Tag Archives: breakfast

Pride Goeth Before a Fall

I was so pleased with myself yesterday. Or, the early hours of this morning, to be accurate. I wrote a blog post, I didn’t veer off into politics, and I left with the Devil’s Gallop playing in my head and a hamster running round a wheel . . .

I knew there was something wrong as I published, but couldn’t work out what. I even had a title, which is the thing I most often omit.

But there was something . . .

This morning, I realised – no pictures. You would think it was obvious. but I managed to miss it.

Looking on the bright side, it has taken me over 100 words to talk about it, and it’s all grist to the mill as I restart my blogging habit. As a result of that missed step, people all over the world will be able to wake up and read about an ageing man who has mental pictures of hamsters, burns cabbage, and now, it seems, can’t even remember to add photos to a blog post.

As I say, I was so pleased with myself. I really need to work on my memory.

Meanwhile, as I sit typing, I haven’t eaten anything, so can’t talk about my progress in the eating of 30 plants.

That leaves me short of things to talk about, and hungry. I have a choice now – wake Julia up and hope she makes breakfast, or do it myself. Neither will be good. She will produce cereal and fruit again, and I will make a breakfast that is far too meat-based. Actually, no. I can do beans, mushrooms and tomatoes. And with one breakfast 18 food types becomes 21. Only 9 to go.

I’ve just realised I have a title for my next post. I’m happy now. I’m also off to eat breakfast.

Sunday Morning, Seed and Song

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Sunday morning. I marked the occasion by going back to bed and didn’t switch the computer on until just after 9.00. The spellchecker just tried to claim that I marred the occasion. Can’t really blame the machine as I should have spelt it correctly in the first place.

Next I checked emails. Nothing of interest. Then I started peering into the lives of people who I follow on WP. Gardening, cycling, concerts, watching baseball . . .

Fascinating stuff.

Breakfast. We had a cereal delivery last night so were back on cereal with fresh fruit. I like porridge and sausage cobs and crustless breakfast quiche (we ran out of cereal three days ago, in case you were wondering – logistical and conversational breakdown. Cereal and fruit seems like it is a better choice, though I worry about the amount of calories in the fruit.

“Worry about” and “have cut out” are two different things. I could go onto plain wheat biscuits but I mentally group that with “gruel” and “bread and water” – a punishment rather than a breakfast.

I’m back at the computer now. Next task is to order more sunflower seeds for feeding the birds. The last lot are nearing the end. They have been very popular and 20kg has lasted eight months. It works out at about £1 a week, which isn’t bad. A second class stamp (if I ever want to send a letter) is 87p these days. At least we have birds every day – under the new postal system we only have letters alternate days.

I note that I have just had five emails – one is confirmation of the bird food order. Three are unwelcome and unnecessary and one is telling me about a sale on clothes for big men, which may be slightly interesting. All in all, though, email is pretty useless. The spam box is even worse – prizes, special offers, parcels for delivery, schemes to help me become rich at the press of a button . . .

This is all done with the assistance of China in Your Hand going round in my head. I heard it on TV a few days ago and it has stuck with me. Click the link to You Tube and you can have it too. No need to thank me . . .

Four Hours

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Feathers and Water

The day is slipping by. At 6.48, after one of those nighttime visits my age demands, I decided to go back to sleep. The postman woke me when a heavy parcel fell to the floor with an emphatic thud, and 8.02 I rose. After checking emails (nothing of interest) I answered my WP comments and looked up butterflies on websites. The USA has 750 species, Australia has 420, the UK has 55. I feel, yet again, that I am the poor relation. Then I wrote a poem. It is now 9.58 and mid-morning approaches, signaling an end to what I always feel is my most productive time.

The “poem” that I wrote is far from complete, but it is a promising start. In human terms, I have the skeleton in place, and mostly in the right order. Some of the limbs have flesh on. More a zombie than a human, and more a grotesque pile of words than a finished poem, but it’s a start. Every journey starts with a single step, every pearl with a grain of sand, and every poem begins when you put a few words together to form a thought or picture. They aren’t always the right words or in the right order, and they don’t always appear in the finished piece, but it’s a start. It’s already on its second title . . .

I’ve been worrying about my poetry recently.

