Greece is the word

  ... Greece was the word on our plane tickets at the end of September. We didn't want to be obvious and visit an idyllic island with sweet blue-and-white houses, charming windy streets, fairy lights and jolly tavernas that would slap down a fresh fish soon as look at you. No we went to a part of Greece with an unusual amount of mattresses and unwanted toilet bowls by the roadside. A part of Greece where the only 'taverna' had a chalkboard outside promising many different sorts of fresh fish but in actual fact only ever had frozen shrimp and things made with a lot of cheese.

We stayed in a stone barn in the middle of olive groves, the view out over the blue blue sea and the islands beyond made us forget about the mattresses and too-much cheese. Also a lovely dog called Susie adopted us. Susie slept outside our bedroom on the balcony and accompanied our morning walks (past the wayside mattresses and toilets) to the beach and the bakery.

Also there were chickens, we cooked with their eggs and they offered endless entertainment, best was the evening show as they climbed or tried to fly into their roosting tree, then jostle and do that happy chicken noise as they found the right branch suitable for them all to settle down side by side for the night.

Monthism

He said: May is my favourite month  

I thought you liked September, September is definitely the best month

September's ok but May is better, although I like April even more and March is pretty good, I like June but not keen on July. I hate August, August can f**k right off, September's nice but October is better  

That's me told

My sister has been staying with our parents, Ma has been ill and the doctors say she has to increase her fluid intake, she phoned yesterday 

Your sister has been making me soup and all sorts of drinks, she made me one of those things where you whizz up all the fruit ... a what do you call it ... a selfie ... anyway I didn't like it and I don't want another one

Seagull Attack - the return

 

 

Last time I visited Cornwall, a demonic seagull stole my ice cream - I wrote about it here.

 

Without noting the date* I visited the same beach last month, I was meeting a long-lost friend there. Telling her the amusing story - hahaha I said so let's not go buying any ice creams here 

 We went swimming and were having a lovely time and lost ourselves in chat and then she said I've got some lovely sandwiches will you have one? and I said yes please and we laid out a blanket and all the while that same evil seagull had been waiting for me and was watching us and when he knew we were good and stupid in our chat he swooped down with his knifey beak and sliced that delicious bun out of my fingers taking a good portion of my thumb with him

 

* it was exactly two years later - TO THE DAY

Spider with Yumen Zed

Yesterday I passed a man telling a small boy that he was 'getting spider with yuman zed' -  my first thought was that this was must be a new and interesting foodstuff - maybe on the takeaway menu at Wagamama. Lockdown has made me obsess about food even more than usual so it was a bit disappointing to realise a few seconds later that the man was actually telling the boy that he would be getting 'a spider with a human head' and I think that sounds too big to eat. 

Maybe I'm just making up excuses,  I buy sheep and deer from the butcher, I hardly think a human-headed spider would be much bigger than these creatures, if they do arrive on the market, portion size is probably not going to be the main issue.

 

In other news

This morning I set fire to the vaccuum cleaner after hoovering up warm ashes - the smell was far worse than I could've imagined

I still swim in the sea but only for 5 minutes because it's reached the sort of cold that makes a person go completely crispy  - in the way of those lettuces that get stuck at the back of a fridge

A dog fox has been patrolling our neighbourhood every night for the last week making a noise that sounds like a queaky-toy

 

 

 

 

 

 

Shopping these days

Grocery shopping in the  Melt Lock Down era  has gone a bit 'underworld'. Neighbours tip each other off about ways to get supplies without standing in long queues outside shops.

an email from a friend says she lives next door to a fishmonger, he could make local deliveries, should she pass my details - I said YES!! 

Thursday afternoon
Pete-the-Fish calls
I can deliver tomorrow what do you want?  

I place an order

Saturday evening
I'm in pajamas, supper eaten, a glass or two drunk, think it might be time for bed.
Phone rings -  Pete-the-Fish

I'm coming down the road with your haddock, meet me outside your house and bring a tenner

Scrambled, I can't find shoes so walk outside barefoot. A man walking towards me is holding a net in front of himself, he throws a bag on the road and tells me to drop my tenner in the net.

