Monthly Archives: February 2022

Day 50

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What a nice round number. You can almost imagine Number 50 wearing a waistcoat and a watch chain, can’t you? Or maybe that’s just me.

I had a go at celery soup today, as I have been threatening for weeks. I got the celery out and searched for a potato . . .

There are none. My attempt to reduce carbs and wrinkly veg has left us with no spuds. That’s why the soup is very orange. In the end I didn’t use celery, because in my search for potatoes I found several bags of carrots. I decided that carrot and ginger soup sounded nice, and the celery plan was, once more, put on hold.

In went half a leek (I had one hanging about and couldn’t be bothered to peel an onion). Then the end of a bag of carrots, garlic paste, stock cube, some swede to take some of the sweetness out of the carrots, and some ginger. Not enough ginger, as it turns out, as you can’t actually taste it. Maybe I should have gone with the thyme. The only thing that stopped me was fear of overkill but now, on looking it up, I find there are recipes for carrot, ginger and thyme soup. Presumably these were written by people like me who throw stuff at a pot and seek to justify it later. I really ought to take a more serious attitude to soup and start with a recipe instead of a pile of random ingredients.

However, as random as my soup is, it still has a long way to go before it becomes as bizarre as some of these soups.

The soup in the header picture is a swede, carrot and parsnip soup. Not the restrained colour. Now look at the one below, which is today’s soup.

Carrot & Ginger Soup

Carrot & Ginger Soup

Day 49

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If I finish this in the next 15 minutes I will get a note from WP congratulating me on 13  successive days of posting. I’m not sure what business it is of theirs, or why they think a condescending pat on the head contributes anything good to my WP experience.

What would contribute to the experience is an editing system that worked as well as the old, non-improved version, an an absence of improvements that cause more problems than they are worth.

It was a quiet day at work, apart from the wind. Storm Eunice, having arrived in the night and blown a few things about, blew a bit more about in the afternoon, then made a comeback in the evening but as far as we are concerned has not been a great nuisance.

The fastest gust recorded was 122 mph,  the fastest round here was 68, so you can see how much of it we escaped. When I lived out in the Fens we often had winter gusts stronger than that – you could actually see telegraph poles bending in the wind when it got going. Of course, that was in the days when we didn’t have “amber weather warnings” and the internet.

This film is quite impressive, but apart from that I’m not sure that the internet is a great benefit in times like this. I just need to know the weather is bad – I don’t need up to the minute coverage.

Looks like I’m going to sneak in and post before midnight, though it always surprises me how long it takes to finish up. At least I don’t need a title!

I hope that everyone reading this has escaped too much disruption from the storm, I’m always grateful when the wind drops as I tend to worry more as I get older.

Long Tailed Tit - Rufford Abbey

Day 48

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In my haste to complete last night’s post in 20 minutes I see I missed out the news that I have placed another haibun. The other side of that news is that I now have some poems back, as they aren’t required. This is not actually bad news, although it does involve rejection, as it gives me something to work with for the next set of submissions.

Having placed a few things this month I now feel more like a writer again. This is probably helped by the appearance of some new greenery in the roadside trees, and the first crocuses. I like snowdrops, but you can’t beat a good crocus as a harbinger of spring. Soon I expect the birds will get in amongst them and start tearing them up, but it’s all part of  nature, so I won’t complain.

I’ve just been looking at a new house on the internet. It’s in Derbyshire and it overlooks Carsington Water, which I have written about several times. It’s not quite where I had been thinking of retiring to but it cropped up and seemed nice.  I note from the links I just added that I mainly seem to talk about eating at Carsington Water rather than bird watching, natural beauty or water. This is probably an accurate reflection of my life. Three links, two about cake.

We had a package back from Portugal today. It had a customs sticker attached telling us that it was being returned for being non-compliant with recent legislation. As far as we can tell, after research on the web, it followed all the necessary laws and guidelines. Portugal is becoming a very difficult place to post to and a number of people we know are now refusing to post to Europe.

Preparing  a parcel for its voyage into the unknown

It’s all part of Brexit. First our costs go up, then our business declines and finally we are faced with asking if it is all worthwhile. This is hardly the easier, more profitable life we were led to expect. Could it be that politicians have been lying to us?

It used to be had enough when we had Italy to contend with – a country with  a Post Office staffed by thieves, and a population that embraced larceny as a second hobby.  Now we can’t send parcels to Portugal and Spain because the system has become devoted to losing mail in a variety of inventive ways.

The new house? Unfortunately we didn’t win the lottery so the £7 million asking price was a little more than a mortgage and a search down the back of the sofa could come up with. However, a man can dream . . .

Crocus at Nottingham

 

Day 47

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Most of my day was spent thinking about the things I should be doing. When I wasn’t procrastinating I engaged in displacement activity or eating. Julia suggested that I could combine two of my talents and write a book about procrastination. Or eating. And suggested, a trifle unkindly, that if I could combine eating and procrastinating it might be better for my waistline.