View from Bangor Pier

it’s 10.22. I have eaten cereal and fruit, drunk tea and watched birds. At one point we had 16, possibly more. It’s difficult to tell when they are milling about and perching inside shrubs. It is a great advance from the handful we used to get when we moved in last winter. How much of teh change is due to a gradual build-up, and how much is due to seasonal changes, we don’t know. I will have to look up kaleidoscope in the dictionary.

Invented by a Scotsman, patented 1817, it seems to have been regarded as a serious bit of scientific kit in its day, rather than the child’s toy it became. See, I wanted to look up a word to use in writing about a whirling mass of birds, and ended up reading about Scotland, science and the Disruption of 1843. That’s where my time goes.

Another view from Bangor Pier

Back with my poetry thoughts, I’ve been worrying that I have become one of those poets I used to view with suspicion – friendly with editors, prolific and widely published. But have I written anything of merit, or have I just found myself a groove where I churn out the equivalent of greeting card verses for poetry magazines?

That’s something I will be thinking about over the next few weeks. For now, as the clock nears 11am, I will add tags and photos to this post and think about what comes next.

Coffee, sorting books and worrying about the direction of my creative life. It is enough.

Pictures are from July 2019

Hoverflies on an orange poppy

Sunshine over Flat Fields

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January Afternoon – Country Park – this is the picture Julia used to make the one shown earlier in the week.

This morning, after a breakfast of cereal and fruit followed by toast and marmalade (I still half hope that the oranges in marmalade count towards my five-a-day) we noted the birds in the garden and went out. The Blackcap has not been seen for a week now. He has probably migrated back to Europe, as this is the right time of year for that. They have quite a complex migratory pattern and my head is still spinning after reading a paper on it. There is a lot of information on the tracking devices and the way the stats are put together and quite honestly, a lot of it is way over my head. You can’t rule out a cat or a better selection of food in another garden, but I’m pretty sure he has gone for the summer. Maybe another bird, one of the population that migrates to the UK in summer, will replace him. It is all very confusing. He is a male, in case you are wondering – they have black heads. The females have chestnut brown heads, but we have only seen a female in the garden twice.

Blackcap

Out trip out was to the Fens. I like the Fens, the massive flat area of land that used to be under water. Apart from the flatness, they have very undulating roads (caused by the movement of the ground under the road, and majestic skyscapes. I wanted to start to learn my way round again and also wanted some photographs for a research project. It was a lovely day, but spoiled by a couple of sets of diversions which made navigating difficult. We got the photographs, but the rest of the day was a bit of a washout as we didn’t get any photos and the only farm shop we found was badly signposted and we passed it before realising it was there. By that time it was late in the day and I decided to carry on home rather than turn round and go back.

In Chatteris, the market town where I wanted the photos, we stopped to use the toilets. They looked disused but Julia put 20p in the slot as required. Nothing happened. The next one along had a coin jammed in the slot. However, the disabled toilet worked on a RADAR key and I had mine in my pocket. There are benefits to being old and rickety. Disappointingly, they don’t work using radar, it is just the initials of the Royal Association for Disability and Rehabilitation. They are more accurately (in my opinion) also called NKS keys – NKS being the National Key Scheme.

Rabbit at Ferry Meadows

A Few Odds and Ends

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Yesterday we started the day late, with an almost Full English Breakfast for brunch. It was, to be fair, Full enough, and lasted us until the evening, when Julia cooked Iranian Vegetable Stew, which we ate with fresh bread from the bread maker. It’s a stew made with squash, spinach, potatoes, onions, tomatoes and (in our case) cranberries, flavoured with ras el hanout. Julia’s version is similar to the recipe in the link, though there are various versions of the recipe, and after reading the link I see there are various versions of ras el hanout.

There is, I feel, little point to retirement if you have to get up early and stick to a routine, or even a recipe.

We had black-headed gulls in the garden yesterday. They didn’t stay, just dropped in, grabbed some bread and flew off. We have frequently seen them overhead but this is the first time they have come to feed. We also had white doves. There is a small flock that flies round. I presume somebody local has a dovecote. There is no way to record them on the garden birdwatch site, but at least the gulls were a new species, as was the rabbit.

Then, between darkness falling last night and Julia looking out of the kitchen window this morning, something managed to open the bottom of the peanut feeder and drop the nuts to the floor. It was almost empty so it isn’t a disaster, but at the moment we can’t find the base. We suspect the squirrel is heavily involved. That’s the trouble with squirrels, they just have to escalate things.

