Another Blogger Returns

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Duck – Arnot Hill Park

It must be he season for it. After all the recent returnees arlingwoman turned up out of the blue and the word “lagomorph” re-entered my vocabulary.

It’s a bit like Highlander – all the old bloggers are gathering, though we will be carrying pens rather than swords and the Queen soundtrack is likely to be drowned out by clicking joints, though that might just be me. I also doubt that anyone will get their head cut off. In fact, now i come to think of it, it’s not a great analogy. However, it was interesting reading about it and looking at the alternative casting possibilities and reviews. As a piece of prose that last paragraph is, I admit, lacklustre, but as procrastination it offered many fine lagomorph burrows.

It has suddenly turned warmer and the winter weight duvet seemed a bit much last night. However, according to the forecast it will be colder by the end of he day so there is no point risking a change of bedding.

Fox – Arnot Hill

So,  a blogger returns, an old word reappears, I muse on a cult film and I mention the weather. I was excited to see an old friend and look at lagomorphs but after that it was all down hill. Is there any wonder that I find myself questioning the meaning of life?

Looking forward, what does the day hold? Breakfast. It’s going to be cereal again. Possibly some writing, because I’m feeling brighter and more active. Julia and my sister are going to see an exhibition in the Cathedral this afternoon and are dropping me off to have an X-Ray on the way. I’m having a foot looked at.

Not sure why, but I expect all will be revealed. It’s the sort of thing I try to avoid as it will take hours, involve waiting in a room full of sick people and will most likely produce no useful result. And I’m going to end up getting a taxi home. I don’t like being ill, but I really hate spending money.

Sculptures at Arnot Hill

It’s a bit like several other things I have avoided over the years. The NHS has more equipment than it knows what to do with and they keep trying to use it on me because they think I have nothing better to do than arrange my life around an endless carousel of scans and tests and X-Rays. And when you get the results they usually come in a letter telling you that this result applies only to the instant of the test and you may already be terminally ill with something really nasty but it isn’t their fault.

I made the mistake of using one of the NHS services last night. It pinged me with an appointment time and asked if I wanted to download the letter. I don’t usually work this sort of thing from my phone but I decided to give it a try. I pressed “yes” and it was ten minutes and 360 downloads before it stopped downloading things dredged out of my computer. It had never occurred to me that the two things had linked up, or that one would empty itself into the other. I’m actually quite perturbed that pressing a button on an NHS app can result in a massive transfer of files I’ve never agreed to. It’s probably the Chinese or the CIA, so somewhere at the end of the world (geographically speaking rather than Armageddon) there’s an intelligence analyst trying to make sense out of 300 pictures of medallions and 60 articles on writing poetry.

Female Marsh Harrier – Blacktoft Sands

This is too much to cope with. I am going straight back to the nineteenth century as soon as I have had breakfast.

Todays pictures will be plucked from random February shots.

It was so warm yesterday Julia saw a Brimstone flying.

Little Grebe (Dabchick)

 

 

 

6.44 & All That

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I had to do some writing late last night as I had to get up early. Counter intuitive? Yes, I agree.

In the old days I would just have wound up my alarm clock and gone to bed. Later, I would have set my electric clock and my alarm clock – living in the country there were often disruptions to the supply I learned you couldn’t trust the electric one. I then went back to traditional alarms and then to a small battery operated alarm clock that allowed me to “snooze”. This was a Bad Thing, as Sellar & Yeatman would say.

These days, of course, I use my phone. I am a modern man and can set an alarm on a telephone. I’m not that modern that it feels natural, but I manage. Anyway, I wrote a bit. The reason I did that was because my telephone battery had run down and I needed to charge it enough to make sure I had confidence it would last.

I selected 7.00 as the time to get up, took pain killers and went to sleep. At 6.44 I woke, annoyingly early, and was able, because of the aforementioned pills, to get a decent start.

I had to be at the surgery for 8.00 as I am once again in the hands of the medical profession. I will give no details as they do not show me in a good light. Basically, I have been self-medicating for the last two months and have finally had to admit I am not improving. Enter the Practice Nurse. That is the nurse who works at the GP Practice, not one that is trying to improve.

