Food Foraging in the Time of Covid

is fraught with issues, I scope out shops with small queues. A bakery/coffee shop near my house sells sublime olivey-cheesy twists. Windows too fogged up to see inside,  I have to open the door to check the territory; two masked women clearly waiting their turn, to the side a man,  his queuing status unclear. My specs as fogged as the windows I ask him if he's queuing - no response,  the man is not wearing a mask but does have headphones, he stands,  swaying, mute and I realise that he must have teleported his mind to another planet.

Lost Ham

on the neighbourhood noticeboard a  heading  - 'Anyone Lost Their Ham?' 

 - a photo of two plastic packs of ham on a pavement and a location  

Responses to this included speculation that the items had dropped out of someone's 'hambag', a conspiracy theorist warned that the items might be bait for a 'hambush' and someone else reckoned that this notice should be considered 'spam' 

when the world is falling apart, we make jokes about pork and then we go swimming 

I drove to the coast as the sun rose this morning, past frosty fields and mist-filled valleys  

the sea surface was smoking when I arrived 

It was like swimming in fire 

Some things are best left alone ...

 

Early September, I noticed how shabby the bathroom had become and gave it a 'good' clean. Limescale build up was removed from pipework and when I next turned on the faucets all the leaky spots were exposed ...

The more I fixed the faster the catalogue of broken things escalated ... 

 

two months later the bathroom is back in use.

Last Monday I did my most daring swim yet

 it was still summer back then.   

confident that I could make the distance to the next bay and knowing other people who were swimming at the same time, I set off at a leisurely pace on a slack tide, my swimming style is best described as a mishmash and I was enjoying myself switching around some flat out lazy floating with a bit of backstroke, a spot of crawl  and some sideways breaststroke (I've been told this last one is 'old lady swimming', that's because it's fun and it's the best one for admiring the landscape and chatting to a fellow swimmer). 

The last short section involves swimming under a pier, then making a sharp left to land on the beach. The tide had turned and I had underestimated the speed that the current picks up at by the pier, just when I considred myself home and dry, the sea dragged me off in the wrong direction and I had to battle my way to the shore. I made land in an undignified fashion, thoroughly puffed out. There was a warm sun to bask in and I had sequestered a block of fruit cake in my inflated tow float, soon I was good as new. 

The next day it was autumn.

I am still working at the funeral parlour

Sometimes we are amused/bemused by the choice of music that accompanies a coffin as it is lowered to the crematorium furnace, last week someone chose Carmina Burana - other popular choices are My Way, Je ne Regrette Rien and Ring of Fire
 

At the parlour we amuse ourselves by nominating our own 'committal to the flames' music, sometimes it goes in the direction of Screamin' Jay Hawkins other times it's more Simon and Garfunkel

 After my epic last-of-the-summer swim I nominate this

I visit my parents for the first time since lockdown

For the last twenty years my mother has made a daily walk around the village, equipped with gloves and plastic bags so she can pick up litter as she goes, her daily haul usually amounts to about one carrier bag full, I try to visualise twenty years of daily carriers bags full of rubbish. 

Mother's litter-picking has been discussed in the House of Commons which means that she is immortalised in Hansard. After her first ten years of picking, she was presented with a bouquet and a plaque by the local council and she made the front page of The Gazette

I ask my mother if she still collects litter on her walk

Yes but I wait until I've seen it lying there for a couple of days before I pick it up so that I know the Covid's worn off

On the radio a man tells a story of filming something with his cameraphone then failing to properly press the button to turn it off before putting the phone in his pocket and cycling on home. The phone continued recording - no picture but a soothing, creaking, rhythmic sound. The man is pleased with this new genre and has coined a name for it - 'Accidental Trouser Music'

Statue Wars

Last month, shortly after Edward Colston the Slaver was pulled off his plinth and dumped in Bristol's city dock the Mayor sent a dawn crew to dredge him out of the water and haul him off to a secure holding place. First thing the following day a fat concrete bloke, wedged in a wheelie bin was parked next to Ed's empty plinth. By dawn the next day the Binman had disappeared.