Thought this might be Cauliflower Fungus. As I don’t intend eating it, it doesn’t really matter.

A Bright & Early Start, Declining . . .

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It’s the full vegetarian breakfast experience for Julia today. She’s doing most of the heavy lifting in the move so Sunday breakfast is the least I can do. Scrambled eggs, beans on toast, mushrooms, fried tomatoes. We are still ripening the tomato crop in bags with bananas. It was either that or fried green tomatoes. Next year, with the new kitchen, I may make green tomato chutney. Or, the slightly less trying climate of a sheltered back garden a bit farther south, we may not end up with a basket of green tomatoes. It seems to be lacking bacon, sausage and black pudding but at our age it’s probably time to develop a healthier lifestyle.

Actually, that time was probably thirty years ago but, like tree planting, the second best time is now.

Yes, I read a lot of low-brow books…

When we move we will, as I think I said yesterday, have a microwave that does air frying, which should be even healthier. Something I noticed when I started to make my arrangements for retiring was that I started to worry about dying before I had enjoyed sufficient retirement. I have enough plans to last me for the next fifty years so I’m not going to run out of stuff to do.

Obviously, going into politics with my new party “The Grumpy Old Men of Great Britain” has been put on the back burner – it will be a few years before the next election so, in my normal tradition of procrastination I will leave it for a few years before starting.

It’s going to be a one issue party with a focus on bile and vitriol, because this seems to be rising in popularity these days. I will leave the “foreigners” alone because most of them have enough to put up with and don’t need me to add to it. Anyway, it’s bad manners to make guests feel unwelcome, and if a party of old people is going to stand for anything, it should stand for good manners. For a while, I did think of picking on young people, with their Americanised speech (“Can I get a coffee?” is a deplorable crime against the English language) and their dreadful music, but, as Julia pointed out, they are the ones working to pay for my pension and health care, so I’ve shelved that too. Politics, deep down, is about self-interest, after all.

I parked this while I went to eat breakfast, then forgot to get back to it. I feel slightly disorientated on discussing breakfast at 6.30 pm and wonder where my day went. (It was mainly sorting and dusting books).

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Setting the Bar Low

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Olympic Breakfast

I have just written a post and deleted it. It has, so far, been that sort of morning. Julia is unhappy with my many failures as a husband, the weather is miserable and I can’t get a grip on writing a short post. What more can go wrong?

At the moment that is a genuine question, rather than a rhetorical one. Give it an hour or so and I’m sure I will have some answers for you.

Some subjects just seem to keep coming round in domestic arguments. I am, I admit, completely unable to read Julia’s mind. I’ve never been able to do it, and have never been able to learn how to do it. If she is, for instance, lying in bed and showing every appearance of being happy and relaxed on a Sunday morning, does this mean she is happy and relaxed and intending to have a lie in. I thought so. However, it seems she was merely waiting, like a coiled spring, to leap into action and devour the substantial cooked breakfast that I had no clue I was supposed to prepare.

I don’t mind cooking breakfast, but I only tend to do it when I know we are ready to eat. It seems a waste of effort to make a breakfast that will then cool and congeal as the intended consumer snores gently upstairs.

Even if I had cooked it, I would have been wrong. I’m thinking of doing something meat free. It’s healthier, better for our weight and, more important, it cuts out some of that carcinogenic cured meat we keep hearing about (or bacon as we used to call it). We all know that in a perfect world I would consume huge fried breakfasts, but as I approach my three score years and ten with a variety of ailments and a large amount of extra weight, compromises must be made. One is that we can’t eat bacon all the time. It’s better for us, and it’s better for the pigs.

Breakfast at Harvester

17 Saturdays

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Sausage and Egg McMuffin. They know the secret to attract fat people. Why doesn’t someone reverse it?

A quick count indicates I have 17 Saturdays to work before I retire. I may start a Saturday Series to mark their passing. Or, as usual, I may talk about starting a series and do nothing about it. Who can tell?

The irony is not lost on me. I started off with Saturday job, I have ended up with one. Working Saturdays is one of those things that tells you success has eluded you.

