Monthly Archives: April 2022

Day 93

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Someone pointed out to me yesterday that I am in the eighth stage of Erikson’s Psychosocial Stages of Development. This was news to me as I hadn’t heard of it before. I didn’t think you could get better than the Bristol Stool Scale in terms of medical scales. I’m not actually sure that you can. I wasn’t, from considerations of good taste, going to add  a link to the stool scale (it’s not about making furniture, just in case you were wondering)  but when I found this my resolve crumbled. Julia came racing through to see if I was in pain, but I was just trying to contain my laughter. Whoever posted it has less good taste than I have, and probably a looser connection to sanity too.

Anyway, back to the serious stuff. I am now in Erikson’s 8th stage of development, which is the last stage. That is a worry even before I start looking into it. It’s subtitled Integrity v Despair.

This is not a lot of use in understanding it, and reading more about it, one commentator opined that to do well in stage 8 you needed to have started preparing in middle age. The whole point, of course, is that I am currently regretting a wasted life and and my inability to go back and change it. Telling me that to feel better about my current life I should have done some things differently twenty years ago is both obvious and useless. I haven’t read Erikson’s original work as I don’t do well with academic papers, so it’s possible that he was more insightful.

Anyway, the outcome is that I can’t change things, and am not on my own with these feelings. Or, to put it another way, there’s no point worrying. As I already knew this, I just wasted a couple of hours  reading internet articles.

However, put on a scale that runs from the Kardashians to the Meaning of Life,I feel I could have done worse. Two hours on psychology, an hour and a half on poetry (improving my tanka skills), with diversions into the Ukraine, bowels and baking have not been a complete waste, and I still have plans for the future, even if that future does feature an abrupt conclusion when I reach the end of stage 8 and fall off.

Flowers – detail

Photos are from April 2020. Not sure why now, probably some that were sent to Julia for Mother’s Day.

Day 92

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It’s cold again. By our standards anyway. So, when confronted by a menu choice featuring either root vegetables or salad, we went for the roots. We’ll be going that way again tomorrow. After that I’m hoping that the weather will improve as I have quite a lot of salad ingredients to use, and the difference between salad and green slime is only a few days in some cases. I will use the spinach for greens and the rocket in sandwiches and the lettuce probably has a few more days in it, so it will all end well. That’s why I prefer coleslaw to green salad. A cabbage does not, in my experience, become green slime. It may become fossilised, but it takes a long time and you get plenty of chance to eat it.

Looking at the weather charts I’m planning roasted veg with sausages and onion sauce tomorrow, pasties and roasted veg for Monday and probably vegetable stew for Tuesday. The leftover stew will make soup for Wednesday lunch and we can use the pizza bases to make pizza and coleslaw for the evening. Thursday? Well that’s quite a long time in the future. I don’t plan so far ahead these days. Possibly pasta or curry. We have the ingredients, we just need the motivation.

I’m trying to lose more weight and you can probably tell that from the length at which I talk about it.

Recently we have generally had good deliveries, with most of the stuff I order being delivered. Where I haven’t been as successful is in being able to order everything I want. There are still gaps, including loose parsnips. It’ not a problem, as bagged parsnips taste just the same. The only difference is that the plastic bags are killing the planet and I am trying to cut down on them.

Day 91

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Veggie burgers tonight. Unfortunately after letting them slip off the menu for the last year or so, I seem to have lost the knack. I mixed and mashed beans, garlic, spring onions, mushrooms, nuts, breadcrumbs, cumin, smoked paprika, Worcester Sauce and fresh coriander and produce a soft brown mix which seemed reasonably firm as I made four burgers. Twenty minutes later I removed them from the oven,  prodded them and decided to put them back. ten more minutes failed to firm them up so I carefully removed them from the baking sheet and flopped them onto our plates with the Spanish potatoes and coleslaw.

As I said to Julia, if I had told her it was a sort of Scandinavian soft bean hash she would probably have believed me. The flavour was right, even if the consistency (and colour) looked like something familiar to all country dwellers who walk through fields of cows.

No, I didn’t take photos. It’s not something I want to dwell on.

I’m going to stop reading recipes with “easy” and “simple” in the titles. They often aren’t, and even when thy are, they often fail o be much good. This one, mind you, was all down to me. Having looked at various recipes I made one up based on the contents of the fridge. Next time I’ll look for a complicated one featuring oatmeal and eggs and I’ll try for a burger that doesn’t bend when you pick it up.

Spanish potatoes are just English potatoes, before you get too excited. They are tossed in oil with garlic and smoked paprika before being roasted. They look alarmingly red but don’t taste as interesting as I had hoped.

Not an unqualified success but nice to feel I’m getting my interest in cookery back.

The picture is from last time I made veggie burgers.