The weeks passed, no plinth action - until -  4am last Wednesday the famous sculptor Marc Quinn came down from London with a big crew and cranes and ropes and tv cameras to install a 3d printed effigy of Jen Reid, the woman who had climbed onto the plinth as soon as Edward Colston fell off it. The image of her punching the air had circulated around the world, Quinn and many others saw this as an iconic moment and this sculpture was christened 'A Surge of Power'.  All of Bristol was agog and flocked to see Jen and take pictures, to praise or complain and argue about whether or not this was actual history or just fake history.

By dawn the next day, the Mayor's crew had removed Jen, putting her alongside Ed and the Binman. Marc Quinn had not been invited to interfere with our plinth and Bristol should decide its fate democratically.

Good luck with that - but the bar has been set and I am looking forward to the next contender.

New Homes for Troublesome Statues

 



After years of asking politely for his removal, the statue of Bristol slave-trader Edward Colston was finally taken down from his plinth and dumped in the city dock last week. This action prompted people to get more vocal about not wanting bronze and stone effegies of murderers, looters and racists to be glorified in our city centres.

Once you start looking we have so many statues of awful people that I predict there'll be a statue-mountain and there's nowhere near enough museum space to house them and we can't just melt them down because apparently then we'll forget our history.

My proposal is to display the bastards all together in clearly signposted outdoor parks  'Bastard Parks'  so no-one is in any doubt that there's any glorification going on.

You're Welcome!

here's some links related to troublesome monuments 

One from a few years back

Banksy's  idea for Colston  

David Olusoga on the Colston performance

The Covid days have provoked

an explosion of creativity here in Bristol, local food suppliers trying to maintain their livliehood are outdoing themselves by redesignating themselves as caberet artistes/gourmet-food-deliveristes - I have ordered a wine delivery with added ukelele, there's a magic-trick vegetable person and ... my personal favourite - Disco Hummus, shiny bomber-jacketed folk in spangled flares, sound-tracked by Saturday Night Fever as they hip-wiggle their way up the street to deliver a vegetarian party

Mrs Blackbird has recquisitioned

a small glass tank in the garden. The Man had filled it with tadpoles  and was about to film them but when his back was turned the blackbird flew down, jumped in and splashed around, then she noticed the tadpoles and scoffed them.*

The tank has stayed there and she comes every day for an afternoon bath, the tadpoles have not been replaced but the Man buys fancy blueberries which he cuts in half and leaves them in a saucer by the tank so she can snack and swim.

*Coronovirus Lockdown has meant that all travelling filming work has been  cancelled, all the kit has come to live in our house, where it sprawls  over kitchen, dining room and garden and threatens to take over upstairs

lockdown end of week 4

News headlines look like this

turkey to release gowns for NHS

branson to mortgage caribbean island

will comic books survive coronovirus

top ten toasties of all time

this is beyond the great depression

watch the NHS drama

tiger country

copycats and crooners

sales of baking goods and alcohol rise while make up and plants fall

demand for crude has plummeted

the upside of lockdown

cobra, is it unusual for a pm to skip

piers morgan now the voice of a nation

will coronovirus change our attitudes to death

quite the opposite

(from Monday's online Guardian)

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

We can't buy flowers for funerals

The emergency regulations put in place due to Covid-19  means that we can no longer get flowers or a professional florist for our funerals. Yesterday we needed to create a funeral for a man who had died from cancer. The only attendees allowed in to this little service were his wife and young children.

We prepared the room, the coffin placed centrally and devoid of decoration was stark. We put a request on social media asking if anyone local had something in their gardens that they could spare. Our neighbours were truly wonderful and contributed whatever they could find,  some bringing just one or two blooms and some fronds of foliage. The effect of that kindness on the four bereft people was beyond what any amount of professionally orchestrated garlands could have achieved.

Coronovirus diary - 3 funerals

Life at a funeral parlour is never 'normal' but this is the month that Covid-19 arrived.

02/03/2020   Funeral 1:

A newly married man suddenly dead. Over the days prior to the funeral, his wife, his mother, his sister and some friends came to see him.  Many more friends and family flew in from his homeland to congregate on the day of the funeral, we held a long vigil in the parlour, everyone brought food and drink and hugged and sobbed, the chapel was crowded and so was the wake

12/03/2020   Funeral 2: 

A burial for a much-loved elderly lady, there were people of all ages at the funeral, but many of her dearest friends were frail and dared not take the risk.

The pastor normally asks the congregation to shake hands or embrace but this time he asked them to simply bow to each other.

