A Culinary Revelation

I should be a gourmet chef 👨‍🍳 for I have had revealed unto me the perfect afternoon snack. 

I don’t eat at lunchtime, so, by mid-afternoon, I’m often a tad peckish. I began, therefore, to have a couple of buttered crumpets* at around three o’clock. (Yes, I know that sounds like a sexual deviation, so stop sniggering, Year 7.)  

In the fullness of time, they became, frankly, a little boring, so I started to spread Marmite on them. Marmite was a definite improvement for a while, but then, inevitably, it ceased to float my boat. 

Consequently, I changed over to using Seriously cheese spread instead. That worked until my tastebuds decided that even the stronger version was rather bland.

And so it came to pass that, upon a day, I was faced with a dilemma: Marmite or Seriously? That was the question.

’Twas then the fire 🔥 from heaven descended and a voice, as from a mighty rushing wind, spoke to me in many tongues.  (Sadly, there weren’t any Medes or Elamites about, so some of the tongues were rather redundant, but I tuned in to the English one regardless.)

“Tony,” the voice boomed, “why not have both?” 

I tried the two together and lo! it was perfection. The world 🌍 was never to be the same again.

Thus, it was in this wise that the revelation of the best-afternoon-snack-ever took place in my humble kitchen. 

Deo gratias!

The Road to Hell…

So much for my intention to update my blog and writing regularly. I see it’s been over a month since I last checked in. Sometimes life just gets in the way, however good our intentions are. 

Anyways, it’s been a funny/peculiar time. The lovely weather we’ve been enjoying has allowed me to tackle a number of jobs in the garden and to start clearing the garage. The latter is a massive  task because there are boxes in there which haven’t been unpacked since we moved into this house twenty-five years ago. Consequently, I called the local scrap dealer and he came to take away what he wanted. Foolishly, I decided to help. 

Many of you will know the outcome from my FB posts. With my hands full of ‘any old iron‘, I tripped over a brick and used my face to break my fall onto a slab of stone. Much bleeding and general disorientation followed. There followed a long saga of a trip to A&E. I won’t bore you with the details, but, fan of the NHS that I am, let us just say I didn’t see the service at its best. Luckily, I hadn’t broken anything, though my teeth had done a good job shredding my lips. They are still being slightly troublesome, but otherwise I am now fully recovered.

What was heartening about the experience was the amazing response from friends and acquaintances who weighed in with offers of help. Sometimes my life feels very solitary and lacking in human contact, but it’s great to know that people out there do care. Thank you to you all.

Another awful blow recently was the fact that the church I have worshipped at for nigh on thirty years was vandalised by, it seems, one deranged person. We arrived for choir practice and discovered a trail of devastation. I can’t list everything here, but even the roof spaces were invaded and damaged. Only a few things were stolen, but the chaos left behind was heartbreaking. Not a note was sung that choir practice; the time was used in clearing up as best we could. Totally soul destroying, but we were back in action by the Sunday. 

In a strange twist of fate, a peregrine falcon has come to nest on the church roof. Call me fanciful, but I can’t help feeling that such a noble bird has come to show us that all is not bad with the world.  The local pigeons however may not agree with me.

The time has arrived for my cataracts to be surgically sorted. My right eye is booked in for 5th July.  The left eye will, I hope, be sorted fairly soon thereafter. I shall, of course, be accompanying my eyes to these procedures. Again, a wonderful friend is helping me out with lifts to a lovely hospital which is unfortunately located in what I can only describe as the arse-end of Poole. (To be honest, I could have described it differently, but I somehow felt the phrase was too fitting to pass over.)

That’s probably enough rambling for now. Be back soon, I hope. 😀

This quotation from Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’ was one my mother was wont to use whenever a member of the family yawned loudly, groaned, sneezed or, as Chaucer would have it, ’let flee a fart’.

It was brought to my mind the other day when I suddenly realised that I’ve become very vocal in my old age. Yes, I make all the old man noises to which Billy Connelly alerts us: groaning when rising from a chair, grunting when bending, enhancing each step on a staircase with a loud straining noise. So far, this may seem fairly normal for a man of my age who has never engaged in any way with physical fitness, but this, alas, is just the tip of the iceberg. Nothing physical, it seems, can be done these days without an accompanying sound track.

