Monthly Archives: November 2025

The Worst Time Planner in the World

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Sunset over Sherwood

It’s the end of the month in just under ten hours and I have submissions to make. More accurately, I have submissions to write. This is not ideal as everyone knows it takes months to write a good poem and let it mature.

I’ve been doing more enjoyable things for the last month. And a lot of non-enjoyable things. It doesn’t really matter – I have frittered my time and now have very little left. I have decided with one of the two submissions, that I won’t bother this month. They have published me once in seven years so I’m not going to beat myself up about it. The other, I will try. It’s a new stsrt-up and deserves support. If someone is willing to start a magazine and put the hours in, I feel writers should give it some support. It doesn’t mean I expect to get in, but I do want the editor to know I support her efforts.

Green’s Windmill – Nottingham 

So am I writing? Yes. I’m writing a blog post. I don’t want to miss it, but I don’t want to do any real work either. It’s just the way I am and nothing seems to change me. It’s not laziness, as I’ve got through quite a lot of stuff this month, just not followed the Poetry Plan.

At one time I used to have so much material in hand that I actually used to wait for submission windows to open as I could send things out on day one. Now I end to be in right at the end. In mitigation I plead several illnesses and a much increased number of submissions. In truth, with no sense of urgency and a love of procrastination, it was always likely to end up this way despite my plans and good intentions.

However, look on this blog post as an example of my double edged sword of a predicament (or double-ended pencil, if you prefer a writing metaphor. I said I would get back to daily blogging so I need to write this to make sure that happens, and because the daily blogging will be good for my writing in other areas too.

So, I’d better get on with the poetry. I have just over nine hours left and I also have to bring the shopping in and cook a meal tonight. Julia is in the cafe this afternoon so it’s only fair that I cook.

Time, he’s waiting in the wings . . . as Bowie reminds us. Though he went on to say  He speaks of senseless things, which is bit close to the mark when you look at my subject matter.

A Creaking gate hangs the lonest . . .

 

The All-Purpose Recipe

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Boiling vegetables

Take vegetables. Cube them. I use carrot, parsnip, leek, onion, turnip, swede, sweet potato and potato. Sometimes I use garlic. This, when boiled, possibly with a stock cube, is “Vegetable Stew” and is served into bowls with a ladle.  I sometimes add red lentils or pearl barley and also sometimes add shredded greens. If I transfer it to a wok and added fried onions and perhaps shredded greens and corned beef and season it with Henderson’s Relish it becomes “Hash”. If you give it a day and hit it with a hand blender it becomes “Vegetable Soup”.  If you tweak the vegetables slightly (I’m not convinced of the merit of turnip or swede in curry, for instance, and parsnips can be disconcertingly sweet, it becomes “Curry”.

Liquidise

In days gone by it would probably have been called “pottage” and would have been the staple food of much of the population. Looking back down my family tree, it’s clear to see that I am just the latest in a long tradition of peasants. Fortunately I have not yet been reduced to gruel.

Yesterday, as I believe I mentioned, we had mixed vegetable soup. It was the surplus veg from the hash with added black pepper and a cheese and tomato sandwich. A posh meal for peasants, but simple compared to the  things you see on cookery programmes.

Serve. Just like yesterday and the day before . . .

In the evening we had a variation on the stew theme – Sweet Potato and Chickpea Curry. I often use a can of tomatoes in it, but this time I used the leftover tomato soup from a couple of days ago. We also use vegetable soup for the same thing when we have it. Not sure if I’m brave enough to use broccoli soup or not. Probably not, it just doesn’t seem right.

I use bags of ready chopped onions – my hands aren’t what they were and buying like this avoids much frustration and cutting of finger tips

I was reminded last night, whilst watching TV, that writing things by hand engages different parts of the brain than typing. I was also reminded that it’s important, when checking things up, to avoid reading technical papers on the subject.  I just spent ten minutes going through one paragraph. It turns out that writing with a western alphabet is different from writing in hieroglyphics or Chinese. I didn’t want to know that, or bend my head around so much Latin, and I know if I see “et al.” I have taken a wrong turn down the rabbit hole. It is written by a man with much knowledge and very little control of his words. They form paragraphs of brick wall proportions and clusters of words like thickets of thorns, holding me back rather than helping me on my way.

