Monthly Archives: January 2021

Vaccination!

It was a slightly surreal experience, leaving the house just after midnight to go for a vaccination. However, despite my misgivings about the lack of clarity in the time of the appointment, we were there for 00.20 and left at 01.00. It would have been quicker but there was, according to Julia, a lot of duplication of information (having filled in a form on-line you have to fill another one in when you get there and then answer the same questions again to a real person). It’s all very bureaucratic and time consuming, which is typical of the NHS.

The vaccination centre is in a building at the Forest Recreation Ground Park and Ride. I would post photos but when I turned my camera on I found I’d left the card in the computer after downloading the fish pie photos.

After the vaccination (which was administered by military personnel) she had to wait fifteen minutes to be released – having to give her details again before they finally let her out.

It seems that they were able to start vaccination of front line staff earlier than planned because they had an unexpected supply of vaccine. The original date had been the second week in February.

It was noticeable, from the increase in pinging on Julia’s phone this afternoon, that something was happening. She checked and found that the code had been released to allow front-line staff to book vaccination slots. The early adopters seem to be all the cowardly stay-at-home types who have been refusing to come into work at Mencap. They are keen to take the wages, but not quite so keen to actually go to work and help the people they are supposedly there to support. However, show them a vaccine code and they are on it like a pack of dogs. Because they stay at home they are actually at no more risk than I am, but they have all leapt in to claim their priority vaccination.

Two of the Mencap workers have already been vaccinated – one because they are also employed by the NHS and another because they exploited a loophole (now closed). I heard last week that two twenty-somethings had been given a vaccination because a friend rang to tell them there was some left-over vaccine at a local centre. I mention them here only as an example of how the vaccine is not been administered uniformly, as they did nothing wrong.

It is now a case of waiting to see if I get my first dose before Julia gets her second.

While I was waiting I noticed a number of cars with middle-aged men in them waiting for their womenfolk to return. It seems that we stick to certain stereotypes in the UK, even in the 21st century; the women work in the caring professions and the men do the driving.

I thought I’d add that so a 22nd Century PhD student of Pandemic Britain might one day unearth my blog and find a nugget of knowledge.

My New Saturday

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Before lockdown, my old Saturdays were spent in the shop. The morning was a bit hectic because I didn’t have to get Julia to work. This may seem counter-intuitive, but free time gave me the opportunity to make choices, which didn’t help. I was often only just in time, whereas I am normally an hour early when I take her to work during the week.

In lockdown I am free to watch Sharpe. It’s not, I admit, jane Austen, but it makes up in humour and action what it lacks in culture. It’s a reminder of simpler times when good always triumphed (in stories, at least) and we were still allowed to have violence and to look down on the French. Oh, how I miss those days.

Saturday afternoons in the shop were the social times, when people used to come in for a chat, as well as to buy things. I tend to have lunch after Sharp (avocado with prawns and Marie Rose dressing for me, mashed avocado on toast with poached eggs for Julia – the eggs were slightly overdone but at least they held together this week). Then I snooze as Jessica Fletcher rabbits on. I really should do something, but a man needs to recharge his batteries.

Late afternoon, I rose from my recharging and messed about on the internet. It was mainly watching eBay. I lost one lot (being underbidder once more) and secured a second lot for a very reasonable price.

Then I made fish pie in my quick and easy style. Soften some leeks (I had some green tops – you could use onions) and mushrooms. Add flour, add milk, make a sort of white sauce. Add the fish from the pack – salmon, smoked haddock and something white- and throw in sweetcorn and frozen peas. Let it cook gently.

Meanwhile, take the potatoes off the heat (yes, I forgot to mention boiling the potatoes, sorry about that). Mash with a little butter and some mustard. These are not American mashed potatoes so go easy on the butter. And don’t add milk. You don’t need to.

Fish Pie with potato topping – the dark bits are the mustard seeds from the Dijon mustard in the mustard mash

Add some prawns (I had some from the pack we had for lunch), warm them through, pour the sauce into the dish, add the potato on top and stick it under the grill. I did put cheese on top, I confess, just to show off. With hindsight, it added nothing to the flavour and didn’t look as good as a nice pattern of lines browned under the grill.

You can add more seasoning and some herbs but tonight I just kept it simple.

I’m now marking time until I take Julia for her Covid Vaccination . It’s either half past midnight (which I think of as 00.30) or it’s half past mid-day (which I think of as 12.30). Unfortunately the booking site and the confirmation email use both times for the same thing. We will be going down just after midnight and I will report back.

I’m not good at food photography and I promise it was more appetising than it looks here.