I do all this as though it is a completely normal sort of transaction

I was involved in a nightmare scenario

 in a supermarket.

I was already in an emergency-style hurry  to get to a kitchen where I would demonstrate cooking in front of an audience. I am not going to name the event for reasons that will become clear.

I was late for my turn in the kitchen because I was in the supermarket running around the aisles looking for a substitute for fresh dill (there isn't one!). An urgent message asked me to find a lot of 'firm, white fish - not frozen'. I ran to the fish counter and hopped from foot to foot while the lady in front of me tried to choose between the fish that I wanted and some other fish, I psyched her into buying the other fish, then I asked the Fish Wife if she had more like the one I wanted - loads more!

Fish Wife emptied her entire stock of the necessary fish into large bags, which I grabbed and dashed pell-mell to the checkout. The conveyor-belt tills were full of everybody and their weeekend shop. I went to the self-service till - the place you're supposed to go if you just have a bit of tea and a cake to pay for.

I plumped the first bag of fish onto the scanning bed where it flopped over and - to my horror - all the fish flowed out - rapidly onto the floor. I applied the three-second rule and tried to scoop them up quickly but they kept swimming away and spreading way beyond the till area. It took far longer than three seconds to round them up into my large shopper where they basked alongside my baguette and a bag of flour.

I hope nobody filmed this.

this episode was somehow reminscent of a dream that I recounted here a few years ago.  

bucket loads of rain

have soaked us beyond saturation

we are so wet we are virtually transparent 

It seems important for my mental health that I list reasons to be cheerful:

1. This weekend I made two divine apricot/almond/cherry, tarts, also an onion, fennel and olive tart and an asparagus and cheese tart - these were shared with several lovely friends and relatives

2. A big bag of old wooden cotton reels in a charity shop, all colours of proper old silk, plus several special tiny reels of buttonhole-twist and fat reels of linen thread - the whole lot became mine for a fiver. I have strung them into garlands and hung them in the window. They are beautiful

3. I spent this morning helping my octogenarian neighbour make a cascading silver cape, she will wear it to perform in the street with her friends

two boy guests remain in my home

the young one wears an all-black outfit and burns a pair of faux fillet de poulet au pain in a pan each evening. If I prepare vegetables while he's in the kitchen I watch him shrink with fear - tonight I will try him with a bible or some jesus-related jewellery to test my vampire theory.

A heavy box was delivered for the older boy, while we were all away. By the time he found and unpacked it, it had been by the back gate for a few days. Undaunted he filled all available fridge space with large plastic boxes of colourful rice-and-chicken-in-sauce meals, he said
I'm sure it's fine, it's still cold 

We looked at the labels which said  'use before June 2020' and I raised all my eyebrows

he read the instructions  - 'reheat from frozen'

the next hour was spent emptying all the smelly yellow-and-red meals into the food waste bin and filling  recycling boxes with plastic containers.

He has returned to KFC.


more reasons to be cheerful:

1. Last night I met up with friends that I love and don't see enough of

2. there's a slice of apricot tart on the kitchen table and I have cream in the fridge

3. the boys will leave next week

lunch with eleven women

in a sun-drenched-wisteria-ridden garden,  a laburnum tree burgeoning with yellow flowers took up most of the air above us, tiny bits of cobalt sky peeped through the blooms. We ate salmon in dill sauce with Jersey Royal potatoes then summer pudding with cream and raspberry cream roulade with extra cream. We were celebrating a scratch-card win.

Our host is an undertaker, four of the guests were either undertakers or 'in the business'. The host didn't want the lunch to become 'too-death-ey' and kept trying to introduce other topics of conversation but death and it's complications are too much fun; one guest had been asked to bury a large man in a wardrobe - there was a problem getting the body into the chapel, another guest was in the process of converting an ex-Carphone Warehouse into a mortuary ...

in other news

French Boy lodger has found his culinary groove - breakfast is fizzy pop and chocolate biscuits. For supper he has found a never-ending supply of reconstituted chicken-in-breadcrumbs, he fries as many nuggets as will fit on a big plate every single evening, I'm hoping he gets home to his mother before scurvy sets in.

