this simple design.
The second photograph is the 2001 creation of a Laplander's wigwam,
known in Finland as a "Kota", which won the competition this year.
There are some new and unusual features, something she does every
year and which gets copied by others in subsequent years.
This year she made the candle holder (which is very traditional one at
Christmas where they make blocks of ice and keep them at the front
gate with candles burning inside them) out of eucalyptus sweet balls
she stuck together. But the real masterpiece was the ice pond she made
in front of the wigwam which showed the reflection of the burning
candle and the distant sun or moon as you prefer (which is not visible
in this picture). She made the pond by melting and spreading the
eucalyptus sweet evenly on a piece of gingerbread. The fireplace inside
the wigwwm was also unique, but it is not visible in this shot.
Her prize winning creation for 1998 has been on the web for a couple of
years. In 1999 she missed the competition as we were holidaying in
India (as will be remembered by those who attended the 40th year
reunion of the Cathedral School Class of 1959).
Annikki's unique creations of cakes include a enormous turtle on the
beach she made as a 5 kg birthday cake for Kachum, the 4 year old son
of Michelle, the local Chinese restaurant owner here in Oulu (who is a
girl from Calcutta).
Grandson Samuel's 1st birthday cake which was a 4 kg creation of
tree stump with a crow's nest and eggs and a beautiful meringue
moulded and carved chocolate coated crow on it.
Another masterpiece for Samuel's 3rd birthday which was an
enormous snowman whose black hat was made by crotcheting the
string liquorice sweet.
All her creations are being compiled into a book and I will publish it
during one of the coming years.
I was greatly honoured to be asked By Antony Ramsingh to attend the
reunion of the Class of 54 which may be held in England. I am sure I
will be able to make the trip as I can take the time to spend some
time with my granddaufghter, Asha, at Birmingham.
I have also been pushed with requests for copies of the programme
brochures of the Cathedral school plays. I will try my best to put
these up soon. I am also most gratful for others who have offered to
send me copies of the memorabilia that they have. The Arctic Museum
of my interests is not going to be a dream for long!!
So far the guesses as to the characters who played various parts in
the play have not come anywhere near the facts. Only one, the most
popular Cathedralite ever, the late Tara Malkani, has been guessed by
many. That really shows his fame. Some of you guessed that Ashok
Jaitly had played the role of Aladdin - not so. He did act in the play
but as one of the Guards. He also acted in "The King of Sherwood
Forest" as one of the Alto Maidens but by the time of "Ali Ba! Ba! or
the Forty Black Sheep" he had become a Tenor and acted as one of the
forty black sheep!! Others named Colin Hunter as Ali Ba! Ba! - but he
played Sir Richard Lea, Badmanazar and Hassarac in the three plays.
Still others guessed Herbert Vaney, but he played Dorothy, Bu-Tea
(Laundry Student) and an Alto girl from one of the various nations,
respectively.
Keep those entries coming in as that Alvar Aalto glass vase is a rare
and beautiful specimen. I am keeping the competition open till the
end of January 2002.
Many of you asked more about Tony Jaitly. Tony was with me not only in
Cathedral but also at St. Stephen's. I did meet up with him many many
years later when he was the Private Secretary (non-pollitical) to
George Fernandes at the Ministry of Industry at the time of the Janata
Government. His wife, Jaya, was in politics and the former Samata
Party president, and his daughter, Aditi, recently married cricketer,
Ajay Jadeja. (There is no truth in claim that Celina Jaitly is Jaya's
and Tony's daughter.) This is the description of Tony as it appears
on the Rediffusion.com pages:
"Suave and powerful, Ashok Jaitley is chief secretary of (Indian) Jammu
& Kashmir. In control of the civil service, he sits quite literally
at the apex of local government. Jaitley is an institution in
Kashmir, having been around for many years. He lives in a beautiful
mock-Tudor mansion by Dal Lake, which was used as a set in the
Bollywood movie, Mission Kashmir. It also used to be - so it is
alleged - an interrogation centre in the early 1990s. Jaitley is as
interested in sorting out the economic mess that is Kashmir as he is
in fighting militancy. With Farooq Abdullah and Giresh Saxena, he is
one of the key decision-makers in Kashmir."
We are having a very very cold season. Yesterday, Annikki and one of
her younger sisters refused my offer to drive them to town to attend
the post-Christmas Sale shopping spree - they decided to walk the
couple of kilometres!! On the way back they were so frozen the called
me from a restaurant to go and pick them up. When they reached home
and thawed out, they found they had left one shopping bag somewhere,
so I drove them back. It was not in the restaurant or the locker in
the shop, but unknowingly they had left it in the middle of the
pedestrian pathway when they had stopped to warm their hands. And it
was still there about an hour after they had left it there!!
Some problems with email addresses:
Viney and Purnima Sethi's email to bigfoot is being redirected to
earthlink and bouncing from there. I have changed the email address to
hotmail as advised by Piloo. However Newsy Notes 003 has not been
sent to this address. Naval Patel's mantraonline account is so full
that all mail is being bounced. Will someone tell him as he is
happily sending out mail from there and wondering why he is not
getting mail from me!!
Hrushit Bhatt's email address at usa.net has lapsed, as has many others,
so could he please be informed by Rohit or someone else who knows
his present whereabouts (in Delhi, I think).
Dr. John David's email address at yahoo is bouncing email, so will
someone please tell him to send me his new address. It may be a
temporary error, so I am sending this message to him also in the hope
that it gets through.
Willie and Pushpa from Canada sent me this short note:
Dear Jacob,
I do feel as though some thing is missing when I don't hear from you
for a while. Thanks for the mail that arrived yesterday. Will write a
proper reply when this Xmas rush is over
Bill
Thanks Willie. It is nice to get such a compliment. But I do wish
someone would tell me once in a while what a horrible guy I
am, bringing all this rubbish and smut onto the internet and
wasting their bandwidth. :-)
Eddie in Salt Lake City is waiting to see (the Finns win medals at the
winter olympics! It will take a few years for the Finns to come back
to par in this sports field after this year's dpping scandal of all
the very top of their sport (sportsmen and women, doctors and
coaches as well) at the World Winter Sports Championships
held in Lahti, Finland, last January.
Thank you for the many offers to help me run my web magazines. The
editorial content is not the problem as there is so much great input
from all of you that I am never short of matter. What I need is
someone who is computer and web savvy to redesign the original pages,
take the old issues on the web and set them up again so that the
content can be found easily and also take all the past issues of these
occasional newsletters and set them up to complement the web page
archives.
Once that is done it should be possible to add the new content fairly
easily.
By the way, if you want me to share your email address with others, you
must explicitly give me permission to do so. Also, I only have the
office email addresses of several of you. Please give me your private
ones as I hate to send these crummy emails to your offices addresses.
Hope you enjoy the photographs.
Best regards
Jacob Matthan
Savage House Captain 1959
Oulu, Finland
1 comment:
Nice blog.thanks for sharing.
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