Monthly Archives: November 2024

A Cold Day for Thinking

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Tree, Fountain, Leisure Centre – Sneinton market

I’m having trouble thinking and writing at the same time. This isn’t always a problem, as I have proved time and time again that I can write without thinking. However, it’s cold, I’m listening to music and I’m in a rush to get a lot of stuff written before I have to deliver another carful of junk to the new bungalow.

I don’t think well in the cold, and I don’t think well in the presence of music. I know lots of people find it helpful, but I’m not one of them. It’s just distracting noise. I’m also annoyed by the commentary. It’s a You Tube Video about forgotten bands of the 1960s. The Zombies, The Tremoloes, The Hollies, The Yardbirds, The Small Faces . . .

Christmas Bazaar

I’m not convinced they’ve been forgotten, and I keep having to stop writing to moan at the presenter. They can’t, of course, hear me, but it makes me feel better. I’m going to have to switch it off in a minute as i need to get some work done. I’m going to be offline for a few days and if I wait until I’m back I will have missed a deadline. Yes, I know it’s only poetry, but it’s one I don’t want to miss. I don’t want to send anything that’s not good enough either, so I’m going to review what I have available (rejection is just the start of a new submission, after all) and see if there is anything worth sending. I have at least one ready but I’m not happy with the haiku.

Gingerbread Women

Julia has just come back from an unsuccessful trip round a craft fair  so we are going to have lunch now and, after I finish the submission, we are off for the weekend. We are having more stuff delivered tomorrow, then a new typing chair on Monday. I’ve gone heavy duty and comfortable, because I’m going to be spending a lot of time in it and I don’t want either deep vein thrombosis or a broken chair.

I’m feeling quite energetic today, which I attribute to eating proper meals again. It’s just a shame that I will have to report that lunch was a Festive Sausage Roll (it had cranberry sauce and stuffing in it) and three sushi portions Julia bought back from her shopping expedition. I suppose sushi is healthy . . .

Santa works his magic

Photos are from December 2015.

 

Carrot & Ginger Soup

Prestige Pans to Thunderbird Wine

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Julia has gone to the gym. It is the final day she will be able to use her membership and she has decided to treat herself to a run and a sauna. I have been left at home with the washing up and the preparation of lunch. So far I have researched an article, done most of the washing up, thought about soup and started to write a blog.  It’s close to the plan she had in mind for me, but probably not close enough. However, compared to doing a couple of miles on a treadmill followed by lightly boiling myself, I prefer my morning to hers.

Over the next few weeks we are expecting several more deliveries as we squander our pensions on comfort, including a second new bed, a new freezer and various other fripperies.

vegetable Soup

Meanwhile, there is little to say. We are gradually packing 35 years of memories/clutter and dispersing it to bins, charity shops and (mainly) to the new house. There is going to be another sorting when we get there. I have already started going through my books again and the ktchen equipment is building up. My pans are nearly 50 years old. They are Prestige copper-bottomed pans but the years have made their mark and we were recently offered a newer, similar set. Then we were offered three more pans. I accepted one lot, not knowing that Julia had accepted the others. The same goes for many things – we have accumulated things over the years, some of which were stored upstairs or in the garage. It’s hard to turn things down. We have six corkscrews now we have sorted them all out.  Nobody needs more than three (one to use, one as a spare and one for the picnic basket).

In fact, nobody needs corkscrews anyway, as a lot of wine seems to come with screw tops. It’s one more sign of falling standards. There was a time when only Buckfast and Thunderbird came with screw tops and they were not the choice of the sophisticated social drinker.

And there you go – memories. I started with clutter and moved ont to my mis-spent youth. Now, before Julia arrives, I’d better get on with doing something useful and terminates my mis-spent dotage.

Carrot & Ginger Soup

Carrot & Ginger Soup

Photos feature pans. It’s the best I could do.

New Beginnings

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The first thing I saw as I got out of the car in Peterborough last week was an unfamiliar bird in the band of woodland that runs near the house. It is actually separated from us by the width of a driveway and a cycle track. I had a good stare and it came back into view after a moment – a Green Woodpecker checking out the trunk of a tree. That’s one of the good things about autumn/winter, birds are easier to see in trees. They aren’t particularly rare but it’s always nice to see one. The yaffle call is distinctive, and that’s normally how you know they are about as you rarely see them when there are leaves on the trees.