Cursive handwriting is better than writing in block letters for a number of reasons (which I skimmed. My decision on those two forms of writing is based on whether I want people to be able to read what I have written. Even I have trouble reading my own handwriting after a few hours, as I forget what I wrote and the squiggles that remain are of little help.

Inions and sweet potatoes – the suspense continues . . .

I’m going to have to look for a simpler version. I know handwriting is better than typing and want to go back to it (even though I hate typing my notes afterwards) but I can only vaguely remember what was said on the subject and can’t take much of any use from the paper I’m currently reading. I am feeling very stupid as I admit that, but that’s just the way it is. Think of  Brave New World, we don’t all pop out of our test tubes as academics, some of us have to operate machinery.

I just found a simpler version. Writing by hand enhances memory and learning. The control of the pen, and sensory involvement, contribute to elaborate brain patterns which enhance memory and learning. It is important to include writing by hand in education, using pens and pencils instead of digital devices.

Add chickpeas and garlic paste as the sense of jeopardy escalates . . .

That is my sort of academic – knows stuff, connects it to real life and helps people learn. I feel more intelligent now. I am also going to make notes my hand rather than typing or cutting and pasting.

Add leftover  tomato soup and simmer as tension reaches breaking point . . .

It’s a small step forward but a journey of a thousand miles etc. . . .

The final result – brownish  food on brownish rice, with beige naan bread. I feel the end result may not have lived up to the sense of tension I tried to create.

 

A Senior Moment and some Personal Grooming Tips

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This is the second post of the morning, the first one being here.

It was, I’m afraid, a new milestone in Senior Moments. It wasn’t particularly worse than some of the ones I’ve had, but it was definitely a milestone, being an amalgamation of White Bear Problem, ohnosecond and WordPress.

I’m not sure if I’ve covered the White Bear Problem before – it’s where a researcher says “Whatever you do, don’t think of a white bear.” And you do. It may be Ursa Maritimus, a Panserbjørne or just Pipaluk, but it’s there, a bright white, big-bottomed ursine twerking its way across your imagination. (I admit that Baloo the Bear from the 1960s Jungle Book plays a part in my imaginary visions of bears.)

I wrote a haibun on the subject. So far it has been shown to three unappreciative editors and is currently waiting deep in the bowels of my computer for me to get back to it and make major improvements. I’ve tried to polish it each time it has come back but it clearly needs something more radical. I tend to work on three rejections being a sign that a major rework is necessary.

Anywhere, there I was with a completed blog post on broccoli soup. It needed photos but it was getting late so I thought I’d park it and leave it for morning. So I scrolled down, looking for the “Save Draft” button and thinking “Do not press ‘Publish.'”

Guess what I did? That’s right, I scrolled down, saw the pink button and as I got to the “Publish” part of my thought, I pressed the button despite telling myself not to.

Then I said “Oh, no!”

Fortunately I was able to move it round and put it back in drafts before completing it this morning.

Definitely a new milestone, plus an opportunity to mention Pipaluk and The Jungle Book, which are both happy memories from childhood.  It also, of course, gives me a subject to write about. Now all I need is some photographs.

I’ll put some of my new head razor here, as I’ve just been using it whilst sitting at my desk. I really am remarkably well-groomed at the moment. Julia looked at my head and went to get some moisturiser to rub in. It had been standing on the bathroom windowsill and was very cold, particularly as I wasn’t expecting it.

Five cutting elements and an LED display  – what is the world coming to?

The Naming of Soups

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Green slime in a pan – it always seems to look less pleasant when photographed in a pan

This is the first post of the morning, the second one being here.

Today we have naming of soups. Yesterday we had tomato, a staple of the soup world and easily produced from a can of tomatoes. Tomorrow we will have mixed vegetable, for those are the ingredients we have. But today it was blue cheese and broccoli. I would like sweet potato and chilli, but that requires ingredients which in this case I do not have.

Tomorrow we will also have poetry, because I can feel some coming on. It is the end of the month and I really need to send some out if I am to maintain my momentum. I have always admired Henry Reed’s Naming of Parts, but if you are familiar with the poem you will probably already have guessed that.