Reflections on Friday and Becoming Old and Boring

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Today I have successfully fought off the urge to waste time on-line. It was my day to go to the shop. I arrived just before 9.00 after dropping Julia at work, and immediately had to ring the boss because the alarm was playing up. It is linked to his phone so I didn’t want him thinking he had burglars.

He came to the shop later in the morning, with home-baked cakes from his wife and we had coffee with coconut and cherry buns. They were very good.

It does highlight a grey area – we are at work and we are able to sit down, chat, and have coffee and buns, but if we were a café instead of a coin shop we wouldn’t be able to do that because the coffee and buns would have to be takeaway or click and collect. I know the scale of the risk would be different but the underlying principle is there.

Same goes for talking to the neighbours. I’m hazy on detail, but I’m fairly sure I couldn’t go round for a chat, but as we needed to discuss building work it is allowable. Unfortunately, I found myself doing an impression of an old man droning on about how the street was 30 years ago. They are a nice, young couple, as I may have mentioned before, and have offered to paint the side of my wooden garage before they put their new one up. It’s very kind of them, but does make me feel a bit old and decrepit. However, I did accept the offer – I may be old and decrepit but I’m not stupid enough to turn down an offer of help.

Julia made tea (egg fried rice and served it with some spring rolls left over from New Year. It was tasty and healthy and much better for us than the chips we would normally have had. We aren’t giving up chips, it’s just that the chip shop is broken. The fryer has broken down and they are temporarily closed. This must be a bit of a blow on top of the lockdown. I am glad, as I have said before, that I am now employed instead of self-employed.

Talking of which, we now have a stock of CN 23 Customs Declaration forms. Since Brexit the Post Office has tightened up on the use of customs declaration forms and we can no longer send items over £270 using a CN 22. Of course, we didn’t even have to use CN 22 forms for Europe until Brexit. At the moment I’m spending an average of 10 minutes a day messing with customs forms for Europe, which comes to an hour a week if we were working full time. Call it £500 a year. The CN 23s require more time to complete.

I wonder how many other small businesses are finding this.

My anti-Brexit feelings are, at the moment, somewhat confused. I still think we would be better in than out, but I look at the mess that Europe has made of the Covid vaccinations. Maybe we are better out of it.

After work and fried rice it was quite some time until I could be bothered to switch the computer on – which is how I successfully avoided wasting time on-line. I just watched TV instead.

Running on the Spot

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I had an email from TESCO this morning.

Dear Mr Wilson
We are extremely sorry to let you know that due to store issues, we have unfortunately had to cancel your order that’s due today. You have not been charged for your order.

Kind Regards

Your Grocery Home Shopping Team

The mildest word that escaped my lips is “unacceptable”. Fortunately, I have plenty of food in, and with a little thought can last until next week. We’ve done that before when things have gone wrong. However, this time it’s the casual way they tell you that your social distancing efforts are all in vain and that your menu planning has been a waste.

I have just rung the company to check that it isn’t some form of clever scam email, but it is true. They have an in-store Covid outbreak. Now, if they’d told me that, I would have sympathised. But just telling mw that they had cancelled the order and are offering no alternative is asking for a negative reaction.

We will have to buy bread, milk, cheese and eggs but probably have enough of everything else. We would normally have plenty of cheese and eggs but I have been cutting back to prevent waste.

Before that, I had my repeat blood test after failing last week’s test. In contrast to last week the phlebotomist was eager to start and I didn’t even have time to sit down in the waiting area before he called me through. Good news is that I bled profusely, so no clotting problems there. Of course, that might mean I have gone too far the other way.

I have also just rung the pharmacy and my methotrexate is in. It’s taken 23 days to work its way through the system and I’ve had to request it twice. This is, of course, from the people who brought us The Great Track & Trace Debacle and Lockdown III – This Time It’s Serious.

The pharmacy, to be fair, has been very efficient – its the on-line ordering that has gone haywire. In the old days you got a piece of paper in your hand. These days you wait for a text, and when it doesn’t come you realise you have no pills and it will be another week, if you are lucky. There’s a lot to be said for simple paper-based systems.

So far it’s been a day of chasing my own tale – lots of jobs done, including getting Julia to work, and writing this post is the only thing I’ve wanted to do. And even this i just a list non-vents in the life of a boring man.

I’ve also had a phone call from someone who claims to be validating Life Insurance Policies, but it felt more like a sales call so I made my excuses and left.

The surgery just rang – I failed my blood test again. Altered dosage and another test next week again.

And now I’ve had one of those calls pretending to be from Amazon.

There is so much rubbish to deal with before you can actually do anything useful.

Luck and Persistence

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Do you remember the post I did a while ago with the haibun about the elderly lady shopping for vodka? It was called “Murder your Darlings”, which is what I did,. Once I published it on the blog it was no longer of interest to most haibun magazines as they require previously unpublished work.

