My Blog Post Archive
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A Culinary Revelation
I should be a gourmet chef đ¨âđł for I have had revealed unto me the perfect afternoon snack.
I donât eat at lunchtime, so, by mid-afternoon, Iâm often a tad peckish. I began, therefore, to have a couple of buttered crumpets* at around three oâclock. (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.
âTwas then the fire đĽ from heaven descended and a voice, as from a mighty rushing wind, spoke to me in many tongues. (Sadly, there werenât any Medes or Elamites about, so some of the tongues were rather redundant, but I tuned in to the English one regardless.)
âTony,â the voice boomed, âwhy not have both?â
I tried the two together and lo! it was perfection. The world đ 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 itâs been over a month since I last checked in. Sometimes life just gets in the way, however good our intentions are.
Anyways, itâs been a funny/peculiar time. The lovely weather weâve 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 havenât 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 âany old ironâ, 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 wonât bore you with the details, but, fan of the NHS that I am, let us just say I didnât see the service at its best. Luckily, I hadnât 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 itâs 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 canât 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 canât 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.)
Thatâs probably enough rambling for now. Be back soon, I hope. đ
This quotation from Shakespeareâs âThe Tempestâ was one my mother was wont to use whenever a member of the family yawned loudly, groaned, sneezed or, as Chaucer would have it, âlet flee a fartâ.
It was brought to my mind the other day when I suddenly realised that Iâve 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. Donât even ask me about the âgetting into the showerâ 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 Dâoh! are written as âannoyed gruntâ. 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 Iâve 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 Iâd 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: âbugger you!â
On that afternoon, the island was indeed full of noises. Itâs 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. Iâm sitting here watching King Charles being crowned. (I refuse to use the word âcoronatedâ. The BBC seems obsessed by it. Canât think why. Even if it exists, itâs an incredibly ugly word and a perfectly good alternative exists.) Itâs the first Iâve 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. Youâd think heâd know them by now. Perhaps even Archbishops get nervous.
Looking forward to our own Mass tomorrow with some of the same hymns, and weâre singing the Stanford Te Deum to finish the service. Cracking music, Grommet!
Iâm 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 heâs 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 womenâs 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 â a forlorn cry
Let me begin with my baseline positionâŚ
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 âthe winnersâ should ask themselves what these âsub-deitiesâ 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 donât talk to me about âdedicationâ and âenduranceâ; a life wasted doing something utterly pointless in order that you can say âIâm best atâŚâ is a life misspent.
As the fat, bespectacled one, who was never chosen for teams, who was always picked last with a sighed âI suppose weâll have to have Clarkeâ, who spent Sportsâ Day shifting hurdles because not trusted to participate in anything sporty, I should side with the losers⌠but I donât. If they set themselves up for a fall, they deserve it. How I hate the sight of athletes blubbing because they didnât 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 childrenâs lives⌠now there would be something to boast about and worthy of a gold medal.
Real heroes expand humanityâs horizons and make the world a better place. Olympic âheroesâ do nothing of the sort.
Harsh as it may be, that truly is where my thinking on the Olympics starts.
HoweverâŚ
Despite myself, I couldnât 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, letâs keep sporting achievement in its place. Itâs entertainment, nothing more. Letâs start putting the money into things that really matter.
Nearly sixty…
Proud of his longevity, my wifeâs grandfather declared himself ânearly eightyâ the day after his 75th birthday.
âAnd how old are you?â kindly people would ask.
âIâm nearly eighty,â would come the reply from the seventy-five year old.
He did not make it to eighty.
So maybe Iâm tempting fate if I say that for the whole of this year, I intend to be ânearly sixtyâ. True I was fifty-nine less than two weeks ago, but ânearly sixtyâ 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 canât 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 Iâve forgotten.
2. Strength. True, I was never super fit, but now I canât even break into a run. âRun!â says my mind. âYouâve got to be joking,â replies my body. The âgo toâ 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 âAndy Cappâ cartoons. Now I have two and sport them regularly in the winter months. I have no doubt that if Dunnâs 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 âearning my livingâ removed, I have more time than I can usefully fill. Things still donât get done because âWhat the hell? I can always do it tomorrow.â 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 itâs a corny thing to say… but I do mean âwisdomâ, 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 itâs my perception thatâs wrong. Just as people who âknow it allâ are generally thick, perhaps it is my failing intellectual powers that make me feel wise. Hmm… a grey area, that one.
So, ânearlyâ sixty it is then. Pity itâll be another six years before the government considers me an o.a.p. As for me, Iâm as old as I feel… thatâs ânearly sixty.â
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 potterâs 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: âDad, youâre Mansfield Town⌠Mum, Shakespeareâs birthplace⌠Theresa, York Minster⌠Pat, the Cuddly Kittens⌠and Iâm Insipid.â Of such minutiae is family life made.
A dozen things I have learned in 58 years of lifeâŚ
1. I should worry because it is going to happen.
2. Cleaning out a peanut butter jar for recycling probably wastes more of the Earthâs resources than it saves.
3. You can never get the last of the Marmite out of the pot.
4. âTear hereâ means Iâll 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 âpull backâ tops on ready meals donât.
7. âUnexpected item in bagging areaâ is the war cry in the first skirmishes between man and machines.
8. Looking on the bright side will damage your retina.
9. âAfter opening, eat within two daysâ is nonsense⌠anything in the fridge is edible until stinks or has grown a fur coat.
10. Other peopleâs 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
Iâve taken the title from the alternative title to âPunchâ magazine, a publication I enjoyed for most of my formative years. It used to be known as âThe London Charivariâ 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 âMankind: the story of all of usâ. Even with Stephen Fry as narrator, I cannot bring myself to watch it. Those two âofâs in the title blip on my âUgly Englishâ radar so loudly that whatever its merits as a programme, I can only loathe and despise it. âMankind: the story of us allâ 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 âthingsâ which allowed one to calculate oneâs âBluesâ name. It claimed that, should I have been destined for life as a Blues singer, my moniker would have been Fat âBad Boyâ Hopkins. The first name gets it in one… fat by name; fat by nature… I can accept that.
âBad Boyâ 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. Itâs 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 âcrimeâ at school. So âBad Boyâ is off the menu.
âHopkinsâ 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 âNice Guyâ Hopkins.
âI woke up this morning…â
¡ 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 itâs 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. âLook, Daddy, Rudolph needs a wee!â 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 âHere come the girlsâ. Can it last? God, I hope so. (Thatâs not blasphemy; thatâs a genuine prayer.)
The advert with the woman who has slaved to make Christmas for her family and is greeted by âWhatâs for tea, love?â 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 familyâs 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 Lewisâ 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 âThe Snowmanâ, shown every year by sadists to bring some sadness to Christmas Day. Yes, he melts… and so, I canât 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 thatâs a small part of whatâs in my mind at the moment.
Have a joyful Christmas and a life-enhancing New Year.