But back to today. I had the remains of the chopped onion from last night and a head of broccoli that was still good but had spent a week in the fridge. I had bought it out of habit but not used it, and an unused head of broccoli is a problem waiting to happen once it gets to the second week. That was all I needed. I didn’t add garlic today, as I try to avoid monotony, but I did use an organic stock cube. I also had a nice piece of Shropshire Blue in the fridge.

Still looks a bit primaeval, but it’s getting better

I bought it to keep for Christmas, but Julia, in an uncontrolled burst of internet shopping, bought a huge piece of Stilton from Cropwell Bishop. As she also bought a gift pack for Number One son and partner, I won’t be able to give any away, so it looks like we are well provisioned for Christmas, and it seemed sensible to start on the Shropshire Blue now.

Shropshire Blue is a slightly puzzling cheese as it probably doesn’t come from Shropshire, and much of it is produced by local dairies that also produce Stilton. It also seems to come from a recipe developed in the 1970s. For many years I assumed it was an old recipe from Shropshire. In fact it is probably best described as Stilton Cheese with annatto dye added. The use of annatto to dye cheese is an old practice, and I once had a stone glazed bottle which had contained it, though I’m not good at dating such things.

With cheese

So, to recap, Shropshire Blue is a cheese that is mainly made in the counties of Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire. They also make Stilton, a cheese named after the village of Stilton, which is in Cambridgeshire, and only about ten miles away from where I sit. You can’t make Stilton cheese in Stilton because the name has a protected status and it can’t be made outside Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, though when milk supplies are tight the makers are allowed to source milk from outside the area, including Cambridgeshire.

It has always struck me as slightly hypocritical  that the dairies can protect themselves from competition, but use outside sources when it suits. And that you can produce Shropshire Blue in the “Stilton” area, but you can’t produce Stilton in Shropshire.

I’m sure life used to be simpler.

With cheese and sandwiches

 

Back to Basics

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Onions and celery

I’ve let things slide a bit over the last year. The last few months have seen my writing and my diet fall into disarray, and my personal grooming could do with some attention.

The last one was easy. Julia bought me an electric head shaver as an early Christmas present and a few days ago I gave myself a good going over with the trimmers then had a go with the head shaver. It doesn’t produce a smooth and shiny bald head like a wet shave, but it’s quicker and easier and, let’s face it, safer. There is always a danger, when impersonating an octopus and wet shaving my head, that I’m going to do a quick van Gogh impersonation. When you see what some people can do to their chin with a wet shave and a so-called safety razor, you have to wonder what I could do if I slip whilst contorting to do the fold at the top of my neck.

Tin and label

I just had a look on the internet to find the correct term for this. You’d think it would be easy enough, but it’s a bit tricky. I don’t want to get it wrong, so I’ll just say that the back of my skull has a prominent ridge of the sort associated with thugs, gorillas and cavemen. It’s supposedly a sign of neck muscle attachments, but to me it’s a sign of deficient social skills and a slightly lower position on the evolutionary scale than I would like to occupy. It’s strange that of all the deficiencies in my body and appearance, I fixate on the back of my head. Apart from that, it’s not easy to shave. A smoother skull would be a definite advantage in head shaving.

I realised, when reading about skulls, that although I am familiar with many of the names of skull parts from my viewing of CSI, that I don’t actually know where most of them are. There are 22 of them, all with long names – parietal, occipital, temporal, sphenoid, and ethmoid for starters. I’m going to admit defeat on this – I really don’t have time or brain cells to assimilate it all. If I ever need to describe a head injury to a doctor I will stick to simple terms like front and back and trust that they know the rest.

Simmer

Anyway, that’s what it is. Next, I will trim my beard, but I like to take my time over that.

The writing is a permanent mess that never seems to run well for more than a few months at a time, so we can leave that for a while.

So it’s diet now, and as the title suggests, I’m starting from scratch. Soup.

Last night’s soup was tomato. Onions, celery, a tin of tomatoes and a tin of water. If you use boiling water it saves heating the whole pan again, and also makes it easier to take the label off. Hand blender. Note I used a steel saucepan after my casserole misadventures. Today I will make broccoli and blue cheese soup, and use the leftover tomato as the base for tonight’s curry sauce. Sweet potato and chickpea curry tonight. A simple staple that we have drifted away from after discovering biriyani seasoning in a kit from TESCO. That’s the thing about getting organised, it makes things easier. It’s also cheaper than buy seasoning and sauce in a box, and contains fewer chemicals.