Then the wind got up and the rain started. We had two nights with the leaks in the porch and conservatory roofs adding a musical accompaniment of plinks as they fell into bowls and buckets. Added to the banshee wail of the wind and the sound of raindrops on windows, this was not great. However, when Julia and my sister went for a walk on Sunday they were able to photograph a heron and an egret, despite having phones rather than cameras. Julia likes this so much that it completely outweighed the leaks/missing builder feelings she had experienced the day before.  The proximity of three tearooms (one at the steam railway station and two in the park) also helps with this.

My sister brought the makings of a cream tea for Sunday – one savoury, one sweet – plain scones, fruit scones, cream cheese, plum and blackberry jam, clotted cream, onion chutney. All from M&S. It ws a very enjoyable meal which we ate whilst discussing the herons and egrets.

Little Egret – Ferry Meadows

In the morning I had been round a military collectors’ fair. It was better than I had expected and I am thinking about standing it in the spring to get rid of some of my surplus items. I have plenty of collectable clutter and it might be a nicer way of getting rid of it than just sticking it in auction. I will be able to talk to people, meet other dealers and, hopefully, take some money.

Spoke to Number Two Son on Sunday night. He was given a custom-made couch by a contact of his partner. It was expensive and big and wouldn’t fit in the lift or up the stairs at the apartment block. There was nowhere to store it so they advertised it on the internet and sold it that night for $1,200. It had to be done instantly or the waste disposal people would have taken it next morning.

While they were doing that they noticed someone had dumped a couch. It was in great shape apart from a broken bracket holding up the back). Number Two Son and his neighbour (an engineer) fixed the bracket and he now has a new couch and $1,200. It’s good to see the dealer genes being passed on!

Green Woodpecker feeding on ants

Heron photo from Julia, egret from my sister and woodpecker is one of my old shots from the farm.

Erratic Service Ahead

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Robin – Ready for Action

I’ve not been very structured over the last few weeks, with a poor record of reading blogs and many missed days of writing. Sorry about that, but the move, the cold and  planning/researching of articles has been soaking up my time.

I now have some poetry to write for the end of the month and a little more for December. At the back of my mind I’m sure there should be more, but it’s not on the list and I’m not going to search for more work at the moment.

It would be lovely to be one of those people who had a routine or a plan, or both, and I sometimes seem to get to that point. It never lasts. Generally as soon as i start to think I have acquired some good habits, it all falls apart.

Guinea Fowl

At the moment I am still looking for an internet service provider for the bungalow.  It is an area filled with deals and bargains and enticement and, particularly, with claims of high speeds. I checked our speed yesterday. It is satisfactory. If the various claims are to be believed I can get the same speed cheaper at the new place, or I can get more capability for the same money. We probably don’t need that, because two pensioners (one of whom would be happy to live in the age of steam and canals) with a couple of laptops and a digital TV don’t need a lot of capacity. I don’t even have my phone set up for emails, so most modern technology is wasted on me. If people want me they can ring me. That’s what a telephone is for. If they can’t be bothered to ring, it isn’t important.

Wren at Rufford Abbey

The ideal date for me to have lived would be about the 1860s or 1870s. We had mainly got rid of cholera and typhoid, we had trains and the telegraph, postal services were efficient and it only took 28 minutes to send a message from London to India. Unfortunately, balancing these advances were a number of signs that the country was going soft – you could no longer set mantraps in your grounds, transportation of criminals would cease in 1868 and even the power to imprison people for debt would be restricted after 1869.  Still, no time in history is perfect, is it?

Yellowhammer – Dearne Valley

Photos are from march 2017 – some spring birds.

Change is Easy, Improvement is Hard

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We had vegetable soup last night. Those of you who are familiar with my methods won’t be surprised by this, as we had vegetable stew the night before. The difference is a couple of minutes with a hand blender. As usual, I got the quantities slightly wrong and it looks like we will be having soup for lunch too. However, there are worse things.

Biscuits – slightly overcooked and slightly too festive for my tastes

The snow is still here, as are the low temperatures. I am sitting here typing in multiple layers of clothing, wishing I’d made a different choice of home thirty six years ago. It was only ever meant to be a temporary stop on the housing ladder, but somehow it became permanent. We could, I admit, have found better built houses with more facilities in better areas, but it was hard to find one that improved in all areas, and which had decent schools, good transport links and good local shops.

That’s life, I suppose. It was too good to improve on and not good enough to feel settled.