WIndy

We're just back from quite a long trip to Portugal, where we had an extremely carnivorous time, chomping our way through a meat parade of chicken, chops and steaks accompanied by mountains of very delicious chips.  

On our return we barely fitted through the front door. I headed straight over to the greengrocer's to stock up on cabbages, beans, peppers and artichokes, serving them up with dahl, hummous and baked beans. The affect on our systems has been dramatic and we are currently unfit for human company, even now we daren't stay too long in the same room as I'm pretty sure we constitute a fire hazard.

In the morning I head to the coast for a swim - curious to see if my internal combustion engine can propel me across the channel

My Top Secret Job has sprung a leak.

It has become known that I sometimes work as a cook.

People have been telling me all about their favourite recipes.  *


This is a regular occurrence and I'm often astonished by the number of youngsters who speak wistfully of tinned fruit and semolina 

Yesterday a man in his twenties explained his favourite pudding:

rice pudding with a layer of tinned mandarins underneath and baked meringue  on top

and then his favourite sandwich

white buttered bread filled with sliced shiny green apples and sliced Mars Bar


*The TSJ has nothing to do with food

I'm being interviewed in a hairdressing salon

between the sinks are small mountains of bosomy torsos and manly sets of legs

phantom limbs stick out - waving or drowning or kicking the air

one of our volunteers inherited the contents of a vintage shop, these mannequins will go in our sensory room

our conversation is overwhelmed by the religious service going on in the care home lounge which is also a coffee shop. The hairdressing salon-slash-office is a glass-walled cube within the lounge-slash-church-slash-coffee shop. 

when the congregation shut their eyes in prayer we sneak out to investigate the sensory room

it's along the 'willow' corridor

care homes use plant names so they don't have to say 'dementia' too much, other homes refer to patients with dementia as 'bluebells', the same way some people say 'fudge' instead of other, ruder 'f' words   
  
we stand in the doorway of the sensory room, it's empty except for a row of chairs and a rainbow-coloured-fibre-optic-disco-light 

we'll bring in herbs and then people will smell the mint and it'll remind them of sunday roast lamb dinners

I think of the willow people feeling the boobies and manly trunks when the mannequins take up residence

Two years ago

we hosted a splendid party which involved a lot of cold meat and jelly. To boost my cooling power I bought an extra fridge. 

When the event was finished and everyone had eaten the leftovers I was going to give Party Fridge back to the charity shop from whence it came - but then our lodgers found it handy and it stayed, Party Fridge is a little too high to fit nicely anywhere, so stands awkwardly in the corridor outside the kitchen, as though waiting to be asked in.

Party Fridge was too large for the next lodger who bought Baby Fridge to put in her room, lodger has left but Baby Fridge remains. I want to get rid of them all 

but not until I have bought and installed the correct fridge 

The correct fridge arrived this morning and I realised that I am currently able to say that I have an embarrassment of fridges

It's going to hit minus twenty five degrees in Ulaanbaatar

Mongolia. The Man has travelled one thousand and a bit miles beyond Ulaanbaatar which I guess means one thousand and a bit miles even colder. He has been looking for snow leopards and for the last two months he has remained unshowered, unshaven and layered like a Baklava in silk thermals and camel thermals and woolies and fur-lined boots all topped with a long Mongolian Man's Coat with a special-sash-that-you-have-to-wear-with-these-coats-or-it's-Bad-Luck.


Once a week there was an underwater satellite call during which I could just about grasp that he's walking really far and up lots of hills carrying really heavy things and he tells me facts like every Mongolian he has spoken to has admitted to inadvertently licking a metal thing in this fierce cold and needing help to get separated, also Goat Fat Stew is delicious and alcohol made with fermented mare's milk is 'quite nice but tastes like goat'.

The Man reckons that the walking and the weight of the kit and the weight of the clothes combined are reducing his body weight but he can't tell because in all these weeks he has never unwrapped those layers. That's two months without a shower - and I get to welcome the smelly hairy marvel home tomorrow night.

In other news
a film about ants and Sir David Attenborough will air on the BBC on 8th December Xmas -ish - look out for it if you can, I shall probably mention this again. 

