Tag Archives: memories

Carrot & Ginger Soup

Prestige Pans to Thunderbird Wine

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Julia has gone to the gym. It is the final day she will be able to use her membership and she has decided to treat herself to a run and a sauna. I have been left at home with the washing up and the preparation of lunch. So far I have researched an article, done most of the washing up, thought about soup and started to write a blog.  It’s close to the plan she had in mind for me, but probably not close enough. However, compared to doing a couple of miles on a treadmill followed by lightly boiling myself, I prefer my morning to hers.

Over the next few weeks we are expecting several more deliveries as we squander our pensions on comfort, including a second new bed, a new freezer and various other fripperies.

vegetable Soup

Meanwhile, there is little to say. We are gradually packing 35 years of memories/clutter and dispersing it to bins, charity shops and (mainly) to the new house. There is going to be another sorting when we get there. I have already started going through my books again and the ktchen equipment is building up. My pans are nearly 50 years old. They are Prestige copper-bottomed pans but the years have made their mark and we were recently offered a newer, similar set. Then we were offered three more pans. I accepted one lot, not knowing that Julia had accepted the others. The same goes for many things – we have accumulated things over the years, some of which were stored upstairs or in the garage. It’s hard to turn things down. We have six corkscrews now we have sorted them all out.  Nobody needs more than three (one to use, one as a spare and one for the picnic basket).

In fact, nobody needs corkscrews anyway, as a lot of wine seems to come with screw tops. It’s one more sign of falling standards. There was a time when only Buckfast and Thunderbird came with screw tops and they were not the choice of the sophisticated social drinker.

And there you go – memories. I started with clutter and moved ont to my mis-spent youth. Now, before Julia arrives, I’d better get on with doing something useful and terminates my mis-spent dotage.

Carrot & Ginger Soup

Carrot & Ginger Soup

Photos feature pans. It’s the best I could do.

Now it’s really time to declutter

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Stack of books burning

I started clearing my desk yesterday. It is more of an art installation than a usable desk these days, and something has to go. Well, a lot has to go. The ice cream wrapper from two days ago was easy, as  were the notes made on the backs of envelopes, but some things were harder to get rid of. All my poetry notes, for instance. Siegfried Sassoon’s papers were purchased by Cambridge University with the help of a £550,000 grant. I note that they contained financial papers and postcards – I could do that. I still have insurance papers relating to my Vespa and I certainly have postcards. I’m a little light on diaries written in the trenches (still with original mud) and letters from famous writers, but anyone who wants to wave £50 in my direction can have several box loads of my papers. Buyer collects.

I think it might have been Maya Angelou who never threw any notes out in case she needed them later. Unfortunately I can’t find any mention of it to post a link. That might be because it wasn’t her, so don’t quote me on this. I thought I should keep all my notes too, as they may contain something useful. I’ve been back to them looking for inspiration, but I cannot understand half my notes and I can’t read most of my own writing, so it’s a complete waste of time. I have books of poetry and notes that take up room and gather dust, but they are no use at all in creative terms. They will be going out this week.

Moustaches! Why don’t they just grow beards? The kids that is, not Julia. Best to be clear about that.

There are five, or six, or seven, or ten things you should never throw out when decluttering. It all depends on whether the writer of click bait ism being paid by the piece or by the word. It all boils down to this – you shouldn’t throw away important documents. The rest of the stuff, I feel, can go. Would you go back into a burning building to save pictures drawn by your unartistic children, or a collection of half-used ballpoint pens, or a selection of baby teeth? No? Well you can probably do without them.

I have the memories. so I don’t need the photos. When I lose my memories, I won’t be able to identify the people in the photographs anyway. We are, after all, just dust in the wind, and very little will remain of us after we go, apart from the memories of others and our blogs. And even they will eventually depixelate, or whatever old blogs do.

A man with time on his hands and buttons on his camera, is never short of something to do. It’s a bit like monkeys, typewriters and Shakespeare, but not as highly evolved.