22/03/2020   Funeral 3: 

A well respected journalist died peacefully at the the beginning of the month, a large, joyful celebration of his life was planned, throngs of friends, family and ex-colleagues would be there to pay tribute to this lion of a man.

And then it was cancelled.

the service was attended by his three adult children, each spaced out on separate pews

If I mention that I work in a funeral parlour

the responses tend to fall at one or other end of the shock/awe spectrum

with a sprinkling of light confusion in between

A birthday party dip

The invitation requested fancy-dress. For purposes of not-drowning, fancy-dressing is restricted to above the neck. Before jumping in we made cool poolside cocktail chat, me in my pink wig and rockstar-sunglasses, a Salty-Sea Captain, a cock, a bear and a Wizard-of-Oz lion.

This is the UK,  sunny but still January. Despite having been here many times before, the sheer freezing cold surprised me.  I swam while gasping with shock. The water dragged the pink nylon wig from my head and the sodden Muppet made a break for the open ocean. I grabbed it, stuffed it down the front of my swimsuit and continued effortfully on my way.

Birthday cake and champagne were on hand for the after-swim-party which I attended with luminous pink chest and pubic hair peeping out around the edges of  my outfit

I have never cooked a turkey in my life

this year a roast turkey will be my contribution to the family Christmas table, I shall get up at 5am to get it cooked, then transfer the hot bird into an insulated, leak-proof box and drive it for two hours up the motorway where it can join a selection of roast potatoes and vegetables on the festive dinner table.

Bringing the bird means that I must also provide stuffing and gravy. It's the gravy that will be my undoing. At the beginning of the week I watched Jamie Oliver demonstrate 'Get Ahead Gravy' - the surefire way to guarantee the Christmas meal is a smash hit. Get Ahead Gravy involves chicken wings - it turns out that I wasn't the only one watching Jamie because every last wing in the country has already gone to Gravyland. I've returned from the shops with a few drumsticks and a pig's trotter, I will have to invent a Fingers-Crossed Gravy.

In other news 

Today is the winter solstice, this one marks twenty years since I said 'I do' to The Man, I've written more about this here. Twenty years is apparently a China anniversary and I'm not sure whether we should be buying plane tickets or a dinner service to mark the event, he is currently working in California trying to avoid being eaten by pumas. He is expected to squeak home just minutes before Christmas.

This year I started working at a Funeral Parlour

my eight-year-old niece  has heard about this and is fascinated,  when I spoke to her on the phone this week, she asked me what I do in my job, I asked her what she thought I did

Cutting up bodies and mopping blood

she imagines my place of work to be a combination of hairdressing salon and a butchers

Our household laundry products are almost odourless

which might account for my olfactory sensitivity to other people's perfumed washing powders and fabric conditioners. The Man is focused on the ecological aspects of using laundry products and recently came home with a bag of brown knobbles - 'soap nuts' which didn't look very inviting, I asked him how they smell, he open the packet and put his nose in.

old toenails

nice!

the outside lake is nearly at zero degrees warm

 I still go there for a swim when I can.

My neighbour Simon hears voices and loves Jesus, he  prints out 'Jesus is Great' leaflets and goes out campaigning vigorously for his man.

Lately Simon has taken to dancing in the street. Most mornings at 10, with headphones on, he marches down to busy a traffic intersection and dances among the traffic for all he's worth. He's happier than I've ever seen him, if he sees me, he comes over to put the headphones on me so I can hear what he's raving to.

Yesterday, I packed my bags for a swim in the lake and as I walked over to the car Simon was coming up the street in his dancing gear, I said, Have a nice dance Simon, I'm off to the lake for a swim. Simon passed me his headphones so I could listen to a bit of Bob Marley, then he called me a F***ing nutter and went on his way.

Night out in London

* warning this post contains body parts and other horrors

I'm looking after a cat in Primrose Hill. I arrive, say hello to kitty, then head out for a lovely culture-filled evening.

My event is done by 9. I catch a bus, head to the top floor and take my favourite seat at the front. Two stops later the driver comes upstairs - someone has vomitted by the exit, he can't continue the journey, we all have to get off

the bus and it's sicky door remain at the bus stop, the smell was bad but the sight is somehow worse. I walk to the next stop to put some distance between me and it.

Next bus is crammed full, I get on and climb to the upper deck. My favourite front seat is taken so I head to the back. Two stops later a young man stands at the top of the stairwell sways, steadies himself as though preparing for a performance, he then barfs hugely and widely.