Lifting anything, no matter how light, is accompanied by the sound of effort expended. Getting into bed (or out of it) gives rise to a whole symphony of sighs, groans and other exhalations. Don’t even ask me about the ‘getting into the shower’ concerto. The list goes on, but I ask you to accept that any physical activity causes pandemonium.

The sound I find myself making most frequently during the day these days is the annoyed grunt. For Homer Simpson, in the scripts, his cries of D’oh! are written as ‘annoyed grunt’. Mine do not sound like his, but are more a wail of outrage. With my advancing years, picking things up off the floor is becoming increasingly challenging. The universe has decreed that if I pick something up, then it will immediately slip from my grasp so I have bend to pick it up again. If I go to put something down, it will straight away find an excuse to slip off wherever I’ve put it and, guess what, fall to the ground. If I try to move something, it will catch on something else and knock that off instead. You get the idea. Ok. My sight is not as acute as in former years, and my paws do tend to shake rather, but my only conclusion is that the universe has it in for me.

Attempting a bit of light DIY the other day, viz. changing the hinges on a kitchen cupboard door, the lack of sensitivity in my fingertips made holding the small screws in place almost impossible. By the thousandth time I’d had to bend and search for the dissenting screw, annoyed grunts were no longer cutting it. To my shame, I reverted to my go-to obscenity to express annoyance: ‘bugger you!’

On that afternoon, the island was indeed full of noises. It’s a good job I live virtually alone. Sure, my son resides with me, but he rarely leaves his room, and has learnt not to pay attention to any tempests that may pass through the house.

All credit to my mother, this island is most definitely full of noises.

[If some of the above feels familiar to you, I stole a small section from a previous Facebook post.]

No, not my own Coronation. I’m sitting here watching King Charles being crowned. (I refuse to use the word ‘coronated’. The BBC seems obsessed by it. Can’t think why. Even if it exists, it’s an incredibly ugly word and a perfectly good alternative exists.) It’s  the first I’ve been able to witness. The music is fabulous and the ceremony striking and well organised. 

My only beef is that the Archbishop keeps stumbling over the words of the Mass. You’d think he’d know them by now. Perhaps even Archbishops get nervous. 

Looking forward to our own Mass tomorrow with some of the same hymns, and we’re singing the Stanford Te Deum to finish the service. Cracking music, Grommet!

I’m walking along the pavement and on the road beside me a minor traffic altercation is taking place. Someone, it seems, has failed to indicate that he’s pulling in. The hampered car drives round the front, slams on its brakes (nearly causing another accident with the car behind) and out leaps a yelling figure pouring out a mouthful of invective which would have made a sergeant major blush. Who is this brute? A young woman of about twenty, good-looking and, one might have assumed up until now, both sweet and innocent.

A car has been clamped in the car park. The clampers, never known for being shrinking violets, are being harangued by five young women and the air is blue – not from the clampers who are looking somewhat cowed but from the foul-mouthed harridans that seem to have beset them.

What should I make of all this? I was always a supporter of women’s lib. But did this really mean that women had to emulate the very worst of male behaviour? A man effing and blinding in public demeans himself to something rather boorish and inconsequential. Why would a woman want to copy that?

I have perhaps grown a-weary of this world when I see that the gentleness and decorum which used to be so prized in ladies has been devalued and cast aside.

Sometimes, Lord, I just despair.

The 2012 London Olympics – a forlorn cry

Let me begin with my baseline position…

People who want to aggrandize themselves at the expense of others by proving that they can run, jump, dive, swim, … in a way that is faster, longer, prettier, and back to faster again… than anybody else do nothing to ameliorate the human condition and are, in terms of humanity, a bunch of useless tossers (literally, in the case of hammer throwers).