I Remembered!

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Julia takes Christmas more seriously than I do

I remembered what I couldn’t remember yesterday. I had a text in the morning telling me that they surgery had cancelled my blood test at short notice. This was annoying fo  number of reasons, including that I am already a week late after working Wednesday last week. My appointment had been for 8.20 (which wouldn’t have been my first choice to be honest) and they had no more appointments that day. So, feeling pessimistic, I rang the surgery to reschedule. I was number four in the queue, then three then two, then one . . .

Whoever was in front of me took ages. They must have been asking something very complicated. I stayed at Number One in the queue . . .

. . . and waited . . .

. . . and tried to keep cheerful whilst waiting, and as the tinny music played . . .

. . . and got through.

I was cheerful and polite and came away with an appointment for 11.40 this morning. It seemed they did have another appointment today after all, and at a much more convenient time.

Christmas in a Tin? See above.

As a result, I was able to stay in bed until 9.00 (clutching the new tartan duvet around my ears) and have bacon sandwich before pottering off, yielding blood at the second attempt and returning home.

I hve thoroughly enjoyed my day so far. It’s  little cold, and the screen was still iced up at 11.20 but  apart from that all is good.

I’ve also found my methotrexate tablets. I’ve missed a week and that really makes a difference in winter, but I found some when looking through my bag. At first I thought they were the ones I knew I had lost, but they aren’t, because the box is different. These are not the ones I know I have lost, these must be the ones that puzzled me a few months ago when I ran out unexpectedly. I must have taken them away with me when we went to Norfolk.

A Quercus Christmas

I am going to have to introduce a memory support system where I  use one big box for tablets, keep a diary and, as Derrick suggested, photograph stuff to remind me.

This, in answer to a question I asked earlier in the week, is when I admit I am getting old.

Imperfection is the essence of a handmade Christmas. I refer, of course, to the wreath rather than Julia, who.like Mary Poppins, is practically perfect in every way. I pointed out that she looks very young in this photo. She pointed out that since this picture was taken she has had to put up with me for another eight years.

All Our Novembers

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November 2014 and ready for Christmas in seasonal headwear. The red hats were gifts from someone who had a lot left over from a promotion. We were never too proud to accept a freebie.

November 2015 – Men in Sheds. Don’t blame me for the Health and Safety, I’m just the photographer. Nobody was actually blinded or set on fire, just in case you were wondering.

November 2016. The report from the Woodland Trust using the data we had gathered for them. We did do some useful stuff, apart from ll the fun.

Nest boxes in two different states of completion

November 2017, and Julia mobilised the MENCAP gardeners to start making nest boxes. One of the Men in Sheds cut the pieces for her and the gardeners put them together and decorated them. They were sold at the Christmas Fair to raise money for seed and a number of them have successfully raised families.

 

November 2018 and the dark nights allow me to take pictures of sunsets when I arrive home from work. There’s not much to say. I am now established as a shop assistant and am a regular at the Numismatic Society of Nottinghamshire. It looks like old age has caught up with me at last.

 

November 2019. We spend our Wednesday visiting a Garden Centre near Lincoln. We had tea and scones in what appeared to be a converted wartime hut and then I took pictures of a desolate lake. I thought you might prefer the tea and scone picture.

 

November 2020. One of our customers had a card like this saying “Clinically Exempt” which he used to claim he didn’t need to wear a mask. The cards were not official, they were sold by a charity. It cost me £2 to get this one, which I used to show to people who claimed they didn’t need to wear a mask, telling them that I did need them to wear a mask.  The customer paid £6.99 for his, buying from someone on eBay who was buying from the charity and then selling them on. Just a little Covid anecdote for you.

