Tag Archives: lie in

Wednesday – the New Saturday

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Didn’t set the alarm last night – slept until 8.30, which was nice. Felt rested when I got up, which was unusual.

Baked eggs for breakfast with bacon, spring onions, cheese and black pepper. We didn’t have a delivery last week as we were out on Thursday night, so we are living off what we have. Now that the panic buying is over, Brexit is done and there are no shortages, we are working our way through the tinned tomatoes and beans. Another week or two should see us nearly done, then I will start laying in a properly planned food and toilet roll reserve. After all, just because there is nothing on the horizon it doesn’t men that there won’t be a plague, zombie apocalypse or meteor strike tomorrow…One growing trend we see in the shop is people buying silver and gold, particularly silver, because they fear for future instability. To be fair, these are people who, in general, also believe that covid is a government plot, vaccination is bad and that Bitcoin is as good as real money.

My view is that gold is a good long term investment, silver is a good, but less stable, investment and that Bitcoin is made up and is similar to the Emperor’s new clothes – as soon as someone catches a cold and finds it is all made up, the whole thing will collapse. Some people will have made big money from the credulity of others and millions of people will have financed the 21st century equivalent of the South Sea Bubble.

Vaccination, covid and Government plots are topics for another time. It’s Wednesday, which is my equivalent of the weekend, and I have things to do, which include being cheerful, ordering groceries on the internet and, of course, submitting more poetry. But first I must do the washing up. Julia has gone to get her hair done and was quite clear on me not sitting at the computer all morning.

Meanderings

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I started the day with a clear plan. So far I have had a bacon sandwich and three cups of tea, replied to comments, written a haibun prose section (which came to me as I was outing my socks on) and caught with paosoren, a wide-ranging blog relating to Australia. I now know a lot more about poisonous caterpillars and slouch hats than I used to. The plan had also encompassed reading more blogs, but I’ve had to shelve that. It’s mid-day already and it doesn’t seem to be much to show for a morning’s work. Of course, as the “morning” started at 9.45, I can’t expect too much. It could have started at 6.45, but after looking at the clock and thinking for a few minutes I decided that 6.45 was too early to start on Sunday.  Even if I had got up at that time I would probably have fallen asleep later in the day, so I wouldn’t have gained much.

I didn’t exactly cover myself in glory regarding the wakefulness front last night. After posting, I went and watched the last half of a programme about Victoria Wood. As Julia decided to go to bed when it finished, I used the “plus one” channel to watch it from the beginning again. Unfortunately I only manged to get part way through before falling asleep. As a consequence, the middle years of her career are still a mystery to me.

It was interesting to find that she was a hard-working perfectionist who said that lots of people could do what she did. This reinforces my belief in hard work and determination being the way forward. It’s a shame I wasted most of my life thinking you needed talent to be successful. That, it appears, is just the icing on the cake. The ability to be successful without having talent certainly explains a lot of things I have seen on TV over the years.

Daffodils in Nottingham

Nearly 1.00 now and time to make lunch. I’m not entirely sure what it’s going to be, but I have a few minutes to think. After my disastrous failure to order the groceries online, we are a little short of provisions this week.  However, we have beans. We have bread. If I was in the habit of representing my menu choices diagrammatically the intersection would be beans on toast.

The picture of a Herring Gull perching on the head of the Cook statue at Whitby can be taken as a metaphor for our history of colonialism. Or it might just be that I was looking for a bird photograph that didn’t have a robin in it.

That was taken in April 2017. The daffodils are from April 2018 and the Magpie from April 2019. \by April 2020 the photos are all downloaded from the Library, or feature food and eBay purchases. I haven’t been getting out much.

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Birds, Breakfast and Books

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We weren’t quite sure what to do this morning, so we turned over and went back to sleep. By the time we awoke, blogged, ate a slice of toast with Frank Cooper’s Oxford Marmalade and stepped outside, the frost had melted from the car and the birds were singing. We appear to have several Great Tits in the garden and I feel that avian romance is in the air.

First call was breakfast at Sainsbury’s, but I’ve covered that before. It was good today. I’ve scored it so that you can compare them, but it would feel like cheating to do a full write up again.

Portion size – good

Sausages – excellent and herby

Hash Browns – crispy and delicious

Beans – average, after all opening a can and heating beans is not a skilled job

Mushroom – excellent

Toast – average, another unskilled job that is difficult to do badly

Eggs – excellent to the point of “almost perfect”. Much better than last time.

Bacon – succulent, thickish and almost perfect.

Service and cleanliness were also better than last time.

After that we went shopping at theEast Midlands Designer Outlet. It wasn’t too crowded, though the shops aren’t that exciting, a bit of a re-run of our recent Springfields visit.

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East Midlands Designer Outlet – though it could be anywhere

We went to a few shops – Julia bought some new slipper socks, some bedsocks and some new socks for me. It was a sock sort of day. These were the only things she could find of interest in M&S. Her slipper socks are pink and white hoops with a gold thread in them. I remarked that they were rather girly and would look good in a disco. This view was received coldly as she pointed out that they were the only pair left.

In The Works I asked if they would be getting more stock in soon as I had yet again failed to find three books for the 3 for £5 deal. The assistant positively looked down her nose at me and informed me they had a good selection that was replenished weekly. I begged to disagree and we left it there. She looked offended and I felt patronised.