It hadn’t gained acceptance after several tries so I put it on the blog because I liked it and wondered if this was why no editor did. It’s standard wisdom in writing circles that if you like something too much it is probably pretentious and rubbish.

Do you also remember a post recently called “Thoughts on Poetry and Bacon?” It’s not one of my more high-brow titles. That was the one where I talked about the poet working like a car breaker to salvage useful bits for future work.

We now cut to last Saturday, when, as I told you, I had an acceptance. I think I only told you about it yesterday because I left it a few days to damp down the smugness. The Saturday acceptance was actually for three poems from a batch of four, and they weren’t Japanese style poems, they were of the style I refer to as “ordinary poems”. One (“D H Lawrence Wonders What’s for his Tea”) is scheduled for next month, the other two for May. One of the May poems is about an elderly lady buying vodka in the supermarket (sound familiar?). I re-used the character and the incident, recast it as free verse and lost the haiku.

The piece that wasn’t accepted was a haibun about Philip Larkin. I always try to send a haibun out to ordinary poetry magazines just in case they are looking for something unusual. They always send it back. To be fair – they also send all the other poems back too.

On Sunday I was looking for bits that might interest Failed Haiku and looked at the Larkin haibun. I’d just been reading Larkin’s Annus Mirabilis and a haiku came to me. It was much better than the one in the returned haibun. I also took a severe line with re-editing and cut a third of it out. This was a surprise as I had thought I had pruned it as much as possible before sending it out last time.

To cut a long story short, they accepted a senryu and the haibun. The moral of this?

Probably that a good poem will always find a home, you just have to find the right form and the right editor. Or possibly that luck and persistence will beat talent every time

Ten Steps to a Better Life

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I’ve decided to make some changes to my life. That way, slowly but surely, it will improve.

One, do some housework every day. I belong to the Quentin Crisp school of housework (“There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse.”) but if we are going to retire to a bungalow I need to sort things out. I just did some shredding. I’m now up to 2008. No need to overdo it.

Two, exercise every day. Even a little bit. Including my hands. Make it into a habit. I’m going to find my weights and residence bands and start leaving them around too. As long as I remember to rearrange them every day Julia will never know I’m not actually using them.

Three, make a good nutritional decision every day. Today’s decision is not to eat biscuits. My willpower on this matter is boosted by the fact that we finished the biscuits on Monday. Tomorrow’s decision to avoid fizzy drinks should be quite easy too.

Four – stop pressing those internet buttons which promise to show you something amazing some American found buried in his back garden. It takes a long time and the only amazing thing is that I fall for it every time.

Five. Go out and walk every day. To the car and back should be about right.

Six – write a retirement plan – that way it won’t creep up and surprise me.

Seven – start using shopping lists. It will make online ordering less of an adventure but will be better for us nutritionally.

Eight – plan my writing for the year. I have a few things I want to do but unless I write them down with dates and everything, they won’t get done. This, Julia reminds me is a SMART Plan – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. I’ve done it before and it’s worked, I really should do it again. That should also help me stop pressing those alluring internet buttons – it’s nose to the grindstone for 2021.

Nine – employ psychology in my struggle with weight loss. Repeating the mantra “Stop eating or you’re going to die, you fat bastard” will be a start. I don’t see any point paying Noom to do that when I can do it myself.

Ten – stop promising Ten Point Lists when you can’t actually think of ten things.

Cotton Wool for Brains

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The street is still frozen and Julia went to work by bus today. That was an unsatisfactory start to the day as I don’t like her using public transport at the moment. On the other hand, I don’t want to be out on the roads if they are still icy. I’m getting old. She was the one who suggested it so I don’t feel too bad. She said there was only one other passenger on the bus yesterday as everyone seemed to have decided to work from home.

Things are going well on the poetry side of things with two acceptances in the last four days. My current numbers are 21 submissions – eleven acceptances, ten rejections. This is in danger of making me smug and complacent. And we all know what comes just after a surge of acceptances, so I’m trying to stay balanced and prepare for the inevitable flood of rejections that are bound to come soon.

My planned submissions for the next couple of weeks include four places which have been turning me down for years so I suspect the figures will be more balanced in a month or so.

Apart from that, the morning is rather flat and I can’t concentrate. I’m here, I’m well rested and my eyes are open, but as soon as I start to type I slow down, and down… It’s like having a head stuffed with cotton wool. The view from the window, was all snow and blue sky yesterday, with highlights of red and green and a certain degree of sparkle. It is now back is back to a generic Midlands winter scene – grey sky and muted colours in various shades of sludge and grime. As I sit here it’s hard to believe that Sherwood Forest is only a few miles away over the horizon and that Spring is only just over a month away.