I thought I’d better point that out in case Donald Trump decided to send a medical ship to help.

Anyway, it all went well and it looks like I may be cured of my physical ailments in the next couple of months. The stupidity which led to me avoiding the doctor may take longer to cure, according to Julia, who is not very happy with me.

Wild flowers

Anyway, back to the point. To avoid disturbing Julia I used the torch on my phone to sneak into bed. While I was doing that I became fascinated by the torch. I mean, how great is it to have a torch that bright attached to your phone? It’s a tiny bulb too. I was so fascinated by it that I looked directly at it, dazzled myself, tripped and fell on the bed. This woke Julia up, which was both good and bad. Bad because she was a little irritated by being woken suddenly,  but good as it allowed me to tell her about how great my torch was. And because I didn’t fall on the floor.

With hindsight I may have been better just apologising and staying quiet.

The pictures are a bud vase Julia made from Zebra wood, with silk flowers in it, and the same bud vase without silk flowers in it. Also a random photo of summer flowers.

Neither the self-medication nor the waking a Julia were the worse things I did yesterday, I also sent of a set of poems to an editor by mistake, having already sent them to someone else. Editors hate that. I have written to withdraw them and apologise but so far have not heard back.

I also had a poem accepted this morning, but that’s a small bright spot in all the doom and displeasure I am accumulating around me.

 

 

The Week Moves On

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I am, as I have said before, on drugs to suppress my immune system. This controls my arthritis and allows me to get around, type and do a bit of baking. Without he drugs, even typing would be tricky, with bent fingers and painful knuckles.

However, I do tend to pick up a lot of low-level infections in winter, and this year I have, so far, had three. They don’t really amount to much, but they do make me tired, hence the amount of time I spend writing about the time I slept instead of blogging. Whilst recovering, I also sleep a fair bit.

I can tell when I have recovered, because my brain seems to move up a notch and I start to write again and answer TV quiz questions faster. I actually beat a contestant on Mastermind last night. I was three behind on the specialist subject (Waterfowl of the British Isles) but pulled it back on the general knowledge. Sitting at home, relaxed, I would still only have come second, because the winner answered all his specialist question and then beat me on general knowledge.

So, self-congratulations done, I’m still a long way off the pace required to do well on Mastermind. I got a few on University Challenge, including a few that the students didn’t get, so I was happy by the end of the evening. Winter Olympics are OK, but it’s nice to have the quizzes back.

 

Julia made a nice curry last night, using the leftover pea soup as a base for the sauce. She also put meat in it, which was nice for a change, as i tend to make my curry vegetarian these days.

I noticed earlier today, that I have done 3,802 blog posts. It made me wonder how many individual titles I have come up with and how many I have duplicated.

I just did a quick search, but after reading about 30 titles became aware that my ability to procrastinate had taken over again . . .

 

The pictures are from February 2015 – I only have 9 photos that month – my early days as a blogger.

 

 

 

And Suddenly . . .

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. . . the Day was Gone.

Black-tailed Godwit and Dunlin

Like some sort of magic trick, my day disappeared.

Julia returned around 4pm, I made her coffee and a bacon sandwich. I had cheese on toast. Sunday is a funny day – we tend to have a late breakfast then nothing until she returns from the cafe, as she often has leftovers. There were none today, because they had been busy with a lot of people making use of the improved weather to get out. 

The danger of left overs is hat if you don’t make plans around them, they can end up as an extra meal. I don’t need to eat an extra meal. But if you plan to have them and they don’t arrive, things can be tricky.

Brent Geese at FRampton Marsh

Sometimes we get nothing. Sometimes it’s a slice of cake between us. Occasionally it is a sausage roll or even a pasty. I always feel a bit guilty, but if we didn’t eat the leftovers they would only be thrown away. We could, as we have discussed, make a donation, but what’s an appropriate donation for a piece of slightly dry cake or a pasty that has been held in a heating cabinet for most of the day?

Anyway, there I was with cheese on toast. The Winter Olympics were on and we were discussing the performance of the British team. It’s disappointing according to the press. Considering we are generally not good at sport I think it’s miraculous.