A collective groan then stunned silence as the man tips forward and somersaults/slides down the stairs on the sea of sick. Passengers yell at the driver to stop, he pulls up and opens the doors and the young man runs out into the night. The bus continues it's journey. We are engulfed in the worst smell that I have ever encountered but we all stay on because the horror that we must pass through to go down the steps and get out is somehow worse.

My sense of smell has become more acute

since I stopped using scented washing powder, I notice the Persil perfume on people sitting next to me on the bus these days and other odours seem more intense too. The people in charge of the mixing desk in my brain must have turned the smell control knob up to eleven.

I've started an instagram account for my sketchy stuff   @eats.shoots.draws   do follow

An intense odour filled the bedroom

in the early hours this morning - the sort of scent I associate with perfumed fabric conditioners. I lay still, concentrating and  trying to work out where this smell was coming from. I did an imaginative olfactory tour of the smelly items in the bathroom that might have exploded but none of our soaps, shampoos or shaving foams smell like this.

Something was preventing me from getting out of bed to have a look but I finally decided that the smell was coming from outside the house, the only rational explanation being that youths no longer disturb the peace by shouting and spraying grafitti, these boys have grown wings and are going round puffing perfume through people's windows.

how often does a thing have to happen before it becomes a Tradition?

I'm thinking at least twice.

This is my second year of getting involved with coffins around Halloween time. This time last year I was decorating some very modern bio-plastic 'Koffins' in Liverpool. This year  my 'coffin project' was to find/make a 'Bristol Coffin' for my neighbourhood funeral parlour*  - locally made from a sustainable wood source, one that will be no more expensive than the eco-nasty-cheapie MDF coffins sold by most funeral directors.

My investigation discovered a wood recycling yard near my swimming lake that is already making inexpensive coffins from reclaimed pallet planks, they will modify the design slightly to make them a little sleeker - I expect to display a photo here before too long.

Other things that have happened recently

1) The Man went to Utah to visit Bryce Canyon National Park, which is full of geological formations known as Hoodoos. He was hosted by a Mormon couple who sent him home loaded with gifts for me, these included:
a tiny white origami box filled with dried, sliced plums
a soap made from home-milked goats milk
a very beautiful oil painting of an evening landscape

2)  I bought some new everyday shoes to replace my very-old-and-collapsed everyday shoes, they are a bit hard though and the breaking-in process is making my feet bleed

3) *I have a part-time job as a Parlour Maid

The water in the lake is starting to get a little chilly

if I keep going this will be my second winter of open water swimming.


The swimming  aspect of winter swimming is the easy part,  it's a bit pinchy when you first get into the water but your body quickly goes numb ... then it thinks it's on fire and you have to guess when you might be cold at which point you get out and dressed and warm again as quickly as possible because body temperature continues to fall for 30 minutes after leaving cold water even when dressed.

There's no changing facility or any shelter at the place where I swim, my fellow swimmers all have their own tips, tricks, outfits and specialised kit to get them back into the warmzone.  

I have discovered that as soon as I buy specialised kit for any activity I cease to do that activity, the kit sits in a corner taking up space and making me feel guilty. For this reason I do not own any neoprene and nor do I possess a fancy fleecy wind-and-rain proof changing robe.

What I do have, is a lot of  over-sized ex-army thermal underwear and a wool kilt, snipping the buckles off the kilt and replacing them with velcro is a boon to numb-rubbery post-swim hands. When I've struggled into the thermals and kilt ensemble, I sit on a rock and put my bare feet in a large shopping bag containing a furry hot water bottle, I slip on a big jumper, crack open a thermos of hot tea and hope the rain doesn't start before I get back in the car.

A visit to my mother-in-law

will involve eating delicious food, exchanging family news ... and bedding information. My husband's mother worries that we might not be warm enough ... or too warm. After explaining how the bedroom windows work (open/closed to varying degrees) she tells us that she has made up the bed with 'one of those aerosol blankets'.  

I imagine that we will spend the night in a giant nest of cuckoo spit.

