Monthly Archives: October 2022

Starts with Stew and Finishes with Soup

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I note my last post was number 2,800. I always like round numbers.

Yesterday Julia did some tidying while I was out. She rang me to tell me that she was half-way through, which worried me. However, when I got back she had moved all the furniture, put down the rug that had been rolled up at the edge of the room for years after we were given it, and put everything back. The room is brighter and the floor feels warmer but I was right – it is too big to fit properly. However, considering what the next winter is going to be like I think we need warmth more than a rug that fits. OK, I say “rug” but it’s more of a carpet. It’s easy to forget that carpets weren’t always fitted.

I’m giving up on the lottery. I had four wins at the weekend – two lots of £5 and two free tickets. I think each one was probably a win and the tickets were thrown in for free. I hope so, because if not I seem to have bough too many tickets. All that luck being squandered on winning just £10. I may as well save my money and use the luck on something else. Julia says it doesn’t work like that, but we gamblers know it does. I’m just glad that I’m not given to big-time gambling. All those smoky clubs and international jet-setting are not really me.

We had vegetable stew for tea last night. Then the woefully inadequate ASDA delivery arrived. Seven substitutions. One substitution was for 2 half kilo bags of carrots for a 1 kilo bag. Fair enough. Then they substituted parsnips with more carrots and swede with ready chopped swede (which always goes off so fast) and gave me rosemary for thyme. This might be OK in a traditional folk song but it’s no good for stews and we have a gardenful of rosemary. They sent us kale in place of leeks, which would have been a disappointing quiche, and 6 Free Range Eggs in place of 15 Economy eggs (telling us they had saved us money as the 6 eggs were 15p cheaper than the 15). I used the word “rip-off” when they sent me a customer satisfaction survey. Finally we were told there would be a bag of cauliflower florets in place of a cauliflower, but there wasn’t. There was a cauliflower.

How, I ask myself, can we be short of root vegetables. They are seasonal and many of them are grown within an hour’s drive of here. Something is going seriously wrong with the world when you can’t buy parsnips, swedes and leeks in autumn.

Tea tonight was curried vegetable soup. Or vegetable stew with curry powder, extra water and a quick application of the stick blender. It was cheap, quick and nutritious. And it makes “convenience foods” look quite time consuming. We had a mackerel sandwich with it, my concession to oily fish.

And those are some of the domestic details that I missed out of the last post. Header picture is soup from an October 2014 post.

Starts with Poetry and ends up with Wallpaper Paste

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As with Newton’s Laws there is always a price to be paid for success and that has cut in today. I looked at some of my successes yesterday and decided they could have been written a lot better. This morning I woke up with the thought that if I’m going to justify my place in magazines I have to back it up with another selection of successful submissions, then another . . .

The road to Hell may be paved with good intentions, but somebody has to provide the wallpaper and that is a task that may well fall to me. I can see it now, hundreds of yards of wasted drafts and rejected versions.

The vision in my mind is not, believe it or not, the flames or damnation, but wallpaper paste. It’s what we used to use in school handicraft classes for doing papier-mâché work. That was our limit at school. We did art and we did “handicrafts”, which was sewing for girls and papier-mâché for boys. Yes, I grew up in a patriarchal society, but look at it this way – sewing is much more useful than the ability to make badly proportioned models from newspaper and glue.

At home, during wet school holidays we would sometimes do it, but using flour and water to make the paste. That skill later came in useful when we produced a Greek style helmet for one of the kids when he had to do a history project. We cheated and kept it for a couple of years before resubmitting it for the next child.  We used diluted PVA glue for it, so it didn’t suffer from storage.

It’s very simple and works for a number of things. Select an ion from history that is roughly balloon-shaped, cover it in glue and then cut holes/paint as necessary.

Strange what you think of when you blog.

Now I need to find a photograph. It has nothing to do with anything in the blog. The header is a frangipane tart made with our Cape Gooseberry harvest. We have just eaten the last ones out of the garden. Unfortunately they die in winter if you grow them outside, so we will have to try again next year. There are no pictures of one that was actually baked as they tended to get eaten fairly quickly.

 

Smugness, Success and the Art of the Humblebrag

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Warning – this post may contain smugness and inappropriate levels of self-satisfaction. I have also invented a new (to me ) form of humblebrag –

Do you realise how much time it takes emailing editors to thank them for accepting your work? I’ve had to do it three times in the last three days and it’s hard finding time to actually write the poems.

That’s. of course, an exaggeration, as i’d be happy to spend all day thanking editors, and in truth it only took about ten minutes in total. I tend, like editors to have a fairly standard reply, because after “thank you” there isn’t much to say.

The story is that I have spent the last few days hammering away at the keyboard. I did this because I am lazy and disorganised and only work when under threat of a deadline. Even then, the “work” of writing poetry doesn’t compare to cleaning out a chicken she in November, or cutting lawns in the middle of summer. Anyway, I managed six submissions in the last  four days (they were written but not finished.

One had an acceptance within 24 hours. I have already written about that. This morning I had an email to tell me someone had accepted three poems from yesterday’s submissions (which is a high level of editor industry and well beyond the call of duty. This evening I switched the computer on and found two more had been accepted. That had taken several days, which is still stunningly speedy considering editors also have day jobs and get piles of poetry sent to them.

Obviously, I’m happy and grateful, and, as you may have noticed before, success is a double edged sword, as I start to worry about repeating it. However, it goes deeper than that. It’s 12 months since I had cellulitis and the associated sepsis, and about eleven since I had Covid. It has taken all that time for me to get going again and to feel I am back up to standard.

The Long Way Home

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Tonight we had a customer who dawdled so I set off home ten minutes late. With the addition or rain, roadworks and a broken down car, this turned my journey home into a 50 minute marathon. With clear roads in the morning I expect the reverse journey with take ten to fifteen minutes. When I got home Julia was already there, looking wet and bedraggled. She had been caught in the rain and her bus journey home had been even more unpleasant than my car trip.

The trouble is Goose Fair. The bus had actually had to make a couple of diversions to avoid the worst blockages.

The truth is that the city streets are not suited to the rush of visitors that accompanies the fair. It should be moved out to the edge of the city. Unfortunately nobody wants it on their doorstep. The noise and smell of fried onions are a nuisance, but they aren’t great inconveniences. Even the parking problems and congestion aren’t the worst things. That is, as one of my friends once told me, the feeling that anything in your garden that isn’t nailed down is likely to be stolen.

They used to cancel their milk for the duration of the fair as it was always stolen. OK, that’s a long time ago (I’m not sure anyone delivers milk now) but the principle remains the same. It’s here for ten days this year, supposedly to allow the stallholders to recover after Covid. It’s going to be an unpleasant interlude.

It shouldn’t affect my journey much but it is not going to be much fun for Julia.  We may have to look at an alternative route home for her. In the mornings we will continue to take the long way round and avoid the place.

Yes, I’m a grumpy sod, and yes, it isn’t the view that usually makes it into the local papers But it’s all good source material for my future biographer.

 

Vegetable soup from October 2014. Was it really so long ago? Top picture is home made piccalilli.