Monthly Archives: March 2022

Day 80

Has so much of the year gone already? This day Numbering title system is quite depressing. So to cheer things up, let’s watch Italy score a truly excellent try to the backing of Nessun Dorma.

I have, I admit, seen better, but they feature my kids and so (a) are not available on film and (b) I am probably biased.

This evening I watched one of those videos on health and am now convinced I am dying. This is a clear case of cyberchondria. and after a bar of chocolate I feel much better. For those of you who don’t waste time on links, it’s a clever pun on hypochondria, is a real condition and is caused by anxiety at the immense amount of information (and misinformation) about health on the internet.

The best antidote for worry is just to take a look around. Day by day there i more blossom out. White, pale pink, deeper pink and even red, though that is mainly camelias and they are, in general, a bit too showy for my taste. Set against almond, plum and cherry blossom, plus magnolia and even flowering blackcurrant, they are just to big and too red. Quince, which is also out, is red, but is subtler, with smaller flowers. The header picture is a quince.

That is all I have to offer today. I started off with big writing plans for the evening but ended up wasting time. I have sent one submission this month and have another ready to go, so I’m doing Ok, but am conscious that I still have another couple to do before the end of the month if I’m going to keep my numbers up. The numbers are important in themselves, but they are a way to measure whether I am writing enough (because practice makes perfect) ans whether editors think I am making the grade.

I went looking for photos of blossom in March but 2022, 2021 and 2020 have little to offer and in 2019 we had snow in March. These are some bird photographs from March 2018. Have we really done so little in the last four years?

Wren at Rufford Abbey

Nuthatch at Rufford Abbey

Robin – singing

Day 79

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In the old system of posting I would probably have gone for “2,600!”. This is actually post number 2,602, as I always seem to miss the numbers by a couple of posts, but it would have been near enough. Nor every title was a great one, even when I was supposedly trying.

I’m now thinking of writing two posts a day. That means that by “Day 279” I could be writing my 3,000th post. All I need is the ability to use time efficiently, remember to post on time, and cover lots of subjects. I have many subjects but am slightly deficient in the other two departments.

However, I started a gardening business without knowing anything about gardening, so launching into things whilst lacking the basics is not a new experience.

I included in my adverts that I was qualified as an Agricultural Training Board Craftsman. You used to have to do four tests and you got a little red book with the four test slips glued in. You could do more but four was the minimum, and was worth extra money. I think it may have been £2 a week, but in those days I only took home about £15 a week for 6 days, so £2 was worth having.

Thirty years later two customers actually took me on based on that qualification. To be fair, they thought I was qualified in Horticulture, but they kept me on anyway, so it was worth doing the tests.

We had cake this afternoon, despite my diet, because one of the neighbours had baked for her brother’s 75th birthday and had stuff left over because one of the families due to attend had tested positive for Covid. It’s still out there . . .

Tomorrow we are having Lemon Meringue pie from the same delivery. I like Lemon Meringue pie. It’s probably misnamed, because it doesn’t have a crust, unless you count meringue, and is probably Lemon Meringue tart. It’s one of those topics to be reserved for a winter’s night of rambling arguments – pie/tart, shepherd’s pie/cottage pie, different to/different from. Sadly the traditional tomato/tomato doesn’t really work in print

Day 78

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The morning passed swiftly – we didn’t have a lot to pack and the customers who came in were not demanding. It was a half day for me today and I left just after 1.00 to go home. Julia and Number 1 son had filled their morning with shopping and we all had pizza and coleslaw for lunch. If this seems familiar, yes, it was the leftovers from the night before.

We watched Wakefield Trinity play Warrington. Number Two son used to play in the youth team at Wakefield before his knee injury, so we were happy to see them take control in the second half and gradually pull ahead to take an unexpected win.

Next up was Wales v Italy in the Six Nations. I like Italy, but you can’t deny that they have been fairly lacklustre over the last few years and have had a run of 36 consecutive losses. People have been talking about replacing them in the competition.

They took an early lead with two penalties and got in the faces of the Welsh, They held the lead into half time then Wales gradually came back at them. Wales scored with just over ten minutes to go and the man of the match award went to the scorer of that try. It looked like it was all over, until Italy came back with a magnificent try. That left them one point down and time ran out, leaving the final kick to decide who won. Miss it and Wales won, slot it home and Italy would win for the first time in 37 games.

To be honest, it doesn’t get better than this.

Italy scored the conversion to win by a point. The man of the match walked across and gave his award to the Italian player who had done all the hard work for the final try. That sort of sporting gesture is something you don’t see every day.

The picture is one I’ve used before, but it’s one of the only rugby shots I have ready. It reflects the other end of rugby – a hard, muddy day in winter in the Yorkshire Youth League with Number Two Son, The other shows the Midlands RL team at the European Youth Festival a few years ago – representing England in matches against the Lebanon and Serbia. Number One son scored in both matches.