Anyway, the day dissolved into TV and the grocery delivery and tea and before I knew it the Pottery programme was on and then Mock the Week and Julia was waking me up telling me it was time for bed.

Little Egret – Blacktoft Sands

I could do a couple of hundred words on the judges’ comments on the Pottery show, which didn’t always align with what I was seeing on the TV (i.e. made me wonder if the judges have favourites on these shows. We often play Guess the Winner in the first few episodes based on the way the judges relate to contestants. We are often right.).

Then I could go on to discuss Mock the Week. It was better this week with a more balanced team but I’m not sure if I enjoy it as much as I used to do.

Perhaps I’m growing up.

Anyway, that’s why the post I planned as Sunday’s 3rd ended up as Monday’s first. It may, of course, be Monday’s only one at this rate.

Talking about growing up . . .

Photos are from February 2017.

 

54 Posts 53 Days

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Coffee and blueberry muffin in the garden

I suppose the title gives it away, but if my counting is correct, I have published 53 posts in the 53 days of this year. This one is the 54th and puts me one ahead of the count.

I’ve done a bit, but should have done more. It’s a familiar feeling. That’s why I’ve just been looking at my emails and am now baclk blogging six hours early.

TESCO has everything for me apart from buttermilk, so they are sending ordinary milk. It’s not really an acceptable substitution and as I have plenty of milk, I don’t need more. They obviously don’t realise that buttermilk nd milk don’t do the same thing, just as they tried to substitute oven bottom muffins with English muffins once – again, two different types of bread. Yes, Americans, bread. What you call a muffin is just a big iced bun or a fairy cake. I can understand why many of our linguistic differences occur but I’ve never understood this one.

So I looked it up.

It seems, according to the hugely reliable and incomparably knowledgeable internet that the “English” Muffin, like so many things, is an American invention. It was invented in the mid=19th Century by a man called Samuel Bath Thomas. He was a baker who wanted a flagship product and decided to call this product the “English” muffin.

Flatbreads ready to go

Where did he get that idea? I hear you ask. Well, it seems he got the idea from a recipe his mother had always used for muffins. She was from England, and by coincidence, so was he. So all he did was move to America and start making muffins. That’s not quite the same as inventing them.

In England the muffin can trace its history back to the tenth century. Other bread products, of course, can be traced back even further.  Tenth century? That’s about the same time that the Vikings arrived, having hopped over via Greenland. That, I think, was the last time anyone actually invaded America via Greenland, despite recent fears over security.  Or, if you are more comfortable with dating by Disney, it was about 500 years before Pocahontas.

At that time, although there was no wheat flour available in the Americas there were other grains (maize, amaranth and quinoa) and a variety of other products which could all be made into bread-like products.

So, to summarise. English muffins were invented somewhere and were widely known in England, where they were known simply as “muffins” for centuries. The recipe was taken to the USA, the name was changed and nobody seems to be able to say why a muffin changed from a small bread product to became a cake covered in calories.

They exist today in bakeries, but mainly in McDonalds at breakfast time. Sweet muffins have, meanwhile, invaded the nation and are available everywhere.

Anybody in the USA or Canada know? Or anywhere else in the world.

That will do for now. I’ve wasted enough time and need to get back to going through my list of jobs.

Remember to look at the first blog post of the day, and check to see if there is a third.

McDonald’s Breakfast

 

Progress . . .

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My Orange Parker Pen

An hour ago I sat down to write a short blog post. It started by saying that I made good progress yesterday and had high hopes of solving many of my writing problems by he end of today.

Then it became introspective, which is not good. I was unable o break out of the cycle of introspection and successive rewrites put me in mind of something circling round a plughole.

And that is why it has taken me the best part of an hour and around a thousand words to come up with the ninety words I have here. Dull, I admit. Unproductive too. But at least, by cutting them severely I have avoided introspection, self-indulgence and whiney.

That’s all OK as far as it goes, but it leaves me with half a blog to write and needing something interesting to say. That’s only 125 words so that’s not a problem. I can fill that with a few sentences about the ease with which I can fill the space – look, the word count is already up to 176 and I’ve managed to keep you reading without actually saying anything.