I've joined a social network for our local area

Mainly it's used to exchange news about cleaners, coffee mornings and car break-ins but sometimes people post sightings of a naked man running away from a police helicopter or a man walking around with a burning shed on his head and sometimes a great row breaks out. Yesterday, Bob posted about the guinea pigs that he keeps in his garden being eaten by foxes. This is the second batch of guinea pigs that Bob's lost to foxes, he claims that he sees 'tens of foxes regularly in the garden' a fact that he blames on the community leaving out food for them.

Here's an extract from his original post ... and the best response

BOB 

STOP FEEDING THE FOXES

We have just had our four beloved rescue guinea pigs killed by a fox ... there have been rumours of someone feeding the foxes ... if this is you or someone you know then please please stop... it’s just inconsiderate and evil. If you’re that desperate to feed an animal how about you get a bird feeder? They were our truly loved and cherished herd and I can’t believe that they are gone by such a selfish and uncaring action.    

Response from Edward

You have sort of left food out for the foxes though...

The London Lady Garden

I'm staying in London, not far from Hampstead Heath and its famous ponds. The ponds were made centuries ago by damming up the river Fleet to provide drinking water for the area. Bathing is permitted in three of the ponds; one is for everyone, one is for women only and one is for men - guess which is the biggest? and guess by what factor female swimmers outnumber men?*

The women's pond is secreted within many layer of trees and hedges, these are necessary to protect the ladies from the constant surveillance they experience when out in the normal world. The men's pond is not so hedged around and is connected to great swathes of grassy areas where they can take as much space as they wish to lounge around in their budgie-smugglers. The women's pond and it's secluded lawns is the only outdoor place that I know of in London where women can sit around bare-chested without risk of harassment - of course it becomes extremely overcrowded.

I join the lady-throng on the after-swim lawns, find a space big enough for my body + picnic + book  and observe that simply leaving each other in peace and making space for newcomers, in this place, is just a normal human activity

* it's about a million to one

Inappropriately public conversations

often happen at the lake-by-the-ocean - my best swimspot. Maybe seeing the far horizon makes people feel so out in the wild that they become oblivious to all the other people around them.

Last week, two almost identical rows erupted at the edge of the lake, the first by little boys and the second by a middle-aged couple who were each telling the other, in very plain terms, that they didn't enjoy each other's company. These exchanges were by the entry steps queues formed as swimmers waited for the angry participants to either drown each other or go home.

Have the British lost their famous reserve? Have we become too European? Is this why we must Brexit?

Do people imagine mobile phones make them invisible?

Or is it everyone else who becomes invisible? I was trailed at close quarters by a big girl weeping copiously as she detailed at volume the very many, very intimate reasons why she was upset, I was getting drenched, deafened and thoroughly depressed and she was practically on my heels so I stepped into a doorway to allow her to pass. She did spot me then and paused her wailing long enough to give me a squint-eyed What's- the-matter-with-you? look

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.  

Cornwall is made of sea and ice cream

I found the perfect beach with a perfect ice cream shoppe. I walked away with my 'strawberries-and-clotted-cream' artisan delight, vaguely hearing words coming from the ice cream seller's mouth

watch out ....

... my attempts to listen to him were interrupted by a seagull's foot landing on my ice cream.

Finding myself in a Hitchcock movie I hurried, hunched over, simultaneously trying to to shelter the cone with my hand and get as much ice cream as possible into my mouth. The bird made another pass under my hand slicing himself a small beakful in such an astonishing way that I dropped the guard hand allowing a third pass and now the gull got the entire double scoop and dropped to the beach, trying in his turn to scoff as much as possible while being mobbed by all the other thieving gulls.

I left them to it feeling foolish - not a single other person was buying ice cream

I started this blog as a sort of therapy

it didn't occur to me that anyone would ever find it. I didn't know about the comments box, 'following' sounded definitely creepy. I didn't know how supportive the bloggy community can be, and I certainly didn't expect to make actual, real life friends through this blog.

Today I read this post from someone who started commenting here 10 years ago,  ... this wonderful man always makes great comments on his community of blog chums posts,  often adding funny and interesting links.