 

November 2021. The picture is a Scottish Communion Token from a collection we bought in the shop. They were used in the 19th Century to control who was considered suitable to take communion, which gave the church quite a lot of control over the lives of the parishioners. The Scottish side of my family left Annan in about 1870. Family history says it was to do with an argument in the Church. One of my relatives may well have handled this token. They settled in Blackburn, which was a cotton weaving boom town at that time.

The few pictures I now have shows just how my world has shrunk since Covid.

November 2022, Another shop picture. This is sometimes called a smuggler’s box, though I don’t think you would smuggle much in a hollowed out Cartwheel Tuppence. They are also said to have been used for smuggling messages by spies. Again, unlikely. It’s more likely to be someone showing off their skills with machine tools. Coin is dated 1797. They all are, so I don’t need a readable date. It’s so worn it was quite possibly not hollowed out until half a century later. I don’t think they did much smuggling then, and spying had advanced to use invisible ink by then.

November 2023. I’ve been poorly, so all the photos I have for November are the three Julia sent me from Cromer. I really must sort my life out.

 

 

Emails, Memories and my First Haibun

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I’ve been searching in my emails. I have a lot of them, dating back to, 2010. They hold details of junior rugby fixtures, excuses from parents and troubles with booking referees. I kept some because they were important at the time, or because I was annoyed by them or, in most cases, because I have always been too lazy to keep control of my emails. There are mails from people who are now dead, people who I didn’t like, and people I don’t remember. Which, I wonder, is better – dead, disliked, forgotten? I don’t know why I still keep them. Last night I have dumped over 300, It is going to be a long job . . .

As I sort, memories return. Pompous nonentities carving out an empire when they should have been helping the kids, excuses for failing to help with catering, complaints about team selection. Even now, my head is filling with the discussions we used to have and all the old frustrations are starting to rise to the surface. Some of the memories are as irksome and stressful as the actual events were at the time and I am amazed at my capacity to harbour resentment.

I note the way the emails change from rugby to the farm, to poetry as my life progresses. I was looking for a poetry email, and after finding that I went on to browse. I found, to my amazement, that it is five years this month that I sent off my first Haibun to an online journal. Time soon passes.

It’s a hornet-mimicking hoverfly – Volucella inanis. To be fair, it’s more like a wasp. Common name is Wasp Plumehorn but a lot of people stick with the Latin.

So much has changed. I used to keep a folder of all my successes, a trick I learned from my father-in-law. I still have it somewhere but once acceptance becomes a regular thing you don’t need the folder to boost your confidence. In my case I still worry about becoming an overnight failure, but the submission process has become automatic, regardless of success or failure. I can still be cast down by  rejection, but it only lasts ten minutes these days. The imposter syndrome, however, persists. Michael Parkinson suffered from it too. It doesn’t get mentioned in his obituary  but his son has mentioned it in recent interviews. That tends to put things into perspective.

The folder of published work is something I must start doing again, as I have lost track of some things, as I said a few days ago.

Always more admin . . .

Late Summer is a time for Wasps

Day 150

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Californian Poppies

Today, I am going to rush through my 250 words and then get on with something else. I only realised this morning, with a shock, that it is the last day of May and I have submissions to make before midnight. Having been caught up at work this evening, then slept in front of the TV I find myself a little short on time.

This afternoon was interesting. We left work at 4.00 and locked the shop. My workmate exchanged a few words with an elderly gent and walked away. The man then came to me. I smiled in a warm and friendly manner, expecting some comment on our opening hours. Instead he said, “I need help, please can you help me?”

It was the start of a series of events that lasted for over an hour. That’s not long in terms of a lifetime, but it’s quit a long time to be involved in the problems of a complete stranger.

Wren

His problem was that he had been dropped off by a taxi driver. He didn’t know where he was or where he was going (apart from the fact it was a hospital). He had no money, no phone and no ID. All this came out in the course of our conversation. He wasn’t quite sure how old he was – late 80s – but the age and DOB he gave didn’t match up, and there was nobody at home we could ring because his partner was in hospital and was expecting him to visit. He was a touch confused, though he seemed o know his name and address, and had not shaved recently or had the benefit of clean clothes. This was not a man for whom things were going well, and in some respects, it was like looking in a mirror.

