Tag Archives: chips

The Beauties of Retirement (Part 2) Fears & Spontaneity

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The world is full of fear. The Daily Telegraph, normally a sensible sort of paper, just ran a headline “China invades Taiwan: Japan steps in”. The sub-heading, when you click through is “If China invades Taiwan, what could Japan do?”

It is, I admit, beautifully done, From a classic click-bait hook through to a sensible opening. I’m sure, if tackled, they would actually say there was no intention to provoke panic and that they would not descend to such tabloid tactics. But I think I will make up my own mind on that.

Apart from that we have the meltdown of world trade to worry about, fishing in nature reserves, denial of climate change, fracking, the changing of history, new laws to disadvantage women, ethnic minorities and poor people, and no compassion shown to small children, though we knew they were going into the cages again as soon as the election was done because, whatever his faults, President Trump is a keen and consistent disciple of the anti-Christ. I can’t help but wonder what Pope Francis saw deep in Vance’s eyes just before he breathed his last.

So, that’s fear number one – living in a world in a world which is ruled by Bond villains.

Two, death. To be honest, as you can probably guess from my poor physical condition, I have ignored the possibility for much of my life and am not going to worry too much now.

Three, losing my driving license. There are loads of stories about this – new medical conditions, new rules, tougher tests, – the papers delight in scaring us about losing our licenses. We can’t all take up cycling, we don’t all have wives who drive. And we don’t all live in areas of good public transport or conveniently sited services. Fortunately I can get groceries delivered and am within a swift electric scooter journey of a shop, a pharmacy and a GP Surgery, so I’m not too bad. I will just have to restrict myself to seeing things within battery range  (and not up steep hills or along fast roads). On our trip this morning we only touched a road once, and that was only to cross it.

Four, I will be taxed out of existence by the Government, a cry which has become louder  as Labour won the election and started making changes. The tabloids love a Labour scare story. However, we had an unplanned bag of chips for lunch while we were out in the sun watching the young squirrels play in trees, so I need a nap. I don’t need to think about politics.

Fish, Chips and Thunderstorms

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We had fish and chips on Monday night. We needed some bottled water for Julia (we were going to freeze it overnight so it stayed cold all day) and the chip shop was the closest place that sells it now all the local shops have closed down.  Well, all the useful local shops. We still have a pawn shop, three hairdressers, a double glazing shop and two accountants, but actual useful shops are rare. We have two supermarkets within walking distance (for Julia) but it was a clammy night and the return journey is all uphill.

It seemed silly not to have fish and chips if she was going that way. It also seemed silly not to have mushy peas and a pickled egg, as fish and chips are a rare event these days. They aren’t cheap these days, and they are fried, which, in diet terms, puts them on a level of popularity shared by Covid, Beelzebub and Boris Johnson.

As she thought of going out the sky turned grey, a cold wind whistled in and one of the “scattered thunderstorms”  that had been forecast settled over our house and lashed it down for fifteen minutes. We weren’t the only ones. Next morning on the way to work there was still a lot of standing water by the roadside.

It’s lucky she didn’t leave five minutes earlier or she’s have been caught in it. It’s also ironic that we had been discussing heat and thirst only moments before a deluge. We have quite a few words for rain when you think about it. Deluge, as used a few words back, cloudburst, downpour, storm, squall, shower being just a few of them. At one time I would have said that this shows how much the British suffer from rain. However, as English is also spoken in Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada, which are not noted for their propensity for precipitation, this probably won’t hold up to scrutiny when comparing us to the Innuit and their snow vocabulary.

Sorry, that was a digression sparked off by use of the word deluge.

The pictures are fish and chips with mushy peas and a pickled egg. To describe me as a foodie would be inaccurate.

Fish, chips, mushy peas (a bit too dark for my liking) and a pickled egg.

Too Many Carrots

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I’m currently cooking with one half of my brain and blogging with the other. Or, to clarify, in case this conjures up pictures of more activity than is actually happening, I’m waiting for a timer to go off, wondering about what else to cook and thinking about recipes. At the same time, having missed a post last night, I’m typing a post while I have a few minutes and feel warm enough to do it. We are still economising on heating, which means I don’t get to the keyboard as much as I would like, as I’m still determined not to take the laptop into the living room.

We have not been doing as much menu planning as we should, and I’m faced with a problem of what to make with carrots, parsnips, sweet potatoes and onions. We’ve already had vegetable stew and vegetable soup in the last few days. Julia did something Chinese with chilli, rice and prawns on Monday but I’m struggling to be inventive. We would have had fish pie but we are trying to clear the freezer for Christmas and all the fish is currently frozen as we aren’t very good at forward planning and anything takes days to defrost at the moment. I could, I suppose, bake pieces of fish in foil. They will defrost like that, but I’m not sure that they go with root vegetables. In the hands of a Masterchef contestant, with a carrot puree here and a parsnip foam there, and probably a sweet potato pickle and a fondant potato, I’m sure my list of ingredients would be wonderful. In mine, not quite so much . . .