That feels better. Sometimes I just need a simple description of my day to set things right. It’s a case of blogging as therapy. A lot of writing is therapy when you look at it. In fact one of the things editors warn against in both prose and poetry, is sending in pieces which are really just the author writing out their problems.

I’d better go and explore the therapeutic nature of shredding and washing up now, because the day soon goes and I don’t want Julia to think I’ve been sitting down staring into space all morning. I have been, but I’m hoping to conceal the fact. I might even move some dust about. That always looks like a frenzy of housework has happened.

Snowdrops at Ruddington

The pictures are from previous years, just to give an idea of conditions. The ice in the street is worse than the picture and the snowdrops are actually pushing through snow.

Variations on a Theme

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When life gives you chorizo that’s perilously close to its use-by date, make sausage casserole.

That’s my new mantra.

I made three meals this afternoon, which will save me time in the long run. The first, mad after finding I had ¾ of a chorizo at the back of the fridge, was to make a variation on last week’s sausage casserole.

This time I managed to find mild chilli powder to use instead of the Cajun Seasoning. I also used black-eyed beans and chorizo. There was a red pepper in the fridge next to the chorizo so that went in too.

We also have vegetable hotpot and Sweet Potato and Chickpea Curry in the fridge so all is looking good on the catering front. A lot of it is looking like plates of red stew, but you can’t have everything. If you cook by pouring cans of chopped tomatoes into things, you are going to end up with red food.

The curry is actually reddish with black bits in it, on account of me simmering too vigorously and ignoring the pot as I watched Father Brown this afternoon. A few burnt bits will add texture.

I think I’ve found a winning combination. Cheap, simple, and not bad to eat. It probably won’t pass inspection by the quality and health police, but it will do for me. I have a blog to write and time is too precious to waste on cooking.

The bread in the picture is Corn Bread from TESCO. I was going to use it for Welsh Rarebit for lunch on Sunday, but the arrangements went adrift.

Chorizo and Bean Stew

Snow and a Slow Start to the Day

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Julia went to work by bus this morning. I felt so guilty that I got up at 6.30 to make sure her breakfast was ready when she got down. It was only tea, cereal and toast, so hardly the most onerous of breakfast.

We are back on the Weetabix so it needs some time to soak. I don’t like Weetabix because it’s often crunchy due to lack of time in the mornings. However, Julia doesn’t like Bran Flakes, my weapon of choice in the war for fibre and regularity, so we alternate – each one of us gritting our teeth and eating cereal we don’t like to accommodate the other. I suppose that’s what marriage is all about at times. When we retire I think I will make porridge every morning. We both like that. We could, I suppose, have two boxes open but I regard this as vain and wasteful. I was brought up to be modest and frugal.

She left me with a lecture about doing housework while she’s out. Housework? And ruin a perfectly good writing day?

I’ve had a go at the washing up and I have plans afoot for cooking tea – I think I’ll try a vegetarian version of last week’s casserole for tonight and make chickpea and sweet potato curry for tomorrow, In a minute I will do some shredding. I can do that without moving from my chair.

I’ve just realised that you are probably wondering why Julia had to travel by bus. WE had snow at the weekend, and in England that means we grind to a halt. We had snow on Saturday but it fell early enough for the daytime temperatures to melt it. We had snow yesterday, but it started inn the afternoon and froze overnight. That means that the street we live on is, based on previous experience (32 winters) is a touch slippery and the slope down to the main road holds all sorts of possibilities. I’m getting more cautious on the roads as I grow older, and as my car insurance premiums increase. If it doesn’t melt today, it’s likely that we will have a surface like a skating rink for the next week. I will review the situation tomorrow.

At the moment the sun is out, next door’s conifer has turned green and the roof of the house below us on the hill is starting to show black slates through the snow. I’m hopeful.

It’s not bad weather, it’s bad preparation. When you only have a couple of snowy days a year it’s hardly worth the effort and expense of preparing for snow.

Just before starting work I had a call on the landline – this is usually the sign of a scammer. It turned out to be a really pleasant Indian gentleman in a call centre. Apparently, all this working from home is playing havoc with broad band availability and our router has been sending out messages. Could I switch my computer on so that he could check the situation?

Yes, I said, as soon as he gave me his identity code. Identity code? Yes, the one supplied by the service provider so I knew callers weren’t trying to scam me.. Ah, he said, he wasn’t actually from the service provider, he was acting on their behalf. Well, I said, it’s unfortunate that they hadn’t given him the code. If he rang them for it, I’d be happy to talk to him further as soon as he got back to me with it.

I actually feel better than I do after I have swearing at a scammer. It’s so much nicer to be polite, waste their time and then disappoint them.

Snowy Detail

Snow pictures are from last year.

quercuscommunity

Life after the Care Farm