I have an arthritic thumb joint

I've heard that turmeric can alleviate the inflammation. I wasn't sure how to make it a regular part of my diet until my recent stay in Stoke Newington - a neighbourhood with a lot of cosmopolitan green grocers. A couple of weeks ago among the cascades of plantains, yellow dates, and dozens of UVIs* I spotted some nice-looking fresh turmeric, I bought a few knobs and took them back to experiment. Hand-grated turmeric is not kind to the mouth.

Luckily Stoke Newington is also the sort of neighbourhood where people like trends, the juice trend is over and these monster machines are being thrown to make way for 'Nutrient Extractors'.  Walking around the neighbourhood looking at my bright yellow hands I thought - I need a juicer - and like magic there was one on the wall. 

This beast has changed my life,  turmeric juice can be added with beneficial effect to EVERYTHING (I make a batch and freeze in ice cube trays) - the mashed turmeric fibres in the outbox are good in flapjacks.



*Unidentified Vegetable Objects

sometimes when I open my mouth

  Margot Leadbetter from 'The Good Life' leaps out.




Last night, walking past my local trendy burger establishment, I looked in the open hatch where boxes of food are passed out to the delivery bikes and stood transfixed as a hip young man poured gloopy yellow cheese sauce onto chips then sprinkled gherkins and jalapenos all over it - this was what I wanted for supper - I went in and stood in the queue.

A whole vocabulary has sprung up around this particular sort of food place that I find off-putting - calling shredded meat 'pulled' doesn't make it any less horrible. The other popular word  is 'dirty' which I assumed meant putting 'pulled' meat or gravy on top. Standing in line in this hipster burger bar I read on the menus that they were offering 'dirty' burgers' and all kinds of other 'dirty' stuff. As I got to the front of the queue, I noticed the slogan emblazoned on all the take-away boxes announced 'Shakes, Dirty burgers, Dirty Chips'. Feeling the need for clarification I asked the man in the backwards baseball hat what they meant by 'dirty' 

it's like, unhealthy stuff

why aren't your shakes dirty? 

That wouldn't sound good

Just a normal phone message conversation

from neighbour 
Help - people keep giving me pheasants and rabbits will you teach me how to peel them and  I've run out of room in my freezer do you have space in yours until I have time to deal with them


from me 
we can do it Monday, there's probably room in my freezer for about 2 rabbits and a pheasant let yourself in  but first you'll have to remove the wool that's in there hiding from moths

At the very posh local farmers market

a chap was selling premium dairy products; hand churned butter, fancy milk and  ... buttermilk.  Proper buttermilk is so difficult to find that I'd forgotten about it's existence. I was sort of excited to see this rare thing but couldn't remember why.

Seeing my hesitation the dairyman handed me a leaflet with suggestions for how to use buttermilk, then he said

one of my customers drinks it but you're not supposed to do that 

Why not?

it's already been used  

!!!!!!!!!

On the bus to Penge

I'm on the top deck. Sitting across from me are two boys aged around twelve years old and a chic young woman who might be their big sister or aunt, they are talking and laughing and sound like they come from south London, she says:

There's this stuff called escargot, it's snails eggs and people eat it

that's disgusting!

it's like caviar which is fish eggs, you eat hens eggs, what's the difference?

from the end of the garden I could smell hot jam

and figured that my neighbours must be processing some of their abundant fruit.


then I remembered that I had put plums on the stove to stew - the burning jam smell was coming from my kitchen ... 

Back in Bristol today

walking through town it's hard not to notice the huge increase in homeless people. One neat, nice-looking older man walked up to me with a box filled half with nettles and half wild garlic

would you like some wild garlic, I've just picked it in Leigh Woods ... I'm homeless these days

foraging seems a whole lot better than standing around selling Big Issues but I worry about animal contamination when I can't see where the garlic gets picked so I let him fill my bag with nettles and then spent an hour cursing him as my hands got stung to pieces preparing it.  Cooked up with lentils, lemon and coconut it's delicious but my hands are still fizzing.

IN OTHER NEWS I'M GOING TO VIENNA TOMORROW!!!