Today I intend writing a second post in the evening to detail what I have actually done. Yesterday was quite productive but didn’t come up with many results. By the end of today I want to have made at least three submissions, maybe more.

I have a list of finished items, and a list of almost finished items. I have a list of submissions I want to make. All I need to do is match them up, but at hat point I sar to worry about whether I* am sending the right things to the right people. I got hat wrong lat month and ended up with a rejection that should not have happened.

Writing poetry is only part of the art of getting published.

 

I thought I’d go for pen photos again, as the subject is writing. I’m surprised how few I seem to have.

As part of my ongoing commitment to procrastination I have already added another post when I should have been finishing off submissions.

 

I’ve Done It Again

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It’s now seven days until the end of the month and a large number of submissions still need work. I also need to get my first draft done for the talk, so I can check the USB works this time. Last time, I was lucky as I had plenty of examples. This time I don’t have so much to pass round. I’ve had two years to sort this out and I am still not sure if the USB will work – this is poor organisation of the highest order.

Soda bread with spring onion and cheese. And possibly garlic, I can’t tell from a photo. No new photos of lambs or puppies so I am falling back on bread.

So, here I am. A talk needs writing and testing, a month’s poetry needs submitting and I have other bits and pieces to do. Plus, I am still not feeling 100%. The good thing is that I know it’s all my fault. No external circumstances, no excuses, nobody else involved. It’s the best way, because I don’t need to waste time on excuses. I am going to get going and a week from now I will have amazed myself by all the work I have done.

This may not include reading other blogs as time and energy are limited, but I will catch up the week after.

It is better, I think to peer into the future and see a bucket of writhing eels which all need taming, rather than to look into a bucket and see a solitary pond snail in my future.

It may not be the best selected metaphor, but I’m warming up for poetry and these things creep in. However, I’m sure you get the gist.

And, as the first casualty of my need for industry is word count, I will cut it at 250 and go to do something else.

Plain soda bread with butter. The addition of butter doubles the size of my repertoire.

A Red Letter Day

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The two pens together. The third proved to be a faulty piece of wood and broke on the lathe.

Furious does not begin to sum up exactly how I feel after once again losing part of the post when trying to insert a photograph. This happens more and more and even though I take care with it, it still seems to happen. I am left with the impression that each year I pay more money for a slightly worse service. 

It's the same the whole world over,
it's the poor that gets the blame,
it's the rich that get's the pleasure,
ain't it a bleedin' shame?

I woke up twice in the night with snatches of this post ready written. Once it was a chorus from a music hall song and the second time it was the word “mephitic” though in both cases they were also accompanied by searing prose. Of course, on waking properly, the prose had become less searing and after several attempts I gave up. Actually, when I think about it, I may have dreamt the prose.

Compared to my normal Parker

The skill I need to develop is not the ability to write hard-hitting political blog posts, but the wisdom to know I can’t write them and shouldn’t try.

The first good news on WP was that Laurie Graves came back a while ago. She had gone over to just posting on Facebook, which is always a problem. I am on Facebook for the numismatics but as I read some of the stuff that people post (not Laurie of course) I feel my intelligence slowly leaking out. Why is it that idiots always want to share their opinions? 

Then, a few weeks ago, Clare Pooley turned up. I don’t, of course, have favourite bloggers, because you are all good in different ways, but Clare does live in a particularly attractive county. The clue is in the blog name. Not saying Suffolk is nicer than Maine, where Laurie comes from, but the winters are shorter and the snow is less deep, both qualities I admire in a winter.

This is the one I chose. It sits nicely in the hand.

Finally, today, I find that Charlie Robinson is back. Writer, runner, reprobate and raconteur. Just published his second novel, blogging again, it’s good to see him back. I always admired his haircut and now have one to match.

So, with three classic bloggers back in the fold, that has given me something cheerful to write about. I will do pictures of the famous pen in a minute and see what you think.

The pens are the two that survived the penmaking process, the third blank proved to have an internal fault, which was annoying because it didn’t show until it was almost finished. That’s wood for you. Mine writes nicely and fits well in my hand – I am enjoying using it.