Grantham Gingerbread

It’s a bit like the new place. The house is better, the heating and garden are great improvements, but it can be busy and noisy when the steam railway or parkrun is on, the chip shop is not as good and, in general, the local facilities  aren’t quite as good. Plus the neighbours are a bit posh. Some of them have electric BMWs and a number of the women look like they need regular maintenance from nail bars and bleach bottles.  I expect that we will become known as the odd couple at the end of the row. My ten year old VW with the bent wing and odd mirror is already quite distinctive amongst the shiny new cars on the rest of the street.

However, even if I won the lottery I wouldn’t change. I’d add an extension to the bungalow so we could access the garage without going outside and I’d probably have the wing fixed on the VW, but apart from that I have everything I need. You’d never believe that I used to be hard-working and ambitious, would you?

Gingerbread Men

When I move I am going to start baking again.

Time to Hibernate

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The Beast from the East – Nottingham

As last night’s forecast firmed up it became clear that Nottingham was going to get some of the threatened wintry weather, but even as it fell we were told it was sleet. It wasn’t, it was snow. The advantage of sleet is that it doesn’t stay. Snow stays. Then, if it doesn’t thaw, it freezes. On our street we don’t see much sun in winter and that ice can stay for days. The temperature is just hovering a whisker above freezing at the moment and nothing is thawing.

It is nothing like the snow experienced by many of my readers, but as a nation we generally have so little snow that we are never properly prepared.

Buses have been cancelled locally and schools across Nottingham are closed (though it is very patchy and many remain open). I suspect this is more to do with where the staff live, rather than the conditions round the schools. There’s no point opening a school if you have no staff.

Snow in Sherwood – though not much

Julia did some shopping yesterday so we have plenty of food, despite running stocks down for the move. I say “running stocks down” but as long as we can do without bread and milk I think we probably still have enough for two weeks. When we get our new freezer at the bungalow I intend freezing bread, so even that won’t be a problem. I may get some long-life milk too, or look into freezing milk.

In fact, I just did look up freezing milk. You can do it, but it may separate, and can only be frozen for a month. It’s easier just to buy long life milk and put up with complaints about the flavour. Personally I don’t mind it, but I know some people do.

The header picture is one Julia took from the front window at 9am. Other pictures are from past years.

Snowy Detail

Travel Woes and Cheese on Toast

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Smoked Mackerel Pate on Toast

Was it really three days ago that I last blogged? In some ways it seems ages ago. In others it seems like the blink of an eye. Time passes in strange ways when you are busy.

Yesterday’s trip to Peterborough seemed to take twice as long as usual. That is easier to explain – it took approximately three hours, which is about twice as long as usual.

First there was the hold up to cross the Trent. As soon as I got into it I remembered there had been notices up about a cycling event. Probably a triathlon as they seem to be more popular these days. The queue was long, so we turned off and went via Newark. That added around 10 miles, and would have been Ok if it hadn’t been for the hold up at a roundabout while a motorcyclist and a van driver exchanged details and discussed their accident. Then, just as I was saying to Julia that I hoped we wouldn’t be held up again . . .

Welsh Rarebit on sourdough toast

According to the Internet there was a two vehicle crash near Grantham. So we took a detour through the town to go round it. Grantham was jammed up as it already had roadworks and the extra cars going through brought it to a standstill. Nobody seems to have been hurt, which is good.

After that it was fairly easy. To be honest, by the time we reached Grantham I would have been happy to go home, but we had a carful of stuff and didn’t want to have to unload it all again.

And that was my Sunday. Load car. Queue. Unload car.

We finally worked out how to use the new grill and made cheese on toast when we arrived as a (very) late lunch. We still don’t have the new toaster calibrated. I used it for the initial toasting, producing what was essentially warm bread. It’s on 3.5 now. On 4 it produces dry charred toast. I may nudge it up another quarter, or I may admit defeat. The margin between warm bread and burnt seems very small. I then put the cheese on and used the grill for the last bit.  It’s more powerful than our current grill and I just managed to catch it before it reached incenertion point.

There’s more to moving house than meets the eye.

Toasted Teacakes

This is my entire stock of toast photos.

 

Fish, Chips. Eleanor Crosses and Eels

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Monstrous Fish and Chips

We have had a good couple of days. We aren’t fully moved in yet, but we have enough stuff in the new house to move in and spend the night.

We had, as you can see, fish and chips. They were actually a bit salty for me (we don’t have added salt but I think they add it to the batter). The portions are also monstrous, so we are going to have to cut down once we move in. One portion of chips and probably one fish will do for two of us.