I could go on to tell you what a great sport rugby is, in both codes, and how much the kids got from it, but I won’t, as I’ve written enough for one day.

Day 77

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Tonight, I noticed that 2022 in Roman numerals, as used in film credits, is MMXXII. In 200 years it will be MMCCXXII. OK, it’s not as easy to read as 2022 and 2222, but it’s more decorative and more fun.

I moved on to discuss date writing conventions of the world. I searched for “dating conventions” but soon realised that it wasn’t the information that I wanted, It seems that the Americans do it differently to the rest of the world because they preserved the original format used by the British before 1776.

This has been bugging me recently because a journal I submit to has started instructing me to use the American system in my submissions. This is one of a number of instructions editors of various journals have been issuing recently. Strangely, they also say they favour the Chicago Manual of Style for certain things – though the date isn’t one. The Chicago Manual of Style does not recommend the American date format as it is felt to be ambiguous.

This is irritating, because I don’t like micromanagement, but that’s how it is. If I want to be published I submit in the style requested. However, things have now moved on. They are going to have a themed issue. I don’t like themed issues. I write for enjoyment, not because I want to engage in a glorified writing exercise. It’s nice to have editorial input, but I don’t crave publication like a drug.I’m going to sit this one out.

Even if I did decide to submit, it’s unlikely that anything I write on the subject of war and human stupidity will be as good as this, so I’ll stick to writing about birds and Julia and traffic jams.

Day 76

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I started reading some blogs last night, which took the best part of an hour. It was more entertaining than surfing eBay, but it didn’t help me in my search for cheap medallions, so it was a case of swings and roundabouts.

I meant to read some more tonight but I seem to have swerved from the path of righteousness and started browsing poetry sites looking for ideas on writing better poetry. No luck so far. Practical help is hard to find. Tomorrow night I will read more. It has now crept into the early hours of the morning and I need to make sandwiches and get to sleep.

First, however, I need to get to 250 words.

We are now seeing a more normal pattern to the business, with more regular customers returning and some trade customers – even one from overseas. It makes life a bit more interesting and stops me wondering about the future quite so much. I have just over two years to go before pension and would hate to find myself unemployed, as it would be awkward to find a job and even more awkward to stretch one wage between the two of us.

Even ten years ago I’d just have gone asking for work, or started something up myself, as I did with the gardening when I decided antiques were no longer paying. Now, with white hair and a walking stick I’m not quite as employable as I once was.

I could, as I said to Julia, go on the street and sell my body. Her reply that only medical researchers would be interested was, I feel, a touch unkind.

I am going to lit this as “uxorial unkindness” in the Tags, as I am on a quest to use more words.

More stained glass. Well, I like stained glass.

Day 75

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I had a lie in, an unhurried breakfast, watched a little TV and started clearing up bits and pieces of work I need to do on the computer. It’s amazing how half-finished thing accumulate, and how, after two hours, I don’t seem to have made much progress.

Lunch was the remains of the green salad with prawns and avocados, and I am now entering that phase of the day where the hypnotic sound of raindrops on glass is starting to work its Morpheotic magic. Well, I would if Morpheotic was a word. It should be, and it should mean “to do with Morpheus, the god of dreams”. Somehow it seems to have slipped through the net and searches for it come up with various medical conditions and a skin-tightening treatment. That’s the trouble with the English language, just not enough words. From what I see on that link, the Koreans are way ahead of us, and the Germans would soon run a word together that meant what I want, though it would probably be very long.

That is the trouble with computers. They offer the same hypnotic spell as a TV screen, added to the potential to procrastinate contained in Google and Wikipedia. This morning I looked up “Wickcliffe”. I always thought it was spelt “Wycliffe“. So does Wiki, though they do mention that it is also spelt Wyclif and Wickliffe. The people who struck a medal in 1924 to celebrate the 600th Anniversary of his birth selected “Wickliffe”. To be fair they also selected 1624 as his birthdate, which is not known with 100% accuracy. This sort of thing can be tricky when you get back into territory where spelling and record keeping had different standards from today.

I ended up on a journey through the Lollards, Tyndale and the Bible, to name but three. Exciting times, where failing to toe the party line in religious matters could end badly, as Sir John Oldcastle, the real life model for Falstaff, could demonstrate.

The problem was that I was supposed to be making a few background notes for the new medallion, not spending all morning refreshing my memory on the Reformation.

The John Wickliffe, if you are interested, was a sailing ship that took Scottish settlers to New Zealand in 1848.

This, if you are a researcher from the future looking at Procrastination in the 21st Century, or some similar subject for your dissertation, is what I do with my day.