All done

And a tuna sandwich garnish . . .

Hands free can opener – one of my devices for coping with arthritis. Most days I am OK, but some days I just don’t feel like wrestling with a can. JML also made my head shaver. They seem to be the modern RONCO.

 

Cast Iron Pots, Cost and Customer Service

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I looked at the Le Creuset website this morning to see if I could find any hints about why a perfectly good casserole should suddenly let go. I asked for their advice on avoiding it happening again, whether it was safe to continue using and whether there was anything I could do to mend it. First I used the contact form, which was returned with a message saying it was not possible to deliver the message. Then I contacted them via the button in the bottom corner.  I had to ask several times to get the answers I required, and they were all pretty much what I had gathered from reading the internet anyway.

Bean Soup

What they told me was that their lifetime guarantee didn’t apply to items made before 2000, that it didn’t apply to wear and tear, abuse or professional use, that they don’t do repairs and that I could line it with parchment and use it for baking but shouldn’t do anything else because I risked eating glass. They also told me that the photos I supplied showed my pan had been abused and gave me advice on how to treat it properly. Then they repeated that there was no lifetime guarantee on the pot and they didn’t do repairs. Actually, they mentioned the guarantee about four times in all.

Now, where do I start? Well to begin – I never asked if they did repairs, just asked if it was possible to repair the damage. Two, I didn’t ask whether it was guaranteed, because quite honestly, it’s 40 years old and it isn’t going to be a manufacturing fault at that point. However, they seemed very keen on telling me the guarantee didn’t apply and repeated it constantly, despite me not bringing it up.

Then there was the “abuse”. It’s lasted forty years. That’s not really a sign of abuse. I’ve cooked red cabbage in it repeatedly, hence the staining, and despite what they said, I always use a wooden spoon apart from the times I use a ladle, which isn’t going to scratch the enamel.

Mushroom soup with pumpkin seeds

 

The main point though, is that I never sent them a photograph, so haven’t a clue what they were looking at or how they could judge how well I had looked after it. Yes, I repeat, I never sent them a photograph.

And they didn’t come up with an answer about how I could avoid it happening again.

Eventually, after writing a review about how good their pots were (fair is fair, after all) and how abysmal, disappointing and bullying their customer service was, I looked things up again. (Yes, I did use those words, so it may not get published).

It seems that the fault lies with me and my control of the gas flames. When I put the soup on to warm I used a low flame (I’m still getting used to gas) and it still wasn’t hot enough by the time I had finished making the sandwiches. So I turned it up. I think what probably happened was that the flame came up the side of the pot, overheated it and pinged the enamel off. Annoying and avoidable, but there you go. That’s all I wanted to know. I didn’t want to know about the guarantee, just how I could avoid damaging another pot.

Carrot & Ginger Soup

Carrot & Ginger Soup

They did later write and tell me they hoped I’d found their customer service useful and that as a goodwill gesture they would be happy to offer me a 30% discount. That’s a good discount. It comes to about £100. Yes, that’s right, the discount, not the price. Full price is £319. And for that you get a really nice cooking pot and really bad customer service. I’m going to buy an inferior make to replace it. It will cost a lot less and if I get poor customer service it will be value for money.

Unfortunately, I can’t find pictures of Le Creuset in action – all my soup photos seem to be of soup in bowls or in stainless steel pans.

Soup –  a mix of wrinkly root veg and fingers crossed

Must go now – over 700 words on poor customer service has taken some time, and I need to get julia to wood turning tomorrow.

 

 

A Fortnight . . .

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Umbrellas – Bowness

Oh dear, it’s been a fortnight since I last posted. That’s lax, even by my standards. For my international readers, may I point out that a fortnight is two weeks – or fourteen nights. I’m not sure how common an expression that is across the world, as I once had to explain it to some Americans. The old word  for a week is a sennight, or seven nights. We don’t use that these days.

The trouble is that I start writing, but I end up being diverted. I’ve just been wading through the FFF System of measurements ( Furlong Firkin Fortnight System, which could also use Fahrenheit, Farthings and Fathoms, I suppose. That led me to the Hawking Index and the New York Minute. Then to a discussion on the old measurements for marking out rugby pitches.