A great traveller and incurably curious, I had the pleasure of meeting LX in Real Life in Bristol when he was on one of his Grand European Tours

He'll be missed by many

an angry man

was wheeling a huge suitcase through a crowded shopping street. A little dog jumped at the suitcase and barked at it, the dog's human was half-prone drunk in a doorway. The angry man kicked out at the dog making the dog even more barky. The man kicked more at the dog and shouted a lot of sweary words and it was getting ugly. My momentum and trajectory had walked me right in front of all this so I was the one who became the school mistress and told the angry man to stop. This made the dog go and sit on his human. The angry man glared at me all red and goggle-eyed

it was going to bite me
no it wasn't

The angry man took a wide-legged stance and pushed his face at me and jabbed his sausagey fingers at my face while searching to find the worst insult ...

you ... you ...  .... F***ING ... .... BLEEDING HEART ....  LIBERAL ... F***ING . ...  
DOG-LOVER

reasons to be cheerful

One ... the colours of my thread garlands

Two ... it didn't rain until noon

Three ... at 11am I was swimming in the lake by the ocean

At 9am I went to change bed linen in the boys rooms, the young one uses the same unwashed plate for every meal, this doesn't bother me, but on my weekly visit to his room I can't help but pick up his old ketchuppy plate and take it down to the dishwasher thus forcing him to use a clean plate - just once a week.

In the older boys room there are sticky squash glasses. Toenail cuttings are lined up by the giant tv screen. I'm still not screaming. Then I discover something so screamy that I can't ever tell another living soul, I have to find someone with a melon-baller who can open up my skull and scrape out the place with that memory, meanwhile I've squashed it into the tiniest place possible and left the room.

... at 10am I got in the car and drove to the lake

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

Did parenting stop being a thing?

I am hosting two young men (one is nearly 30) neither has been taught basic life skills:

the younger one used the washing machine yesterday, I showed him the first time but forgot to demonstrate the exact amount of laundry liquid to be used for one machine load - he used one whole litre

the older one is tiring of KFC, he did use the kitchen once, placing a raw chicken in the oven - but then unsure what else was supposed to happen, he has now subscribed to a scheme that sends him meals by post

I was looking after a pet

in Cornwall. The owner tried to pass it off as a cat but it's clearly the lovechild of a fox and a ferret, her fur is beige with burnt edges and her face is actually more pointy than my drawing. Also she might appear delicate but this killer is adept at rabbit-hunting.

It's hammock-crazy around here

Community hammock at the bottom of our road. 

Hammock-for-human-beans at the bottom of our garden.  

My household currently contains two adolescent boys*, one is in his teens and the other is nearly 30, each of them consumes enough cans of pop to fill a bathtub daily.  Neither of these boys owns a coat and I am reminded of the Finnish boy who stayed a few years ago

In other news

I have embarked on 'The Great Floor Polishing' this involves much shifting of furniture and then sweeping, scrubbing and scraping before the oily polish can be laid down in thin thin coats. After the oiling, people must skate around on tea towels so it polishes up nice and shiny. Last time I did this I had spilt tea on my computer and lost the use of the letter 'i'

*the boy-in-a-hammock is not one of the resident pop-drinking boys, he is a visiting-boy

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.

We headed out to a Greek Island

it was out-of-season-closed-down so no-one else was there, the spring flowers ran riot in abundance and the weather was out-of-season mad, wild winds, then calm, mostly sun but some blustery black skies and a bit stormy sometimes.

We stayed in a white white cottage on the edge of a tiny bay where a grumpy old shepherd brought his flock of maggotty old sheep to nibble at the grass edges, the sheep liked to go in the water which made the shepherd furious, if I went down to the sea when the sheep were trying to swim to freedom they would come out of the water to see if they could come home with me - which made the shepherd doubly furious.

The local tavern had no inside, a bit of clear polythene was wrapped around one of the sides of the open air terrace - giving pale shelter from raging winds, we double-wrapped up for our daily fried-cheese-and-chips-with-Greek-beer visits.

The sea cottage was owned by someone in Athens who sent daily messages to remind me what is forbidden:

DON"T USE THE BBQ!!!

DON'T TURN ON LIGHTS AND HEAT AT SAME TIME!

DON'T DRINK WATER!

DON'T FEED ANIMALS!

DON'T LEAVE DOORS OPEN, ANIMALS WANT TO COME IN!


Around the house, drawings of massive mice with big crosses over them are pinned to the doors

A few scraggy cats came by but most had read the notices and didn't stay except for the gray-and-white one who took up residence on the outside mat.

We got home at the end of last week and now a very young French Boy is living with us, FB wears glasses, from the front he is brainy-looking, when he turns around we see the design carved into his almost-shaved hair, this might be the 21st century equivalent of a mullet.*

*business out front, party round the back!

