Tag Archives: can opener

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.

 

An Evening with the Intelligentsia

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Derby Peace Medal – reverse

Second Post of the day. This is the first.

I’ve just been watching quizzes on TV. After a hectic night with frequent waterwork-induced wakefulness I have been tired. This showed when I slept through most of Mastermind and all of Only Connect. I did manage to stay awake for a gripping edition of University Challenge where, yet again, many of the questions could have been in a foreign language. Meanwhile, several of the contestants, who don’t speak English as a first language, managed to decypher the questions, understand and answer. They were frighteningly intelligent, and I can only speculate how quickly they would have been able to answer if playing in their first language. However, I did manage to answer several questions which they couldn’t so I don’t feel too bad.

Emily Dickinson and Australia (in relation to reptiles) were two of them. There were a couple of others, but I couldn’t even understand the chemistry and physics questions and hadn’t a clue about the Periodic Table.

Sheffield Peace Medal – obverse

I once asked a leading academic what the soldiers of the English Civil War used to open their tinned food as there were no known 17th Century tin openers. He pondered, he muttered and  he eventually suggested that, as bayonets were not yet invented, they must, on the balance of probability, have used their daggers.

Sheffield Peace Medal – reverse

It was an interesting answer, which may have been made less complicated if only he’d been able to remember that tinned food wasn’t invented until 1811 he would have saved himself a lot of mental effort. He knew this, because he was a scholar of the Napoleonic Wars, and canned food came from Napoleon’s offer of a prize to develop a method of providing preserved food for armies. Unfortunately, his academic training made him zoom in on the fine detail, and provided me with a great deal of amusement. He’s brilliant but not always practical.

Ooops! I just looked up can openers and found out I have been wrong about canned food all my life, It was first used by the Dutch in 1772. The first can opener was patented in 1855. Until then they had used a variety of methods including keys similar to modern corned beef cans and hammers and chisels. I bet soldiers did use bayonets too,  Though they were theoretically available during the English Civil War they weren’t issued to British Soldiers until 1672. having said that, as the early bayonets were just daggers stuck in the end of a musket barrel it’s very hard to say when the army started using them as any man with a gun and a dagger could hve “invented” the bayonet.

Birmingham Peace Medal – reverse

Birmingham Peace Medal – obverse

I used the peace medal photographs because I was looking t them earlier this evening and because I mentioned military things earlier in the post. It’s very tangential, but it’s the best I can do.