We could have the good old standby of pasta with stuff in it and pesto poured on – we have prawns and mussels in the freezer and they take no time to defrost – but it doesn’t seem much of a meal in winter.

Julia just rang as I was juggling pans. She’s on her way back from a meeting and wanted to know if she should go to the chip shop on the way past.

So, tonight’s menu is fish and chips with peas. Tomorrow we will be having mixed vegetable hash with corned beef (it could be eaten tonight, but I’d rather have chips) and I’m currently using the vegetable water from parboiling the hash vegetables to make a carrot, lentil and garlic soup. It was going to be carrot and lentil, but the garlic paste jar looked about empty so I used it all, and the resulting smell from the pan is rather garlicky.

In fact the chips just arrived so I’ll eat now and finish this later.

Fish & Chip Friday

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I must admit I woke with worries about the Cats of Salmon Brook Farm. I know they were packed and ready to move as the fires advanced, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed for them all. Ideally the fires will magically die out as they get closer to the farm but I fear this may not be the case.

Julia had set her clock for 6.30 and I wasn’t able to get back to sleep, which allowed me more time to listen to the news. It seems that this country has sunk so low that even American politicians feel able to take the moral high ground from us.

I Googled “honest politician” and did find this man, so all is not yet lost. I do love this quote:

“People of Kentucky, you deserve complete honesty, so here it is. I don’t care about you. Unless you are a donor, a lobbyist who can write a big fat check, the result that you get from voting for me is negligible.”

If the Americans don’t want him, can we have him for the UK. I’d happily vote for him. As for the rest of them, I’m seriously thinking of giving up voting as it only encourages them.

We sold one thing overnight on eBay and another during the day, the second day in a row this has happened. It’s not good. We also got two stupid offers from people. I was on my best behaviour when I declined them, even though they were just wasting my time.

I then went shopping, ate chips, fell asleep in the chair and woke up just in time to post.

Fish and Chips

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I haven’t had much luck writing today – just the same dull drivel as I normally churn out on a Sunday. Washing, shopping, sleeping…

Even I felt bored. So, continuing from the last set of photos, I decided that fish and chips was what we needed, particularly as I lost out earlier in the week.

Sheringham
Felixstowe
Cromer
Sutton-on-Sea

If you want more information on fish and chips the link has plenty of it. You can tell it’s a big part of British life from the number of times I have pictures of fish and chips.

They are a good subject – appetising, well lit and not prone to move suddenly or fly away.

 

Southend or Saxmundham?

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After a breakfast of porridge and croissants in our room (the porridge was the sort where you pour boiling water into a plastic pot) we didn’t feel the need for food for most of the day.

We did indulge in a snack when we arrrived in Southend-on-Sea but the four miserly doughnuts and two cups of tea merely showed us how good we’d had it on Monday. They certainly didn’t fill much of a gap. The cost of today’s snack was £7.40, with the miserable skinny doughnuts being £1 each. The tea wasn’t even full!

According to Wikipedia Southend is the 11th most expensive place to live in Britain. With doughnuts at £1 each you can see why.

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What a contrast to Saxmundham when we visited later that day.

Before that we had failed to get fish & chips in Aldeburgh (having been told several times how good they were). The queue was just too long and there were only two people serving. We tried several times but the queue never seemed to get shorter.

A disaster was averted when Saxmundham came to mind. It had seemed a decent place when we stayed near there at Christmas so why not try there, I reasoned. If there were no chips there were two supermarkets so we could at least buy something. (Julia was ravenous by this time and she’s not at her most cheery when unfed).

We had cod and sausage and chips and ate them in the car. That’s not some fiendish combination of flavours – Julia had the fish and I had the sausage (and some fish as there was a lot of it). We didn’t bother with peas as they can be tricky, even with the liitle wooden fork traditionally supplied by chip shops.

They came from “The Trawler’s Catch”, which we selected simply by driving past and finding it had car parking nearby.

The shop was chaotic as one man tried to cope with walk-in trade and telephone orders. Julia ordered a large haddock and a large battered sausage, both with chips. We ended up with two medium cod a small battered sausage, a small plain sausage and a discount.

You have to admire a man who can put together a deal like that.

So, the service was great, and distinctive.

The chips were very good.

The sausages were good.

And the fish was the best I’ve had in years with big, fresh, tasty flakes. I think I’ll polish up the word “superb” for this review – I don’t often use it but it seems appropriate today.

So remember – The Trawler’s Catch, Saxmundham for superb cod and chips.