Those who want to prostrate themselves in admiration before ‘the winners’ should ask themselves what these ‘sub-deities’ have actually done to make life better for anyone other than themselves. The Olympic Games are not a bastion of high ideals; they are simply an excuse to build oneself up at the expense of others. And don’t talk to me about ‘dedication’ and ‘endurance’; a life wasted doing something utterly pointless in order that you can say ‘I’m best at…’ is a life misspent.

As the fat, bespectacled one, who was never chosen for teams, who was always picked last with a sighed ’I suppose we’ll have to have Clarke’, who spent Sports’ Day shifting hurdles because not trusted to participate in anything sporty, I should side with the losers… but I don’t. If they set themselves up for a fall, they deserve it. How I hate the sight of athletes blubbing because they didn’t turn out to be the best!

And to add insult to injury, these athletes eat up huge chunks of tax revenue and lottery money which could be used to achieve real humanitarian aims. How many of the blubberers have cried about the really shameful things like children dying from starvation or any of the thousand horrendous human tragedies going on around the world? Being the best at saving children’s lives… now there would be something to boast about and worthy of a gold medal.

Real heroes expand humanity’s horizons and make the world a better place. Olympic ‘heroes’ do nothing of the sort.

Harsh as it may be, that truly is where my thinking on the Olympics starts.

However…

Despite myself, I couldn’t help getting a little caught up in the Games. Occasionally, the skills displayed were entertaining and I found myself enjoying a few of the sports. Archery, fencing, the equestrian events (to mention but three) were skilful and diverting, but that was all. The world did not rise or fall by their efforts. I could have been as easily amused by a half-hour comedy and at much less expense.

So, please, let’s keep sporting achievement in its place. It’s entertainment, nothing more. Let’s start putting the money into things that really matter.

Nearly sixty…

Proud of his longevity, my wife’s grandfather declared himself ‘nearly eighty’ the day after his 75th birthday.

‘And how old are you?’ kindly people would ask.

‘I’m nearly eighty,’ would come the reply from the seventy-five year old.

He did not make it to eighty.

So maybe I’m tempting fate if I say that for the whole of this year, I intend to be ‘nearly sixty’. True I was fifty-nine less than two weeks ago, but ‘nearly sixty’ it is to be.

So in (nearly) sixty years, what have I gained and what have I lost?

Lost:

1.       Brain cells, particularly those relating to memory. Names frequently elude me. I arrive in room to do a job and forget what I went there to do. I check the car doors three times because I can’t remember if I locked them. I go shopping for baked beans and bring back half the shop, but no baked beans. I write things on a calendar and still manage to miss them. I can stand in one spot for a long time trying to remember whatever it is I’ve forgotten.

2.       Strength. True, I was never super fit, but now I can’t even break into a run. ‘Run!’ says my mind. ‘You’ve got to be joking,’ replies my body. The ‘go to’ man for jar opening now has to use gadgets to get the top off a new jar of marmalade.  Furniture, once moveable, now has to stay where it is.

3.       Fashion-sense. Admittedly never my strong suit, but now warmth and comfort override any other considerations. Once flat caps were only for use in ‘Andy Capp’ cartoons. Now I have two and sport them regularly in the winter months. I have no doubt that if Dunn’s still existed, I would be glued admiringly to the window.  I eye up the catalogues and consider foot muffs and woolly shawls. It is only a matter of time before I start thinking about ordering from Damart.

Gained:

1.       Grandchildren. The joy of my life, my grandchildren can do no wrong. I am the archetypal doting grandpa. I am fascinated to see them setting out on their voyages of discovery. What I missed with my own children because I was so busy trying to provide for them, I now discover in my grandchildren. Being a grandpa is great.

2.       Time. With the imperative of ‘earning my living’ removed, I have more time than I can usefully fill. Things still don’t get done because ‘What the hell? I can always do it tomorrow.’ Waking up can be a slow, leisurely slide into the day. Gone are the days of hurried breakfasts. I can snooze more or less whenever I want. Time is a luxury which I can afford to waste. (To those who think this is shameful… tough.)