I'm trying to get as much of lovely europe as possible

while we're still in it.

At the weekend I booked flights to go to a Greek island. This evening I booked the house we'll stay in. It's located in a 'village' with two other houses and two tavernas, all clustered at the end of a long peninsula.

the house owner has contacted me with directions and other relevant things to note:

Other informations....every day in the piazza of the village,at 10.30 comes a white van,and sells bread,beverages,biscotts....and every monday and Thursday at 9-10 another white van sells vegetables ,frutts...
Remember have bottle water with you,the water in the house you cannot drink it

I'm packing for a few days in London

while I'm collecting up the bits I need for the trip the Man is on the phone to his father, they are both deaf so the conversation is being held at top volume, I can hear both sides clearly. The Man is talking about a programme he's working on called 'Amazing Earth' but the father can't quite grasp the title. The Man breaks it down, bellowing the words slowly

It's called AMAZING EARTH ... 'amazing' ... like really fantastic and ...'Earth' ... like where we all live

the dad reckons he's got it and bellows back appreciatively

'Fantastic House', Oh yes that's a great title, I hope it all goes well... bye

My wounded hand is still sore

I'm doing finger-waggling exercises the way I think the physio instructed so I'm hoping it's pain-in-a-good-way rather than pain-because-I've-done-it-wrong-and-making-things-worse. 

The enforced loafing is becoming a bore.

Knowing that my hand operation would limit possibilities for exercise for a couple of months, I spent the weeks beforehand building up heft credits; tree-felling, taking rubbish to the dump ... God-forbid I even did a bit of housework. I also went to the gym because someone told me that ladies can end up marooned in a chair and never being able to get out again just because we spent too long drinking coffee one day and our muscles just evaporated and then someone has to break down the door and find us covered in flies, coffee cup still in hand... and that would be sad.

This inward focus is obviously necessary to distract from the disgraceful performances being played out in parliament

at the beginning of March

my hand underwent surgery. The surgeon gave me a sketch of what he did and I've been showing it to all and sundry in the manner of a proud parent-to-be showing a baby scan.

It's still the recovery period (and for another month or so at least), doing lots of flexing and massage to build strength in my thumb joint, to bring the nerve endings back to life and reduce scar tissue - it's sore and I can't drive or put my bra on!

It's been a sad month - a dear friend and beloved member of our neighbourhood died at the end of February.


I am setting up an art project in Surrey, I'm still in the preparatory phase. As I'm not able to drive and I'm unfamiliar with the area I took up the offer to go and look after a long-haired cat near the estate where I'll be working. The hairy tomcat spent his days and nights out and about, getting up to mischief no doubt. He'd slink back to the house with evidence of these adventures on his prodigious coat - bits of hedge and moss stuck all over him, surprising odours hitching a ride too - one morning he came in smelling as though he'd been in the sewers.

Back home on Friday I decided to try swimming in the lake by the ocean with my injured hand, the temperature is still quite icy, as the cold seeped in my thumb joint complained and I had to return to dry land swimming single handedly, the poorly one held above my head as though I was calling for help.

What's my motivation?

Drove to the seaside for an icy swim this morning along with several other people. My fellow dippers seem to fall into two camps.

i) Mostly women; jumping-in, giggling and chatting about last night's telly
 
ii) Mostly men; doing 'distance,' wearing devices that chart the metrics of their swimming, much discussion about past and upcoming water-based challenges.  

I was dried and ready to head home at the same time as another Bristol-based swimmer, he accepted my offer of a lift back.  Maintaining a constant monologue about swim-races, marathons and cross-channel swimming events coming up over the next decade, he kept asking if I was planning to enter this or training for that (no - a thousand times no). I realised that he was trying to work out what my goal was - what was the point of my swimming - I could offer him no satisfactory explanation.

I have also joined a gym, I have been given a card where I must note down the heaviness of the weights that I can push or pull and how many times I can do it. I'm a few weeks in and have completed a row of figures on my first card, I note that I am pushing and pulling pretty much the same amount of weight that I was when I started and it dawned on me that my aim is simple - 'Don't Get Worse' - this can become my motto, my motivational mantra, I shall embroider it on a coat of arms and make myself a marching banner.