I told her I would consider the book, and that I would spend the rest of the day in research.

After lunch she went to have her hair done and when she returned, bearing Bakewell tarts, I forgot to tell her how nice her hair looked. In my defence I would say that two hours on eBay followed by tea and Bakewell tarts had dulled my normally tip-top husbandly instincts.

After that I did some more research. When you are researching procrastination, as I pointed out when asked if I had gone to sleep, it is often difficult to draw a line between research and torpor. Generally, if I have a notebook out, it is research.

Last night, when preparing myself for a serious assault on the world of poetry magazines, I found I had submitted the same poem to two different editors. It is the second time I have done this, despite my best efforts at organising myself. Fortunately they both rejected it, so it wasn’t a problem. I really must do better.

As soon as I finish here I am going to start recycling the rejected submissions from the last month. They have many good points, which I will try to accentuate, whilst removing the bad bits. This is the easy bit, after that I actually have to start working.

 

Day 46

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What can I say that I haven’t already said? I’m afraid that today was much like yesterday, but without a rainbow. This evening was much like yesterday evening, apart from the fact I didn’t go out. I have, however, managed to get back into the Facebook page, so here is the link. It appears that although we had 14 people at the Zoom meting last month and 17 there last night, we can only manage 8 on Facebook. It’s hard work running a society.

I am on the committee, mainly because, at the last AGM, I said that if they had difficulty getting anyone to step forward to take up the vacant spot, I would do it. As a result my name was recently forwarded to the Charities Commission and I have already had two emails from them. This is two more emails than I got when I was previously a committee member at a rugby club which was also a charity. Things move on and perhaps become better organised, but does it really make a difference? I will comment no further.

The charity sector also covers big businesses like private schools looking for tax advantages and a variety of individuals who fancy a couple of foreign trips a year and somebody to pay for them to have a new car. Cynical? Yes I am. Wrong? Let’s just say I’ve seen some of these in action. Notice how many of these charities are set up to help foreigners in exotic holiday destinations and how few are set up to help people in the cold and grimy parts of the UK.

I’m definitely thinking of going back to titles for posts rather than numbers. When you use titles you can ignore how fast the days are going by. At this rate it will soon be time to think of planning for Christmas . . .

Day 45

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I took cake home from work and this seemed to smooth things over. A new cakeshop has just opened over the road from the shop where the sandwich shop used to be.

Then I went to the Numismatic Society for the talk on Smith’s Bank. The banking bit was a little dry but some of the family history was interesting and the speaker (who also happens to be my employer) had done a good job of adding coins to convert it to a suitable talk for a coin society. I will give you a choice of following the link, rather than have me inflict a second hand version of the story on you. It’s not quite as interesting as the talk, but it’s infinitely better than my garbled retelling would be.

There was  a rainbow in the sky tonight as we left the shop, maybe a sign of brighter times. So far we have had a very mild winter and I’m hoping we will get through the next couple of weeks without a storm. The rainbow fade as I got the camera into action, but you can just about see it in the header picture.

The second picture is a cigarette case in the form of a British wartime blue £1. They were changed from green to blue to make counterfeiting harder and were the first British banknotes to include a security thread. After the war the colour returned to blue but the thread was retained. It’s not in as good condition as the last cigarette case we put on eBay, but it’s still interesting.

Wartime Blue £1 on cigarette case

Day 44

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There’s something solid and satisfactory about the number 44. It’s a far cry from 37, which always has a shifty look, though clearly lacks the gravitas of 88. Having said that, if I pull my belt tighter I can do a passable imitation of the number 8. I wouldn’t know where to start with imitating the patrician number 4.

After writing that paragraph I looked up numerology. It doesn’t say much about the personality of numbers, though does talk a lot about 888, which is a happy number and is also known as the Jesus Number. It is a fine number from many points of view, including my favourite, that it looks like my grandmother and her two sisters standing side by side. They don’t mention that in the Wiki entry, though they do say that it reads the same back to front and upside down. All in all, I like it, but I’m not sure if it’s a number I have much use for in everyday life.

I’m not sure what number I’m going to use for 1st January 2023. It could be 366 I suppose, in which case 888 will fall on 6th June 2024. On the other hand that’s a lot of counting, so I may have to rethink. I hadn’t thought about what happens in Year 2 when you start using numbers for titles.

We are having steak tonight. We traditionally have steak for Valentine’s Day but tomorrow I am going to the Numismatic Society of Nottinghamshire for a talk on the Smith’s Banking Family of Nottingham. Julia, for some reason, turned down my invitation to come to the talk and have a bag of chips on the way home. I’m just hoping I can stay awake through the whole talk now she won’t be there to prod me in the ribs.