3.       Wisdom. Yes, I know it’s a corny thing to say… but I do mean ‘wisdom’, not intelligence. I have forgotten many of the things I used to know. My thought processes are slower. Knowledge I used to have at my fingertips has slipped away. But I am wiser… I choose my battles carefully and let the others pass. I can see more sides to a situation than I could when I was younger. I can judge things for what they really are rather than what they seem to be. I am calmer and more accepting. The black and white nature of things has faded. I can see more of the grey. This can all be very infuriating for my family who do not always revel in my wise advice. Anyway, maybe it’s my perception that’s wrong. Just as people who ‘know it all’ are generally thick, perhaps it is my failing intellectual powers that make me feel wise. Hmm… a grey area, that one.

So, ‘nearly’ sixty it is then. Pity it’ll be another six years before the government considers me an o.a.p. As for me, I’m as old as I feel… that’s ‘nearly sixty.’

Facebook Fragments

In an unashamed attempt to bulk up the site in its early stages, I thought I’d collect together a few of my more curmudgeonly Facebook postings from the past year.

Having now seen the Littlewoods TV advert, I am now in a position to make the following awards: Most Irritating Advert – Boots (Here come the s@dding girls) ; Most Ear-Torturing Advert – M and S (X Factor – where X stands for ‘excruciating’); Most Vomit-Inducing Advert – Littlewoods (Soppy mothers, ghastly brats = instant emetic.) By law, all adverts should feature cute Meerkats saying ‘Simples’.

When I were a lad (all them years ago), if a ten bob note arrived in a birthday card, it was riches beyond measure. Today I spent almost ten bob on a postage stamp for a birthday card. How old do I feel?

I sat down to watch what I hoped would be an interesting programme about satellites. After five minutes… I had to turn off…because the stupid narrator…kept pausing in mid-sentence…creating the effect…of listening…to a jumping…record. Infuriating! Shame on you BBC Two.

Easy Targets

‘Why no comment on the Diamond Jubilee?’ I have been asked. In many ways, it has just seemed too easy a target. I sum up my reaction by lazily copying a couple of my Facebook posts:

Dear BBC, Reigning for sixty years is not ‘a/an (insert over-the-top adjective here) achievement’ unless you count not dying as an achievement, in which case I have achieved an astounding 58 years. The Queen has no doubt achieved many wonderful things in her long reign, but I don’t suppose she counts not dying among them. So shut up about her ‘fantastic/ amazing/ brilliant/ fabulous/ magnificent, blah…, blah.. achievement’ on reaching her diamond jubilee. You might just as well say, ‘Well done, Ma’am, for not dying’.

Can’t believe people are selling their old World Cup car flags for the Jubilee. How did it go? Two flags = I’m a dickhead; One flag = I’m still a dickhead, but the other flag’s in the hedgerow. Determined to remain miserable about all this Jubilee nonsense. ‘Gawd bless yer, Ma’am’ (tugs forelock). [Are Royalists ‘Ma’amites’?] 

Apparently I was wrong on two counts with the latter comment: the flags are for something called Euro 2012, which I thought was the level against the pound at which the whole Euro zone would collapse, but is, I discover, some sort of minor football tournament played in some God-forsaken part of the world. Also the ‘Marmite’ joke doesn’t work because the Queen likes ‘Ma’am’ to rhyme with ‘Spam’.

This is the trouble with easy targets; they make you sloppy in your thinking.

So what am I to do when the Olympics come along? It’ll be like shooting fish in a barrel. 

I was approached the other day to give money to support ‘our’ athletes. I wholeheartedly resent the money wasted on sponsoring athletes. If they want to run, jump, skip, hop, throw, dive, and so on, let them pay for it themselves. This myth that being an athlete is a proper job needs scotching once and for all. 

And that’s me hardly started!

Car Parks and the Great British Public

The GBP in cars:

1.There are no speed limit signs in car park lanes. This means you may drive dangerously fast despite the presence of the GBP on foot.

2. All directional instructions are there to mislead. Arrows are best followed from tip to base, thus ensuring maximum chaos.