It was also a nudge into a memory that I don’t really like. About 40 years ago I saw a confused elderly man hit by a car as he tried to cross the M11 motorway near Cambridge. He went flying through the air, and when I attended the inquest the events of that afternoon had clearly placed a great strain on both the car driver and the wife of the deceased. I wasn’t going to let him wander off, but there wasn’t  a lot I could do to help him either.

Gannets

In the end I had to ring the police and wait until an officer turned up to attend to him. She was very friendly and efficient, and asked all the right questions and took him home, where she was going to check with the neighbours and see what was happening. I will probably hear no more about the story, and will always wonder how things turned out but, in the manner of these things, I suspect it is the start of a change in his life that will not be to his advantage. I hope he has a family and that they gather round to help.

And on that sombre note I will leave you and go to finish my submissions for the month. I am going to make the most of my brain while it is still working. Not sure what photographs I am going to post with this, I will try for something cheerful.

Yellow Flag Iris

Rebus and Marillion and the Passing of Time

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Where to start? As usual i have a lot to say and a feeling that much of it is boring. So I will cut out what I was going to say about the Inspector Rebus stories on TV and go straight to Marillion.  Their song Kayleigh was played on the pop quiz earlier in the evening and, as ever, took me back to an earlier place in my life. That was probably what induced me to watch Rebus, despite my opinion that John Hannah as Rebus is one of the worst casting choices of all time. Great actor, great character, but put them together and it didn’t work. And then, the dodgy club owner came to the screen. I thought “He’s familiar.” and he was. It was the singer better known as Fish, who wrote and sang sang Kayleigh before leaving Marillion for a career of solo work and acting.

I’ve always, by the way, thought that singers with nicknames, are a touch pretentious. This probably seems a little unfair from a blogger known as Quercus, but it seems to happen on wordPress – we end up being known by others by nicknames relating to our blog titles. That never seems pretentious. However, in fairness, they are nicknames given by others, not ones we give ourselves.  I am now going to quote Fish on the subject of his nickname. I do see his point, and probably forgive him.

“With a real name of Derek William Dick, it became very necessary to find a nickname as quickly as possible.”

Yes, I can see that, though it could have been worse. We had an Andrew Dick at school, or A Dick, as he used to appear on lists.  It must have all been rather wearing for him after a while, because the humour displayed by children between the ages of 11 and 18 is neither subtle nor varied. To be fair, mine hasn’t really move on much since then.

Do you ever get those days when something takes you back in time?

Scone Chronicles – 34

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This time it’s a hot pork sandwich.

We didn’t want much for lunch, having had a scone for elevenses, so before setting off home after our day in Derbyshire (the one last week, not this week) we did some thinking.

There were several places to purchase chips, but that seemed a bit much. There were other choices nearby, but I was  feeling lazy. So, something light, and something where we didn’t have to move far.

We happened to be standing just yards from the Bakewell Pudding Parlour. I’ve had the hot pork sandwich before. We’ve also had the macaroons and other things from there, which always helps – it’s good to buy from places you trust.

View from our table
Hot pork sandwicjh
The empty “plate”

And that is what happened.

We had the hot pork sandwich with stuffing and apple sauce and we ate it outside, where they provide chairs and tables. We weren’t only ones to sit out, so it must be a sign that spring is coming. It also gave me chance to watch dog owners talking to each other and to take a photograph of yet another padlock.

A small padlock
A large padlock

It’s a good-sized sandwich, and with hindsight was probably a bit bigger than I really needed. There was plenty of pork and reasonable amount of stuffing. The apple was a bit runny.

All in all, not quite as good as it could have been, and probably not one I’d repeat. However, I will still go there for other food, as I do like it, and I like eating whilst watching people walk past.