Picture for today is coins. Even on my day off I am surrounded by coins.

Day 74

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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.

Day 73

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I note from a Twitter post that Julia showed me, that someone has painted Putin’s face on a dog poo bin in a park and labelled it Pootin. Several other artists seem to have used dog faeces as the medium for painting portraits of the tiny tyrant. (That’s Putin, not Julia, though she is actually shorter than him. They both terrify me, if I’m honest). I’ll let you search for that yourself, if that is the way you are inclined.

It’s all part of a Great British tradition. I have also seen Napoleon and the Kaiser featured in a similar way.

I counted our plant-based dietary sources tonight – 32 for this week, though I still have to check if we are doing it properly. Some ofm them were small quantities used in a green salad.

Tonight at the Numismatic Society of Nottingham we had an interesting talk on the life and time of Queen Anne told through coins and medals. It was very interesting, and like me, he’s more interested in the history rather than the minutiae of die varieties and are dates on coins.

He joined the society in 1958, the year I was born. This made me think.

Apart from that, the day nearly got off to a messy start when a cyclist jumped a red light and cut across the front of me. It nearly came to a messy end too, when two learners on underpowered motorcycles cut down the side of me when there really wasn’t a gap. In between times there were at least six cars that pulled out in front of me, causing me to adjust my speed. Considering that on most days I don’t have any problems, this was a notably bad day on the roads. It’s clearly the counterbalance to my good day last week.

Meanwhile, the crocuses are out all over town, the flowering blackcurrant on the corner of the street is out and the white blossom that is probably plum blossom is also starting. I noticed a magnolia budding up tonight and there is a definite haze of grey-blue hanging over our rosemary plants. Looks like Spring is starting.

Day 72

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As the sky changed to twilight and the day turned to the time known as “Sunday evening” my neighbours seemed to wake up and realise they still had time to ruin the day. One, who had spent a couple of hours in the afternoon perfecting his car door slamming technique, decided that he really needed to cut some wood with an electric saw, and one just down the hill decided that what we really needed was a ten minute barrage of fireworks. They weren’t particularly interesting fireworks, but they were noisy and obtrusive.I’m not sure what he was celebrating, but assuming that his intention was to disturb and annoy, he succeeded.

At one time Sunday evening was a quiet time where adults prepared for work and children went to bed with dire thoughts of school in their minds. Now it appears to be a peak time for making pointless noise.

The cut-off time between Sunday afternoon (when we were expected to dress in our “Sunday best”) and the dreaded evening was “Songs of Praise“. It used to be broadcast after 6pm, but has steadily moved earlier and earlier. I had noticed it was on in the afternoon but when I check up I find it is now at lunchtime. All the old certainties are being swept away. It’s difficult to have confidence in a world where we have “Songs of Praise” at lunchtime and fireworks in March. Fireworks used to be strictly for 5th November, but now they are spread throughout the year. Either celebrating the burning of Catholics is becoming more popular, or more old traditions are being swept away.

I’m glad, to be honest, to see the back of “Sunday best”. It was very frustrating to sit inside being quiet and tidy when there were fields outside and mischief being left undone.

However, it could be worse. I know of streets where the neighbours are far noisier, and if we were in the Ukraine it wouldn’t be fireworks that disturbed my evening.

It’ a 29 hour drive to Kiev. Just 1,693 miles by road. That’s like driving from Land’s End to John o’ Groats and back again, or the same as Boston to Oklahoma City in the USA. Imagine what would happen if Texas invaded Oklahoma.

It sounds quite close, doesn’t it?

Day 71

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Another post which is decidedly late.

I started it while I was waiting for tea to cook. That makes it sound grander than it really was. All I did was measure out two portions of vegetable stew into a pan and heat it through. As the smell of thyme filled the air, I started to type. Ten minutes later I walked from my office/dining room and ladled the stew, complete with gorgeous golden gravy, into bowls. I don’t make dumplings when I do it, because I am not good at dumplings. Julia’s dumplings are much better.

Un fortunately, instead of starting a blog post I spent the ten minutes surfing eBay. If you like reading the ramblings of idiots, or buying junk, or simply wasting time, surfing eBay is probably the best way to do it. But if you want to write a blog post, eBay is a disaster. Hours pass, cliffs crumble and dynasties fall, and I don’t notice because I am searching for medallions and brooches and something for nothing.

The day, in contrast, was busy. We had three serious customers plus a couple of more casual customers, and several people selling. We also had a constant, though shallow, stream of customers on eBay and put plenty of stuff up for sale online too. I suppose I should be grateful to eBay for providing me with a job, even though I do waste so much time on it.

The journey home was remarkably quick, with only one set of traffic lights failing to turn green as I approached. This is so rare that I feel it is worth mentioning

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Life after the Care Farm