3. Shout at and give the finger to any other surprised motorist who may happen to be going the right way.

4. Zebra crossings and ‘give way’ lines in car parks must be ignored.

5. Use of indicators at any time is a sign of weakness. Disempower the enemy by letting them guess your intentions.

6. Do not ‘granny park’ (drive forwards through to an accessible space). This is for wimps. Overshoot by a large distance the space you have decided to reverse into and then cause everyone behind to reverse while you glare inimically at them.

7. Show no skill at reversing so you block the lane for the maximum time possible.

8. Parked across the entry to three ‘disabled’ spaces is the best place to stop and talk to your mates for five minutes. 

9. At no time allow anyone to leave a parking space if it is possible to block them in. Courtesy of any kind is a sin.

10. On leaving your car become a member of the GBP on foot. (See below.) Make sure you damage the doors of any vehicles next to you as you leave yours.

The GBP on foot:

1. Wander slowly down the middle of car park lanes in order to impede to the maximum extent the passage of cars.

2. Children are a great weapon; deploy them carefully. A wandering toddler can create a rolling road block. If you can arm them with shopping trolleys, they are even more deadly.

3. The best place to hold a long conversation is in the blind spot of a motorist who is trying to reverse out of a difficult space.

4. Alternatively, dance about from one side to the other of the car as it reverses. Adding a shopping trolley to the waltz causes maximum confusion.

5. Leap out onto pedestrian crossings and trust in the efficiency of the approaching car’s braking system. Preferably, use a child in a pushchair to ‘test the water’.

6. Allow your shopping trolley to run out in front of other cars. This tests the driver’s reactions.

7. Abandon your trolley in any free ‘disabled’ parking space. The extra exercise gained clearing the space is good for any disabled person.

8. On entering your vehicles, revert to being part of the GBP in cars.

Following the above rules will make parking in public car parks a pleasure.

A Mug called Insipid

It was probably around about the mid-sixties when Insipid came to live with my family. Families everywhere were abandoning the cups and saucers de rigeur in the fifties and were taking to the use of mugs. Our cupboards had begun to boast the assortment of cheap souvenir mugs that are still in common use in houses all over the land. Family rounds of tea or coffee were served in a jumbled assortment bearing all sorts of badges, pictures and legends. Not so Insipid. He… for the purposes of this blog he can be male… was some potter’s attempt at early sixties psychedelia, adorned in swirls and whirls of alarming complexity. The only problem was that all these swirling pastel currents had somehow faded to semi-transparency. Maybe the wrong paints had been used or a fault had occurred in the firing but the overall effect of the colour pattern was insipid… and so it was that Insipid joined our ranks. Other mugs were named more obviously after their provenance. So it came about that a tray of teas or coffees would be brought into the room with an announcement such as: ‘Dad, you’re Mansfield Town… Mum, Shakespeare’s birthplace… Theresa, York Minster… Pat, the Cuddly Kittens… and I’m Insipid.’ Of such minutiae is family life made.

A dozen things I have learned in 58 years of life…

1.       I should worry because it is going to happen.

2.       Cleaning out a peanut butter jar for recycling probably wastes more of the Earth’s resources than it saves.

3.       You can never get the last of the Marmite out of the pot.

4.       ‘Tear here’ means I’ll never get the package open without making a mess.

5.       When opening cheese or DVDs, resort to the scissors straightaway, not after ten minutes of bootless struggle.

6.       The ‘pull back’ tops on ready meals don’t.

7.       ‘Unexpected item in bagging area’ is the war cry in the first skirmishes between man and machines.

8.       Looking on the bright side will damage your retina.

9.       ‘After opening, eat within two days’ is nonsense… anything in the fridge is edible until stinks or has grown a fur coat.

10.   Other people’s kids are out of control; yours are just playful.

11.   The person who gets to an opening checkout first is the one with the most groceries.

12.   Petrol is always cheaper at the filling station after the one at which you filled up.

A charivari of sundry thoughts

I’ve taken the title from the alternative title to ‘Punch’ magazine, a publication I enjoyed for most of my formative years. It used to be known as ‘The London Charivari’ and contained writing on all manner of subjects. Sometimes I feel my head contains a maelstrom of sundry ideas, none of which will by itself make a reasonable piece of writing, so I have decided to group them together as the din that goes on inside my head.