I’ve been to five of their outlets recently. In one I failed to buy a book. In one the covers are curling up because of damp. In two I have failed to buy three books for the deal.

It’s getting to a stage where I might as well buy off the internet – there are some really cheap deals out there on books I actually want.

We had coffee too, but that is a different post.

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East Midlands Designer Outlet – though it could be anywhere

 

 

A Restful Sunday

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I’m struggling to find anything to talk about.

I could talk about my new resolution to alter my entire life after watching Ninja Warriors. However, I would be wasting your time, as I think we all know by now that my resolutions rarely survive the week. Often they don’t actually survive a good night’s sleep.

This week I’ve developed a new way of amusing myself. As I’ve addressed envelopes to send off eBay parcels I’ve been looking the addresses up on Google. It’s very interesting seeing where people live, though I’ve only actually done it twice as it isn’t what I’m paid for, and it’s also a bit creepy.

However, it will probably form another part of the projected novel about the antique dealer and the mummy in the basement. I looked up references to mummies for sale last week – I didn’t find any but I did find an article about artifact smuggling.

There was a mummified head for sale on one site (5,000 Euros if you are interested) and a hand, complete with red nails, on another. I suppose you could build your own from bits if you had the time. I can’t find the links I need for the body parts but here is a link to an interesting auction.

I’m not quite sure where the novel is going, probably nowhere, but if it has antiques and mummies in it then it is off too a good start. I’m going to site the antique shop next to a cake shop and give them a customer who works in a quarry and has access to explosives. That, I think, covers the basics.

Having just eaten a slice of insipid cheesecake I may make the neighbour a cheesecake shop and indulge in some hard-hitting satire on flavourless food.

Anyway, that’s about all for now. Nothing much happened but Julia took the day off after her recent Mediterranean exertions (she describes Malta as being “all uphill”) so we didn’t have to get up at 5 am. It can’t be a bad day when that happens.

The daisy was one I took last week, but there are a lot about in the grass verges at the moment so I thought I’d use it again.

 

No Snow!

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After a day of lying in, with the covers pulled up to my chin and the polar weather well and truly ignored, I rose to find things were considerably less snowy than when I’d gone to bed.

In fact, after all the hype, and all my moaning most of it had gone.

I then went shopping, took a few photos, moaned internally about idiots in TESCO and spent too much on groceries. I could go into greater detail about the idiots in TESCO as there was a particularly fine crop today, including one wearing a Bluetooth headset.

It bears repeating, and I have repeated it, I confess, that there is little difference between someone talking to a Bluetooth headset and someone talking to themselves in the manner of a burbling idiot.

There were also several sets of giggling girls and even one fully grown woman who seemed to be letting her sense of humour gain the upper hand. I checked my clothing for malfunctions and comic notes but couldn’t find anything so can only assume there is something hysterically funny about shopping. I’ve never noticed it myself, but it takes all sorts.

After that it was off to pick Julia up and watch a BMW getting stuck in a very small patch of snow. I’d gone through the patch without really noticing it, turned round and parked ready to pick Julia up. The BMW followed a short while after and spent some time spinning his wheels before reversing and trying again.

 

It is so tempting to be sarcastic here – but I’m better than that. Oh yes, I am.

In the evening I had another senior moment. I selected potatoes for baking, pricked the skins, put them in the oven and went to watch TV with Julia. If only I’d switched the oven on…

What a difference a day makes...

What a difference a day makes…

The news says it’s going to freeze overnight, so it’s fortunate that there isn’t much snow left. That and the two kilos of salt I put down outside the house should prevent too many problems.

 

A New Theory of Relativity

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This morning Julia’s alarm, as usual, went off shortly before mine. They are both on our telephones, which are presumably;y linked to an atomic clock somewhere,  so I’m at a loss to explain the difference. My car clock is set from my watch, which I keep two minutes fast,and it agrees with neither phone.

In the days before mobiles we had a time signal on the radio, and everyone seemed to take punctuality more seriously.

So, having had a disturbed night lay there waiting to fall asleep again. This half hour delay allows her to use the bathroom without feeling hassled and allows me to avoid making breakfast. This is either the mark of a caring husband, or a lazy sluggard. I have censored her actually words, but the last three letters are the same. In another example of relativity I prefer not to subject my readers  to profanity.

Anyway, back to the relativity of time. Normally I fall asleep for my extra half hour. Today I didn’t. It seemed to drag on forever. I started to wonder if I’d been in such a deep sleep that Julia had left without me. But no, When I checked my alarm the “hours” had passed in 23 minutes. The remaining seven minutes also dragged…

Normally I’d love an extra half hour in bed. This morning, mainly because we are resisting the use of heating, I decided to tough it out under the duvet as luxury turned into an endurance test.

And that, if I may be so bold, is my Theory of Very Ordinary Relativity. It’s not about things like time travel, or time moving slower at the tops of high buildings. If it was I’m sure that geriatric scientists would live in tower block, not bungalows.

It’s about very ordinary things, like not all time being of equal value and a week on holiday passing quicker than a week at work.

Unless (a) your wife starts worrying about whether she locked the door properly, or (b), you are spending it in Berwick-on- Tweed. But that is another story.