I am one of the people who gave up reading A Brief History of Time, though I did finish The Great Gatsby. However, that was fifty years ago and I have forgotten most of it. Of the 11 books measured in the article, I have never even started the other nine, and, in truth, hadn’t even heard of 7 of them.

A Leaf on the Ground

I also liked the ohnosecond – the length of time between accidentally pressing a button on a computer and realising you just did a really bad thing.

In the last 15 days we have committed to spending a lot of money on a new roof for the conservatory. The first house I thought of buying cost less than this new conservatory roof. It was a small house and I didn’t go ahead with it, but it was cheap. Then we had the surveyor round to measure up for the job. He fixed the hole in the roof while he was here, so the house is now warmer and the conservatory is dryer. Julia made a candlestick and a potato/bulb dibber on the lathe. I did some more notes for the Nottinghamshire medallion book and studied more about the Lusitania.

I’ve been writing a longer piece on it for the Military History Group and have found an unexpected talent for making interesting subjects very dull. It’s the length. I can be interesting for about a thousand words (though my blog posts may suggest otherwise) but after that I fade away when I read through it, I start to hear a droning sound in my head.

That’s about it. Not much has happened.

No, somethings have happened. We had a wren on the windowsill, staring in at us with a frown. We sometimes have blue tits but a wren is a first.

I also seem to have ruined a Le Creuset casserole dish. I turned the gas up. Even though it was already warm and I’ve used it to boil on the gas hob before, two pieces of enamel pinged off. After 40 years this is quite annoying, particularly when you look at the price of a replacement. Even a replacement from a (much) cheaper source, is expensive when you consider that we will be eating baked beans for months to pay for the conservatory roof.  I am very annoyed with myself.

Oak Leaf at Bowness

 

A Quandary at a Crossroads on the Horns of a Dilemma

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Medallion with box and leaflet

Two days ago, I wrote the beginning of a post, then tried three middles, which all took a turn that I didn’t want to pursue. And suddenly, as so many times, it’s two days later and I’ve written nothing. It’s not like I’ve been idle, but I have managed to stay busy and still accomplish nothing. All my talk of focus and being conscious of the passage of time has, as usual, counted for little.

At the moment I have several choices.  One, I can blog. That, as you can probably guess, is what has happened. Two, I can write a couple of passages of disambiguation for the medallion book I am helping to edit. Three, I can go through the list of Nottinghamshire medallions which will be an appendix to the book. Four, I can write poetry. Five, I can go to Derbyshire  to look for jewellery for Julia’s birthday. And six, I can wait in to see what the conservatory man says about the leaks.

As I have no real choice about number six, I won’t be travelling to Derbyshire today. It’s an hour and a half longer when you start from here than it is from Nottingham, and I wouldn’t be able to get back in time to feel faint at the cost of the job.

And by the time I’ve finished this post I will probably have forgotten about writing poetry.

Death sells tickets for the final voyage

Tomorrow is out for Derbyshire as it’s Julia’s wood turning day. Looks like we  will be going on Wednesday. Of course, that also depends on the weather.  If not, Thursday is available as Friday is cafe day. Things are gathering pace there, with Julia’s policy of writing about people for the newsletter making her a lot of new friends. It’s a good policy. If you can’t have lambs or kittens (or puppies or piglets or poultry) go for people.

That reminds me – seven, discuss the social media strategy for the Numismatic Society. It’s all very well having a selection of interesting numismatic articles, but why are we doing it. With half a dozen regular readers we aren’t spreading numismatic knowledge or increasing our membership so, apart from two of us sharpening our writing style, what are we actually doing it for?

It’s here, by the way. Last week’s Lusitania article might be a bit more interesting than some of the more numismatic bits, if you are inclined to read a bit of history.

The photos are the famous, or infamous, Lusitania medallion. Originally produced by Karl Goetz to ridicule the greed of people who sailed in the face of danger in order to do business, it was adopted by the British, who used the medallion and the error in dates, to make it look like the Germans were congratulating themselves on the success of the attack. I was always told by my parents that propaganda was a Nazi invention for WW2. In fact, Hitler was so convinced that British propaganda had helped win the war that he adopted our methods when he took power in Germany.

And the other side – showing artillery pieces on deck, even though there were none on board.

