On reaching home (after a journey featuring many red lights – I am definitely paying for my satisfaction at so many greens last week) – I started on pizza. Or, to be accurate, I started slicing vegetables for the topping – all the hard work had been done by the supermarket, who had provided the bases in a convenient, though ecologically disastrous, plastic bag.
Green peppers, spring onions, tomatoes, mushrooms and bacon – the theme being “oddments I found in the fridge”. I then made a green salad consisting of ten sorts of vegetable-based food source. Rocket (arugula), spinach, coriander (cilantro), pumpkin seeds, olives, tomatoes, spring onions, celery, cucumber and pomegranate seeds. I’m fairly sure that even the most desperate counter would not include sesame oil and lime juice, though I did add some. Still not sure if flour in the pizza base counts, though I’ve already covered it by eating sandwiches if it does. If you can count oatmeal in porridge, wheat flour in bread should count.
When Julia eventually returned home, after yet another unsatisfactory staff meeting, I popped the pizza in the oven and we had hot, nutritious food. If only all our meals were this good, fresh and timely. I would add “additive free” but sadly the tomato sauce was from a jar and the pizza bases were baked by a factory, so this probably isn’t true.
We had two excited men in the shop. They had a 1921 Gorge V penny which, according to eBay, is worth £41,000. That merely, of course, means that some idiot/con man/money launderer has put a penny up for sale at £41,000. It hasn’t sold and it isn’t worth that, but that’s not what people see when they read the story. We must have had a dozen calls this week on the same theme.
They wouldn’t believe the shop owner that it wasn’t valuable, and they wouldn’t leave, so to get rid of them he went through a bag of pennies and gave them one with the identical date. At that point you could see it dawning on them that people just don’t give you a coin if it really is worth £41,000. I suppose you could say that the penny dropped . . .
(I have included a link to the dictionary as I’m not sure if that is an American expression or not).
Coins in the picture are half-pennies of Elizabeth II. They were the first pre-decimal coins I found when looking for George V pennies. They aren’t rare either, so I thought it would do.