It’s about three weeks since I did any proper cooking. It was very tricky cutting veg, even with my big knife and various ingenious techniques. I hve confined myself to a few convenience meals and ringing for takeaways. I think I said that even the act of buttering bread or stirring cheese sauce was challenging – that’s how bad it’s been.
Today I am cooking roasted vegetables with belly pork. It’s so simple it’s hardly cooking but the cutting of vegetables makes it easy to compare with three weeks ago. It is so much easier I am cautiously forecasting a return to normality in the next few days. My main qualification for saying that is optimism rather than science, but what is faith without hope? Or charity?
Here’s a diversion for you. It’s always a surprise to think that the Gloster Gladiator what was basically a design from WW1 fought the Luftwaffe in WW2. For those of you who don’t follow links – this comes from Faith, Hope and Charity being the names given to three Gladiators that defended Malta. It was a bit more advanced than the Great War designs, but it really did belong to a different age, fighting with the RAF over France in 1939, in the Battle of Britain, Norway, Malta and the Mediterranean.
One of the pilots using the Gladiator, was Roald Dahl. I’m tempted to ask a serious question here, but I won’t. I will just mention that it just shows how complicated it can be to sit in judgement of people. Roald Dahl, anti-Semite and author i need of rewriting, as we are now told we must see him, was also Roald Dahl who risked his life many times to bring down the Nazi regime. Two of the earliest RAF casualties of WW2, by the way, were members of the British Union of Fascists.
Life is complex when you try to sort it out into good people and bad people.
“C’est la vie”, say the old folks, it goes to show you never can tell.
I enclose the quote because you never can tell, and because you don’t often get a chance to quote Chuck Berry in a post about anti-Semitism and the BUF.
People are a indeed a mixed bag, and life is complicated. It comes in many shades of grey. 🙂
I am glad your arthritis is improving, Simon.
Thank you. Most mornings it feels a little better, then the day makes it a bit worse. But, on the bright side, most evenings it feels less bad than it ddi the night before. I am actually able to muster some brain power to write now. 🙂
I am amazed that you have survived continuous exposure to these postcards. Step a very strong constitution. I’m glad to hear that you are able to cook more freely now
The process has not been without stress – unfunny jokes abound, and many of them remind me of attitudes I must have had forty or fifty years ago which are no longer accepted. However, some are still funny, and I have enjoyed revisiting earlier more innocent times. It is, as I say, complicated. I, on the other hand, am simple. 🙂
I hope your physical improvement will continue. Two nicely scurrilous postcards. Rewriting history is always problematic
Thank you Derrick – the physical improvement is continuing and I am still listing postcards. 🙂
I like the twists and turns this post took. Yes, life is complicated. I have been struggling with the appalling racism of writers who were published during the early 1900s right until World War II. After that, there’s a dropping off, but apparently not with Roald Dahl. Sobering.
It’s tricky defining things with hindsight. Even Einstein and Gandhi can be made to look bad in hindsight, to quote just two.