·        Currently there is a programme advertised on Sky as ‘Mankind: the story of all of us’. Even with Stephen Fry as narrator, I cannot bring myself to watch it. Those two ‘of’s in the title blip on my ‘Ugly English’ radar so loudly that whatever its merits as a programme, I can only loathe and despise it. ‘Mankind: the story of us all’ is by comparison so sweet on the ear that I can only imagine it never occurred to anyone as an alternative.

·        I came across one of those weird internet ‘things’ which allowed one to calculate one’s ‘Blues’ name. It claimed that, should I have been destined for life as a Blues singer, my moniker would have been Fat ‘Bad Boy’ Hopkins. The first name gets it in one… fat by name; fat by nature… I can accept that.

‘Bad Boy’ seems a bit harsh. I was a bit of a pain at school, but I feel that I was more sinned against than sinning. Like Jennings, there was always a good intention behind the scrapes into which I propelled myself. It’s just that teachers in those days never ever listened. I always found myself in that corny soap opera position where the innocent person is poised over the body holding the knife just as the police force their way in. The innocent stands there tongue-tied while everyone assumes his/her guilt. It then usually takes a lot of episodes before his/her name is cleared. One often wonders if it would have been better for them to speak up quickly at the time, but strangely they never do. Neither could I when apprehended in some ‘crime’ at school. So ‘Bad Boy’ is off the menu.

‘Hopkins’ could be worse. It suggests a successful actor of stage and screen, particularly when combined with my real first name. Or it could be that nice girl called Mary who sang something in the sixties sometime. Yes, I can accept that. So when my Blues career starts, I shall style myself Fat ‘Nice Guy’ Hopkins.

‘I woke up this morning…’

·        Christmas is of course on my mind and I have been considering the street decorations. My home town manages a few strings of bulbs with some tinsel, but it’s hardly a grand display. Bournemouth does better, but they are very secular, indeterminate designs with the odd Santa thrown in. The place I used to live in Norfolk managed a few animated reindeer which were supposed to look as though they were running. Sadly they looked as if they needed the loo as they frantically crossed and uncrossed their legs. My then-young children loved these. ‘Look, Daddy, Rudolph needs a wee!’ was the yearly cry.

Mansfield, where I spent most of my childhood, had ideas of grandeur. It managed to obtain some ex-Regent Street fibre glass angels complete with trumpets. Illuminated from within they looked impressive but were rather heavy. Each year two things were inevitable. Firstly, an angel would slip on its moorings overnight and would then be hit by the first double-decker bus to come through in the morning. Secondly, a gale would get up during the Christmas period and at least one angel would throw itself to the ground and shatter. These two incidents were so regular that the local newspaper kept stock photographs to save going out each year and getting new ones. Slowly the number of angels fell under this rate of attrition and the angelic host dwindled to an angelic few before they disappeared to be seen no more.

·        And finally those Christmas TV advertisements…

A weaker field this year as everyone seems to have been more restrained this year. So far, Boots have spared us ‘Here come the girls’. Can it last? God, I hope so. (That’s not blasphemy; that’s a genuine prayer.)

The advert with the woman who has slaved to make Christmas for her family and is greeted by ‘What’s for tea, love?’ when she finally goes to sit down would be greatly enhanced by a subsequent scene in which she runs amok with a meat cleaver and wipes the smiles off her family’s lazy self-satisfied faces. In the final scene, she can relax among the blood-stained corpses and enjoy a well-deserved glass of sherry.

John Lewis’ cutesy story of a romance between two snow people is heart-warming, were it not for the fact that such romances are doomed. For years we wept at Christmas over ‘The Snowman’, shown every year by sadists to bring some sadness to Christmas Day. Yes, he melts… and so, I can’t help thinking, will the brave JL snowman who travels so far to find his love a hat, scarf and gloves. Maybe I’m just a natural pessimist.

So that’s a small part of what’s in my mind at the moment.

Have a joyful Christmas and a life-enhancing New Year.