 

The Line of Peas

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Hake and Chips in Cromer

I fell asleep in my chair last night, slept for nearly three hours, got up. went to bed, didn’t stop to look at emails or anything, and slept five hours more. At that point, just after 5am, I got up and started “work” as I call it. It’s taken me just over an hour to read blogs, comment and read emails. It’s 5.24 and I’m beginning to feel tired again. I also feel hungry. The diet must be working.

Overnight, I have had an acceptance for a haibun, the one I thought was likely to be refused. This is good.

Haddock Special at the Dolphin Fish Bar, Sutton on Sea

I also have a new pen. Julia made it during wood turning yesterday. She actually made three but one had an internal fault in the wood which, at a certain point, snagged on the cutting tool she was using and almost snapped it. Fortunately she survived without damage or injury, though the kit of pen fittings is now useless as some was already fitted and is not salvageable. That still leaves two – one for me and one for Number One Son’s birthday present. She’s getting quite good at it now and I have a pen and a pen pot to show for it. They are in the living room at the moment as my office is too cluttered to display such things.

After the Pea Soup yesterday, I moved on to reading some of the history of pea soup. I used to make pease pudding for Living History events and yesterday’s pea soup brought back many memories. Its modern descendent is, of course, mushy peas, as seen on many of my pictures of fish and chips. It’s nice to be part of a tradition.

Haddock Special at the Fishpan, Scarborough

 

The Brain Cells v Old Age

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Ham, cheese, mushroom, spring onions

Yesterday, whilst writing the blog post, I had three ideas for prose sections to haibun/tanka prose poems. In my mind, though I am probably wrong, the two things are interchangeable.

Anyway, with three ideas in my head, I thrashed along through the blog post, added photos and tags and a title and sent it on its way into a world of pixels.

At that point I realised I had only two ideas in my head so I immediately set to, wrote one and hoped the elusive third idea would come back. It didn’t. Instead, I forgot the other one.

Three ideas. Two forgotten. One remembered. I really must remember to use a notebook.

And so I made my way to the kitchen. I did not, if I’m honest, fancy the cleaning, so I didn’t do a soda bread, just a couple of quiches, a rice pudding and yellow split pea soup. The quiches involved ready-made cases (mine always do) so it was just a case of filling them. One is Stilton and Leek. We had that last time too, but we do have quite a lot of Stilton left. The other is ham, mushroom, cheese and spring onion. As regular readers will by now have realised, it was filled with what I had knocking round in the fridge.

Stilton and Leek. Stilton does not photograph well.

The yellow split pea soup is ana amalgamation of several recipes as there are some very strange recipes out there for what is essentially a bowl of cheap peasant food. Mine has celery, carrot, sweet potato and spring onion in it along with the peas. It would have been carrot, onion and celery, but it’s another of those leftovers things. I could have started a new carrot and a new onion, but I have wilting spring onions and half a sweet potato left so what am I to do?

Later, I will move on from this very plain version to something slightly more fancy. Perhaps. If it’s OK I will stick with this version. It takes a bit longer than usual because the peas need around an hour to cook down, so I will have to see if it is worth it. Otherwise it’s back to red lentils.

Latest news – the timer went off and I got to the kitchen just in time. The soup was very thick and the water was gone, but I got to it just before it started to burn. I have mashed it so far and it seems OK, though will probably need diluting as it’s more of a thin porridge than a thick soup. I don’t think it needs the hand blender as that will take the texture and the orange speckles out of it.

The rice pudding meanwhile, a slightly fine-tuned recipe, is done too.  All that needs doing now is for Julia to come home, congratulate me on my industry, compliment me on my cooking skills and enjoy a yellow pea soup lunch. Tonight we have the pasta bake and tomorrow we start the quiche and salad lunches.

Veg for the soup

The only fly in the ointment (an expression which, Wikipedia tells me, comes from the Bible) is hat I have to finish cleaning the kitchen before she gets back. Then I have to do some of the actual writing I was planning. So far I have written what is going to be the second post of the day (I will have to do something else for tomorrow) and one part of a poem. It’s a start, but a poor one, and I need to do better.

Yellow split pea soup, or porridge. It needs more water.