Tag Archives: poor summer

Bad Start to the Day but Things are Looking Up

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I unwillingly made my way downstairs this morning. Though I had an ambition to do some work, I had a conflicting ambition – I would have quite liked to stay warm in bed. It was a chilly night. This summer is taking me back to the summers of the late 60s and early 70s. I remember that some of them were quite poor, and all the talk at that time was about climate cycles and a new Ice Age. How things change.

It started badly in the kitchen when I tore a pair of  teabags apart to make myself a cup of tea. One tore and released a cloud of tea powder all over the floor. This is doubly depressing – a whole teabag wasted, and its contents revealed to be a long way from the lovely tea leaves of my youth. I always joke about the contents of teabags being low quality floor sweepings, but what I saw today seems to confirm that.

Broccoli Soup taken on “Food” setting

I’m probably wrong. I’m sure that tea merchants across the world will tell me they use the best ingredients in their teabags, but it just looked depressing.

I have just made broccoli soup, as you can probably guess from the pictures. It came out quite green compared to the yellowing florets that actually went into the pot. The Food setting on the camera didn’t do it justice this time, I had to use the Landscape setting. That enhances green but the soup is still actually greener in real life than it is in the pictures. I may go back to photographing flowers. At least the colour rendition is accurate.

I used a stock cube today, as Julia complained about the lack of seasoning in last night’s pasta bake. As a result, the soup tastes quite salty. This is annoying. After 30 years of not using salt in cooking I have grown quite sensitive to salt in things like this. In general though, it tastes quite good and I am about to have it for lunch.

Pale grey version

 

Almost off white

Once again, the camera fails to render the colour accurately.

 

An Unsummery Start to the Day

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It’s approaching 8.00am and I would normally be leaving the house, but today being a day off, I am typing. I waved my car off at 7.05, as the garage collected it and I now have a day to type and worry about the size of the car bill. I’m hungry but I can’t cook yet as Julia is having a lie in and if I cook the smell will make her want to get up and come down for breakfast. All in all, it’s a messy start to the day.

I’m very tempted by the idea of baked eggs, but I find they work best if kept simple, and as I also fancy the idea of bacon I’m in two minds about what to do.

The prospect through my writing window, is grey. If you told me this was March or November, I would believe you. Apart from the temperature, which is chilly but not actually cold, things are definitely unsummery. That should be a word – meaning disappointingly unlike summer, but not quite bad enough to put a jacket on.  “Typical English summer” is often used in this context, meaning that it’s a disappointingly dull period where sunburn is a distant prospect, even for a nation of people who are inclined to expose too much blue/white flesh to the elements. The average English sunbather isn’t so much protected by sun oil as basted. There’s something about sunbathing Brits that always makes me think of pork crackling.

Note I am referring mainly to the English here, the Scots, according to popular belief, are even more delicate in matters of sun, and the Welsh exist in a semi-permanent miasma of mist and rain.

This, by the way, is my default setting. Leave any chimpanzee alone with a word-processor and they will eventually write Hamlet (or so they say). Leave the English alone with a keyboard and the topic soon turns to the weather . . .

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.