 

 

50!

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So, last time I mentioned acceptances, I was on 48 and saying that 50 was no big deal as it was just a number and didn’t reflect on the quality of the poetry. Fifty is still just a number, but after two more acceptances, it’s now a number I have reached. I’m now looking at the list and wondering what the chances are of me hitting 55. It won’t make me a better writer, but it will be a bigger number. What makes it even better was that the two acceptances were from a magazine that has previously been  a bit hard to get into. I won’t count too many chickens before they hatch – an acceptance is a momentary thing. In a couple of months they may well be hard to get into again. However, it does give me faith in the power of practice and persistence.

The downside is that I have looked at the haibun they accepted and I can see a major flaw in it. I hate it when that happens. However, when I tried to think of ways to get rid of the flaw I introduced others, so it will have to do.

I’m currently looking for someone to put a new roof on the conservatory. It was built by a company who went conveniently bankrupt and it has never really been satisfactory. They say that things like bereavement, divorce and moving house are stressful life events. Is it a coincidence that they all involve the legal profession? I wonder. Anyway, they never seem to include finding decent builders in these lists, and I can tell you I find that quite stressful. We will have to see how that goes.

My new batteries arrived yesterday so I can start baking again. That’s a new problem for me. We had multiple sets of scales on the farm so always had a set available. Now, on my own, a flat battery (and inability to find the spare which I know is somewhere around, renders me unable to weigh things. I’m sure I still have the old set somewhere around. They aren’t quite as accurate or convenient, but they work without batteries. This is something I should have considered before moving over to technology.

A Day of Eggs and Chores

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A leaf in Arnott Hill park

This morning I rose shortly before 7am and started my day. I do not have a great deal to do today, but it feels virtuous to start with “This morning I rose shortly before 7qm . . .”

It was 6.48, so it wasn’t that long before. This may be the opening line I need for my memoirs. Getting up before 7.00 and blogging makes me look reasonably industrious without necessarily promising too much. This is about right, I am industrious in patches, and have achieved very little. That’s probably why I never actually get beyond the stage of thinking “today I will write my memoirs”. You really need something to write about and a memoir from someone who has done less with his life than most of his readers is about as much use as a novel where nothing happens.

The view from Tebay Services

I wonder if you can make a book out of blog posts – The Collected Blog Posts of a Nobody. It would be a true title, but runs into the same old problem. The fact that I woke up, wrote, made coffee for my wife, who spent yesterday morning wood turning, and had high fibre cereal for breakfast is interesting only to me, and even then, I felt my interest waning towards the end. Julia enjoyed the wood turning. We now have a small Christmas tree in oak and something that could be the end of a pull cord, if we drill a hole for it. It’s not bad for a first lesson.

We had soup for lunch. She is, in case I haven’t mentioned it, half pack rat, and had been storing half-used vegetables at the back of the fridge. This is an area where we differ. I tend to use all the vegetable, and if I don’t, I leave it at the front so it doesn’t get old and wrinkly. I have just checked up pack rat in Wiki to make that link. She wants to know what I am laughing at.

They are particularly fond of shiny objects. A peculiar characteristic is that if they find something they want, they will drop what they are currently carrying—for example, a piece of cactus—and “trade” it for the new item. 

And that, dear reader, explains the decor of our home.

Sunlit oak leaves at Clumber

After breakfast, we tidied kitchen cupboards to check for duplication and find out what we needed to order for Christmas. We don’t need to order stuffing. I ordered four cheap packets last week as we seemed to have run out whilst making turkey sandwiches last week. At least half the fun of eating turkey sandwiches is in the trimmings, rather than the turkey. I could order a better quality turkey but the cost of a good one always makes me think I should be living in it rather than eating it. I see I can get a free range bronze turkey from Marks for £150. In my youth I used to pay less than that for cars.

After that I made two jars of pickled eggs, then heated up yesterday’s soup and made egg sandwiches to accompany it. The eggs I use are a bit larger than the average pickled egg and I can only get five eggs into a jar. That meant I had several more eggs left over than I planned. Guess what tomorrow’s sandwiches are going to be.

We watched a bit of TV as we ate then Julia started work again and I watched more TV. Then I washed up the mess I had made before remembering I had a blog post to finish.

Rufford Abbey Lake