 

 

 

Sun, Sea and Sand. And Sunburn.

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I’m sitting here with several hundred photographs and experiencing that warm glow well known to bald men who forget their sun hats in the middle of a heatwave. It’s quite sore at the moment, though it’s nothing like it has been for the last few days. I never knew that my scalp flexed so much until it became painful to move.

In just a few hours I returned to a simpler time, to an era when sun wasn’t linked to skin cancer, and I was a carefree youth. I spent a week walking around Norfolk in 1976 and lost the skin off my back and shoulders. Since then I have been more careful – until I hit my second childhood this week. Anyone who is familiar with Swan Vestas will be able to imagine what I look like. (If you aren’t familiar, they are matches with pale stems and bright red heads).

We just had a few days in East Anglia. I’ve been taking more exercise than usual and getting more sleep so despite having plenty of material to write about I’ve not done much. Sorry about. When I eventually change the name of the blog I’m considering The Lazy Blogger as a title. It’s not only an accurate title but it’s pretty close to what Julia calls me all the time.

Landguard Point, Felixstowe
Southwold Pier
Southwold Pier
Southwold Pier
Britannia Pier, Great Yarmouth

I’m just getting back into my stride – it was the sort of holiday you need a holiday to recover from. Seven piers, two forts and a nature reserve don’t see themselves. I also had to consume two lots of haddock and chips and a cream tea for the purposes of research. Lesser men would have wilted under the pressure. I merely whined a little.

All will be revealed in due course.

For now I offer a selection of photographs of Julia in holiday mood.

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Bempton Part III – or Scarborough as it is better known…

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Well, you can’t go to Bempton without having fish and chips can you?

We did have an Eccles cake with a cup of tea before leaving Bempton though, that walking stuff can be quite demanding when you don’t have all the right gear. It also gave us time to look at the Tree Sparrows. House Sparrows are in decline, but the Tree Sparrow is doing even worse – you rarely see them these days unless you are at an RSPB feeding station.

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Tree Sparrows at Bempton

Once in Scarborough I took some pictures of the castle. That reminded me of the last time it saw action – 16th December 1914. Not bad for a place that was originally built as a signal station by the Romans in the fourth or fifth century.  It was, according the write-up, a favourite place for King John to stay. Richard III was the last King to stay there and it held out for Henry VIII during the Pilgrimage of Grace. Finally, it was reduced to wreckage by a Parliamentary siege in 1645. The Royalists produced siege coins.

I didn’t need to mention siege coins, but I find them quite interesting, and if I can’t ramble in my own blog where can I ramble?

I expereimented with the camera settings. Some are quite subtle. One isn’t.

Scarborough Castle, Yorkshire
Scarborough Castle, Yorkshire
Scarborough Castle, Yorkshire
Scarborough Castle, Yorkshire

After that it sort of pottered around crumbling and, by 1914, hosting a Coastguard Station.

That day in 1914 two German Battleships emerged from the early morning mist and opened fire. Five hundred shells were fired, eighteen people killed. It could have been a lot worse, though not for the eighteen and their families.

There is a list here, if you are interested.

A U-Boat shelled the town in September 1917, but that is hardly ever mentioned. Three people were killed and five injured. Compared to some of the air raids happening at the time, killing 836 and wounding 1,982 in a 12 month period, the submarine raid was almost inconsequential. These were aeroplane raids, the Zeppelins having sustained too many losses to continue, but not before killing 557 and injuring another 1,358.

Sorry about all the stats and death, but after reading John Knifton’s posts on aircraft crashes and Clare Pooley’s mention of wartime damage to Bungay church, I’ve started thinking how violent history has been in some parts of the country.

Here are a few other photographs – a police box, a sea mine and a ship that went to Dunkirk. Violence, always violence…

(Near the lighthouse there’s a Vickers 13 pounder Naval Gun, the Naval version of the field gun the Royal Horse Artillery uses for firing salutes at state occassions. This one was raised from the wreck of the Hornsund in 1982, 65 years after it was torpedoed. I admit, I didn’t want to walk the extra distance to the far end of the harbour.)

It was a hard life in the Merchant Navy.

And that, apart from buying some cheap reading glasses and photographing a gull, was the end of the day.

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Nouvelle Cuisine and the NHS

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Yes, I was admitted, I was (finally) operated on and the food was good.

You can’t tell from the picture, but the chips were nice, the peas were tasty and the fish was excellent in its crispy coat.

However, it wasn’t large. There’s a lot of space on that small plate. Look at the fork for scale. When they uncovered it I didn’t know whether it was a starter or a cruel hoax.

Remember that I’m using my phone for taking this picture and the perspective is distorted. The chips were just average size, and there were only five of them.