Today I got up late, as I don’t see any point in having a day off and flinging myself out of bed at dawn, or any time approximating to dawn. The benefit of having two days off together (as I did this week due to a rearrangement of our days in the shop) is that you can work into the early hours of the morning, pretending to be creative. I say ‘pretending’ because I’m not sure I do my best work when I’m half asleep.
I read for the first hour of waking, then went downstairs.
I had written four haibun last night and, after replying to comments on the blog and reading a few other blogs I got down to work.
All four needed considerable tightening up, and that’s what they got.
Then, at 12.00 I decided to have lunch, as I hadn’t actually had breakfast. Sourdough toast, tinned plum tomatoes, fried mushrooms and scrambled eggs, in case a future reader is interested. It’s not exciting or healthy, but it’s what we had in the fridge. A bit like my writing, which is what happens to be kicking around in my head when I sit at the keyboard.
That turned into a short spell of watching TV and a rather longer one of napping. I don’t know why I needed a nap, perhaps because I could.That led on to doing the washing up and doing a bit more writing. After that there was more TV, a discussion of shopping lists, a meal of stir-fried vegetables, the on-line shopping order and this blog post. Actually there was a previous blog post but it developed in a way I couldn’t be bothered to complete, so it is now resting in drafts.
Light and Shade
TESCO have increased the delivery charge – I am now paying them £4.50 to pick and deliver my groceries, where it used to cost £3. That’s £75 a year, though if I had to drive to the shop every week I suppose it would cost me about that in car running costs and time.
That’s it for now. The post is drawing to a natural close, midnight is approaching and I need to do my sandwiches for tomorrow.
It’s tempting to ramble on a bit to try for 500 words, but I’m going to stop now. Three hundred and eighty nine will have to do. (If I’d written 389, it would only have been 385 and I wouldn’t have been able to add this sentence and top it up to 412). I just noticed, on adding a title to the second photo, that the word count went up. Strange…
I hope that your tightened haibuns catch an editor’s eye in the course of time.
We will see. I am taking a relaxed view of things these days, having just been told I can retire a year earlier that I thought.
I love the language differences between UK and US. I learned so many of them from novels and then when I visited I was already familiar with most. I think I ran across tinned beans first in my reading, and of course the recent books have modern slang and various words one wouldn’t use in polite company (but who knows?). I like “trainers” for athletic shoe or sneakers and the “lift” is one of my favorites. But I’ve only ever had tinned tomatoes at breakfast in the UK. Do you still call them tinned if they’re in those cardboard boxes?
In our house tinned tomatoes go in ratatouille, anything Italian, curries and chilli. We also have them at breakfast, though we will also have real ones fried or grilled if we have them available.
WE have drinks in cans and food in tins – a can of Coke but a tin of beans – not sure why.
Good point on the tomatoes in cartons – I would probably still call them tinned.
Did I mention that my grandfather always called a tap a faucet? Apart from him, I’ve only ever heard Americans use the word,
but he was born in the 1890s, lived in the country and was a speaker of Lancashire dialect rather than standard English.
Now that’s interesting. While some parts of the US call the faucet a tap, most call it a faucet. I wonder what the word derivations are…
I don’t know much about the tap/faucet thing. I was surprised, some years ago, to learn that some of the vocabulary differences in America seem as great as the differences between US and UK English.
Faucet is from French and tap is from Germany – just looked it up. Someone also asked if you get tap water from a faucet. 🙂
Oh, lol. Yes, some of the regional speech differences have to do with who settled there and how words were then anglicized. There are other things as well–burners on the stove or eyes on the stove. Nobody here calls it the hob. And some regional accents are difficult. I don’t think my Wisconsin mother ever was able to understand my Alabama grandfather. I’m trying to think of other different words for the same thing and can’t, but reckon, for instance, is only a word used by southerners. never heard a northerner use it unless they were talking about Shakespeare…
I knew some of your states were bigger than the UK but just checked up – USA is 40 times the size of us, so it’s hardly surprising that you have regional differences.
In my Linguistics studies, I read something about faucet/tap usage, as well as other words in English. If I remember correctly, the gist is that many words which appear to be American English did originate in Britain but over time a different one came to predominate in either country.
Considering the numbers of French, Italians and Germans who went across, it’s a miracle the tho languages are still so similar.
It is!
Whenever I use etc in a list of flowers in a picture Jackie sees it as a signal that I was tired. Sussed 🙂
I still rememeber a teacher telling me “Don’t use etcetera, it means you’ve run out of ideas.” I still hear that every time I type it, or think of typing it.
No-one forgets a good teacher 🙂
That is true, though a few bad ones are stuck in my mind too. 🙂
Most certainly
I think we call them canned tomatoes here. Use them all the time.
🙂 Phew, glad it’s not just me. I have to admit being very reliant on them. Outdoor tomatoes can be tricky in the UK so we don’t have huge crops.
Yup. Maine usually has a good crop, but only for a few months a year. Canned tomatoes are a must for us.
It’s probably my number one versatile ingredient. This probably tells you all you need to know about the level of my cookery skills. 🙂
Tinned tomatoes is not something I have seen here. Are they like sun-dried tomatoes in olive oil? Those come in glass jars over here.
Not as sophisticated as that. Just a tin – 60% tomato with the rest being tomato juice and acidity regulator (citric acid). Traditionally they come from Italy.
Interesting that you don’t have tomatoes in tins. Is it to do with cuisines, cultural norms or something else? Maybe in the past here we had fewer tins of tomatoes but I’m sure I ate tinned tomatoes on toast as a kid.