Later that day 

walking up the road, passed a grizzled-looking man who suddenly exclaimed MOTHERFUCKER
I startled and looked at him with raised eyebrows, he looked abashed and said - Not you - you look lovely

Ten years ago

I was in living in a dilapidated French farmhouse - rented on a two-year lease to use as a location for a series of short films about insects. As Location Manager, I stayed in this house during the non-filming periods to take care of it's sporadically bursting pipes and prepare things for the next shooting period. The house was so cold that it was usually warmer outside, I probably got rather too involved with village life. 


The month of February 2009 was eventful, I hosted a lunch event which was hijacked by several unexpected guests, an elderly alcoholic was trying to woo me, the village bar embroiled me in a web of secrets and lies worthy of several Eastenders episodes, I was press-ganged into joining a sports team,  I spent a week cooking for autistic people and somehow found time to pop home to the UK where my friend Ms Whiplash explained how her friends made household cleaning more entertaining.

Ten years ago I had only been writing this blog for a few months, I was amazed and delighted by wonderfully supportive commentary from bloggy friends like  Scarlet and LX -  it was their recent trips down memory lane that prompted me to make this one.

I swam in the ocean lake this morning

the sky was bright and sunny the water temperature measured LESS THAN THREE BRITISH DEGREES!!!!*

it was a bit like being electrocuted


or maybe galvanised

I came home and chiselled up all the awful old ceramic tiles covering the Boot Room floor,  filling several boxes with heavy-concretey hardcore then hefting them all outside by the back gate, then I mended all the broken things in the Boot Room and swept it all tidy and shiny. 

The Man came home and said

I see you took the floor up - that must've been nice and easy 

Yesterday an engineer came to sort out some wires in our house

He adjusted some components then there was a moment when he had to stand around and wait for information from the computer -  we made chit chat

he said, things are pretty quiet workwise this week so I'm taking tomorrow off, it's my kids birthday
Lovely I said how old?

Four-year old twins, twin boys

Crikey I said, were they a surprise or are twins in the family? 

They were a surprise when we saw them on the scan but the funny thing was that my daughter gave birth on the same day

Gosh, did you all go to hospital together?

No my wife was booked to have a cesarean in the afternoon so she was just getting ready for that, my sixteen-year-old daughter was in the next room, she'd been going on about having stomach pains and then they got worse so she came in to our room, I didn't even know she was pregnant. 

????

She was a big ... I thought she'd been comfort eating, her mother had died a few months before.  So my wife was getting her bag packed and my daughter was really shouting about her pain and I was Googling to try and see what she had and the only thing I could find with her symptoms was labour, and I kept saying that and she kept insisting she wasn't pregnant.  And then her waters broke and all I could think was that was a new carpet. When the ambulance arrived my daughter was on the floor on all fours and my wife, who was enormous, she was on the floor behind her, they were both yelling their heads off and the paramedics didn't know which one to help, luckily they had a midwife with them and she got my daughter sitting on the side of the bed and I went out the room for a minute, then I  came back in just in time to see my granddaughter's head coming out of my daughter and they  delivered her right there.

Did you have to get another new carpet?

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

They're tearing down the skull building at the end of the road

on Friday I was on my roof when I saw the skull being bitten off


people go on about it being a big useless eyesore and they're glad it's finally going but I found the building charming - in a creepy sort of way.

When they have totally flattened the 'useless eyesore' a block of  'executive apartments' will rise in it's place they will not be suitable for families or people with badly paid jobs.

Another building down the road used to be an office block, it was empty for years, drunks gathered on the steps to fight. One day the building was unlocked and opened. Without any apparent refurbishment the ground floor became an enormous bar selling pricey beer and cheap food, parties started at noon for no good reason, an art gallery popped up, bands played every night, the upper floors were let out to artists and people who wanted to use the big rooms for meetings, it was crowded with all manner of characters. The drunks that used to gather on the steps came in and earned a drink by collecting glasses, it was chaotic and messy and a lot of fun. Over the last few weeks the artists have been evicted and most of the building will be developed into smart apartments.

I moved to this neighbourhood because of it's weirdness. That skull building was like Lurch from the Addams family, ungainly, huge and instantly recognisable - the arty party office block was our Uncle Fester. The new apartments when they are in place will be as dreary as Brian and Jennifer from The Archers*


*the Archers is the UK's longest running radio drama - a tale of eternally weary, hard-working, beige-wearing country folk