Julia has just come down and offered me toast. I was going to leave, but the lure of toast is too strong, despite my commitment to losing weight. If I remove six slices of toast and marmalade from my diet each week, it is around 1,500 calories, which is a lot of calories. If I don’t remove them, I enjoy toast and marmalade, though some of it may be rushed and the rest may be spoiled by guilt. It’s a balancing act, but on Saturdays the toast tends to win.

My recommended daily calorie intake is 2,500 calories. If I want to lose a pound a week they recommend 2,100. Taking out the toast and marmalade and a few more tweaks (no more second sandwich for lunch) should do the trick.

It sounds so easy.

If only . . .

What these diets don’t include is the sitting at work feeling bored and eating that single sandwich for elevenses. What happens then? Dieting is about more than simply cutting back on food, or we would all do it.

In retirement I may concentrate on making meals from cardboard. That should do the trick – zero calories, no enjoyment, plenty of fibre and chewing. What more could you want? I suppose there must be more to it than that or we would all be doing it. On the other hand, having just had a bowl of bran flakes I am left with the impression that it would have been much the same if I’d just cut the packet into small squares and forced them down.

Other breakfasts are available, or not, in the case of the much missed Olympic Breakfast. Other waistlines, and coronaries, are also available.

Olympic Breakfast – much mourned

Back to Life

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I’ve had a leisurely start to the day, to say the least. It started with a cooked breakfast because I wanted to make sure Julia had something decent before she left for work. The weather is not bad here but there’s a chill in the air and the threat of patchy rain to add to the overnight soaking. As I write, Derrick and Jackie Knight are still under an amber weather warning as Storm Ciaran rips along the south coast. Normally I envy them living n the New Forest, but when the weather is intent on breaking branches and toppling trees I find myself less keen on it. I know there are lots of bits without trees (forest in England refers as much to an area of land enclosed for Royal hunting as it does to a place with trees.

Robin Hood lurking in the Forest

Sherwood Forest and the New Forest, very different places these days, were once mixed areas of heath, farmland and woodland set aside for Royal hunting and under the Forest Law rather than the normal law of the land. To a certain extent, the New Forest still is. If you let your horses and pigs wander free round here people would soon protest. And the pigs would soon be in freezers.

After breakfast I went back to bed to continue my recovery before rising for a second time to do a few odd jobs. The phone is currently squeaking at me to remind me that I have a phone call to make. There is always something to do. For the last ten days this “something” has mainly been sleeping and whining, but now it’s time to return to real life.

Acorn Sculpture – Sherwood Forest

The Great Ledger of Life

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If today were to have an entry in the Great Ledger of Life it would not, I suspect, be totally positive.

I had several interesting and reflective conversations with wife, which would be a positive.

Bacon and black pudding cobs for breakfast would be in the “iffy” column. They are definitely nice for a leisurely breakfast, but from a health point of view are almost certainly frowned on by thin people within the NHS.

Slept through and hour and a half of dull TV before spending a couple of hours awake in front of dull TV programmes. That would definitely be bed, and a waste of life.

“Read a Kindle book on the Vikings” should be a positive but as the entry continues “written with a 21st Century slant” you can probably guess what my thoughts are. The Vikings, it seems, are bad. I can go along with that, as it’s a point of view I’ve heard before. However, when I am informed that they are bad on the grounds that they had slaves and influenced British Imperial thinking, I begin to recognise a touch of fashionable bias. Bias is OK in historical writing as we all have it, but I do dislike the taint of fashion or opportunism.

These are not, I confess, traits found only in this book, as virtually any TV historian you watch these days seems to be contractually obliged to mention the evils of slavery and Imperialism in relation to British history.

It’s very much like the popular view of the Great War – Lions led by Donkeys and all that, plus Blackadder Goes Forth and the famous drinks cabinet line. “Field Marshal Haig is about to make yet another gargantuan effort to move his drinks cabinet six inches closer to Berlin.” It’s a view that has been popular for around 60 years now, to the point where schools are showing Blackadder as a history resource, despite it being a comedy programme. You may as well rely on Oh! What a Lovely War as a source. However, if you say something often enough it becomes the accepted view, and is often accepted as fact, as you can see when reading many WP blogs.

That’s it for today. I’m going to look for some photos and go to bed now. I would say that I’ll see you tomorrow, but at my age you can’t always be certain of that. This is the problem with writing about unhealthy breakfasts and warfare – it encourages thoughts of mortality.