Julia packed the Christmas duvet cover. Well, I think of it as the Christmas duvet cover. It’s tartan, which is associated with Christmas for me because it is often in Christmas colours and because it reminds me of the tins of shortbread that always come out at Christmas. It is, of course, also associated with Scotland, as is shortbread.  I just looked up the legislation relating to tartan, as it was, I thought, made illegal after the 1745 Rebellion. In fact, as so often with these things, the truth is slightly different. It was restricted from 1747 until 1782, but it wasn’t actually made illegal. having said that, the punishment for a second offence was transportation, so it was probably wise to avoid wearing it.

That’s my book – not the one on the bed in the picture.  not quite as spiritual as the one by Patrik Svensson, but neither am I.

Along with effective heating, the flannelette made for a warm night and by the early hours of the morning we were both too hot (despite the heating having gone off before midnight). It’s unseasonably warm at the moment, but will be going down to freezing at nights next week. Until then we have switched the heating down another notch.

It’s just another sign of old age. I have slept most of my life in unheated bedrooms, often with the windows open, but over the last few years I have started to look at heating, and we regularly use hot water bottles now.

On the way back to Nottingham we took a loop through Northamptonshire and went to Geddington to look at the Eleanor Cross. I think I’ve mentioned them before, which is another sign of increasing age . . .

Eleanor Cross at Geddington, Northants.

Declutter, declutter, declutter . . .

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Sorry about the patchy service. I’m currently splitting my time between two houses and spending more time driving than tidying. One is gradually emptying and the other is gradually filling, We have also got rid of some stuff – around 150 books and three bags of clothes yesterday. It seemed  lot, but hen I look round I can’t see a difference. I’m now afraid I’m going to fill the new house with clutter before we manage to empty the old one. It’s a strange thing to fear, and definitely falls into the category of  First World Problem.

It all goes back to something in my childhood. I don’t know what, but there are lots of internet sites willing to discuss the problem of hoarding in the context of mental illness and childhood roots.

Autumn _ Arnot Hill Park

My grandfather was a hoarder. He had a cellar with four rooms in it, five if you count the coal bunker (with external chute). One was full of tools and stuff. one was full of scrap timber, a third had more timber and the fourth opened onto a rock wall with ferns and running water. It must have been something to do with building and foundations, or it might merely have been a portal to as wet, cold magical realm. I wasn’t quite clear at the time and am none the wiser now.

It took me months to clear it out for my grandmother and, forty years later, I still have many of the tools in my garage.

I’m not sure if he suffered childhood trauma. It wasn’t a great childhood, leaving school with a special license at the age of 12 to work to support his mother and young brother (his father was an invalid after an industrial accident), but I’m not sure if it was traumatic either. People just got on with it in my day. My great-great aunt, as I have probably told you, was not much older than my grandmother. She broke off her engagement in 1919 and gave up the opportunity to move to Canada so she could look after my orphaned grandmother. She could have been a bitter women, but was in fact one of the most cheerful people I have ever met. In WW2 she worked in a mill and took in refugees. That generation didn’t traumatise easily.

Time, I think, to throw more stuff out and pull myself together.

Autumn Leaves – Rufford Abbey

 

A Safer World?

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Today has been one of those days where there seems to be a constant supply of work and a dwindling amount of time. It seems to have passed in a whirl, which was in danger of becoming a vortex leading towards a drain . . .

Fortunately it didn’t run away with me and I was able to step off and have a couple of hours in the shop. This is always relaxing.

The price of gold has gone down since the US election. This indicates that the world is seen as a safer place than it was before. Gold generally goes up in times of trouble and uncertainty and down when things are looking calm and predictable. There is also some effect from the strengthening of the  dollar but it seems fair to suggest that the world is happy with the election results. No political comment – just an observation on the markets.

I have been moving books from the top shelf. Our front bedroom had two walls of shelves. Unfortunately, that allows dust to settle on the top books, which can be tricky to handle after it has been allowed to accumulate for years.When I put them back up again I might have an empty shelf at the top to stop this accumulation of dust. Or I may try to read the books regularly so they stay clear of dust. That’s a good ambition, but unlikely to come to much – too many books and not enough time.

Anyway. must go now – I have books to sort and Julia tells me I have to do it so we can pack them for tomorrow.

 

 

Photos are from November 2014. Ten Years? Really?