 

 

Day 43

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I’ve just finished the first phase of planning my submissions for next year. So far I have 53 submissions in the planner, and I haven’t quite finished. I will have about 75 by the time I have finished. No doubt I’ll miss a few, but you need some sort of target, and it should always be slightly more than you think you can achieve.

Set a target too low and it’s not worth having. Set it too high and you risk demotivating yourself. Last year I made 48 submissions, though I was ill for a couple of months and would have managed around 55 if i’d been fit. Seventy five for this year seems fair as a target. I still need to add a couple of magazines that always reject me (I need a challenge) and some ordinary poetry magazines too. Life isn’t all about Japanese forms of poetry.

It feels good to have the plan done, even if it is incomplete. At last I have something to compare myself to, and it’s always easier to work when you have  a framework in place. Without one, it’s easy to drift.

When I look at the actual figures, I see that I met or slightly exceeded the targets for numbers of acceptances last year, being on target for haibun and a few over for haiku. I also wrote a few tanka, which weren’t included in the targets, as I hadn’t even thought of writing tanka when I set the targets. Then there were the six “normal” poems. There is no target for them as I just fit them in when I have time and they aren’t a particularly high priority.

 

 

 

Day 42

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I just looked at the title, and thought, that only leaves 323 days until the end of the year. Give it three weeks and the year will be 1/6th gone. And what have I done? Well, apart from moaning about the cold, worrying about WW3 and putting off the housework? I know they are all important things, but they aren’t real achievements are they?

I’m getting ready to put a few better bits on eBay for work and, at home, to catalogue my collection of plastic transport tokens. Here’s a question for you, what are collectors of transport tokens called?answer (in the US at least) is Vecturist). In the UK, they just call us anoraks. Even coin collectors look down on us as being peculiar. The hobby is much more developed in the US. There are also more serial killers in the US. I’m not saying the two things are linked, but you have to wonder . . .

The pictures for today are two pieces of coin jewellery. The header picture is a 1901 penny which has been cut away and made into a brooch. It’s fine work and it’s a shame the pin is missing. It isn’t much worn, which makes me think it was probably made in about 1901, maybe as a piece of mourning jewellery for Queen Victoria. It is very dark and the patina may have been artificially applied.

The other is an enamelled bronze brooch (also lacking a pin) which has had a farthing mounted in the centre. This, as the inscription shows, is definitely a piece of mourning jewellery. The maker’s mark is “W.J.D” which is W. J. Dingley, a Birmingham manufacturer of everything from high quality trophies to mass market badges.

When I found them (I was going through one of the junk boxes) I thought of adding them to my collection, as I have a few bits of coin jewellery, but decided against it, as it’s time to start cutting back, not adding to the burden of whoever has to sort out my collections.

If things had gone a different way I may, by now, have become a leading authority on mourning jewellery. Instead, I’m a shop assistant. Sic transit gloria mundi, as they say.

Penny Brooch – front view

Penny Brooch showing rear view with Britannia and the date 1901

Penny Brooch showing rear view with Britannia and the date 1901

With modern penny for size comparison

With modern penny for size comparison

Day 41 (Part 2)

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A slight departure from titling protocol, but not a major one.

I had my INR results – I’m just within range and they have, as a reward, given me a month until I need to go again. I am happy.

For my second post of the day I am going to talk about trousers and their role in memory for the over 60s.

They are a style of trouser that has gone by many names over the years. I first encountered them when they were in military surplus shops, sold as “lightweight trousers”. I’m not sure I ever saw any “heavyweight trousers”, though they may have been more suitable for a man of my size and shape. They went on to be known as “cargo pants”, “combat pants” and later became “workwear”.

I just looked them up and find they are also called “tactical trousers”. It’s a much more English term than “pants”.

The defining characteristic is not that I am about to go into combat, either in the army or in a SWAT team. The West may be under pressure from Russian sabre-rattling but it has not yet reached the point where it needs to call me up.  It is the pockets. Mine have 8. I believe some have 14. This means that you don’t have to lose things, you just have several sets of identical trousers and keep the same thing in the same pockets.

Right thigh – wallet and folding magnifier. Right hip – ready-use handkerchief. Left hip, clean handkerchief (which is like the other but without the blood, oil and snot which I always seem to end up with) and pocket change. Left thigh – mobile phone. Left lower leg – notebook, RADAR Key and spare change. I tend not to use the other three.

Every time I change my trousers I move the contents of my pockets, and I very rarely mislay anything. It’s a lot simpler than remembering things all the time.

No, it’s not necessarily a system that would suit all people, but it’s something to think about. Remember, I may not look smart, but while you are wondering where you put your phone, I am composing poetry in my head.

Complete with braille

The big top helps people with stiff fingers when it comes to grasping and turning

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As you will have noticed if you read the link – it’s not an official key but I don’t like filling in forms when I can just get one on eBay.