Before Derrick jumps in to tell you that you can’t beat the pork cobs in Newark market place, I am going to provide you with that information, as it is true.. Their pork is more succulent, and everything else is just a bit better. And they give you crackling.

With my teeth that’s a bit like Russian Roulette, but don’t you love a nice bit of pork crackling? Or is that just me?

So if you ever find yourself in Newark – Nottinghamshire, not New Jersey – give it a try.

Five Years on WordPress

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According to WordPress it is now five years since I first registered with them. This was a surprise as I always thought that I’d started in October. It seems that it took me nearly two weeks to get the first post written.

When you read the first post this is even more of a surprise, as it doesn’t seem to have the polish you’d expect from something that took two weeks to write. In fact it looks like I just threw a pile of words at the screen and took a very bad photograph. This has remained my technique throughout the five years.

 

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

A bad photograph of guinea fowl . The start of a proud tradition of average photography

 

The whole blog is, in fact, a log-jam of typos, false starts and broken promises.

 

This is a better photograph. It’s a salad of weeds and edible flowers

The post which featured this salad was the third and things were getting better. This plate of f floral delights was unequal to the weight of health and safety wielded by one of the visiting Guide officers. She was determined to make everything difficult and, as I remember, her first complaint was that people were shooting on the fields and I should have known better than to allow it when sweet delicate Rainbows were going to be on the farm.

They were 200 yards away and the way the farm shoot was run were unlikely to be achieving much in the way of slaughter.

Anyway, if you’ve ever had to host a visit from any scouting/guiding group you will know as well as I do that it’s the closest you can get to being a lion tamer, now that we are no longer allowed real lions in circuses.

And Rainbows, being the youngest and squeakiest of the lot, add sonic weaponry to the horror of the day.

A brief read  will soon show you that I haven’t really developed over the years – five years ago I was idle, overweight and out of tune with modern life, and nothing has changed.

The featured image is another robin. I’m thinking of running a series of lookalike photos, under the title “Nugget or No-get?”

Those of you who are currently looking bemused and wondering what I’m talking about should probably have a look at this post by Derrick Knight. It’s a typically elegant Derrick post with wine, women and song (represented by wine, Mrs Knight and a film) and a robin called Nugget. You’ll have to scroll down a bit for Nugget as Derrick is more industrious than I am and tends to write more. (This entire post, in case you hadn’t noticed, is about reusing old posts and photographs. Laziness, I feel, never goes out of fashion.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thoughts about Water

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It’s been wet for several days and there has been standing water on the roads. It’s been drier today and things are getting back to normal. This is a relief as my joints have been a bit creaky and I’m wondering if this is caused by the damp.

In many ways it is more like November than June. I remember a summer like this before. I must have been about twelve at the time and the mental picture of me staring out of a window at rain for an entire summer holiday is still with me. It has haunted me for years. The sense of loss, and being cheated out of six weeks of holiday, must have been really strong for me still to remember it so clearly.

Apart from that there is little I can think of to write about. Rain is not a terribly interesting subject, though if, due to the magic of WordPress, you are reading this in the middle of a drought, I can only apologise for my insensitivity.

I tend to stay off politics and other contentious subjects, as I don’t want to offend people, but I’ve only just thought of water in this context. It’s obvious really, when you think that the next series of World Wars, if we escape annihilation over religion, is likely to be over water. I have read that the Nile is likely to be a source of problems, and that the Portuguese are concerned with the way the Spanish are using all the water on the Iberian Peninsula.

When you have massive salad crops, as the Spanish do, you need water. Personally, I’d solve that one by banning lettuce, but you know how I feel about salad.

This is what happens when you mess with nature. Spain should stick to growing olives and grapes and we should stick to eating salads only in summer. In summer they are a necessary evil; in winter they are self-indulgent and wrecking the planet.

At last! I have found moral high ground concerning salad!

Normally I try to limit myself to one exclamation mark a day, but I think this discovery merits two.