Unusually for me I started the blog in Word, so that this evening, when I return from the camera club, I can more or less just copy/paste into my blog - (which I am now doing). First thing I notice is that the font is different. Not to worry eh?
Picture 1 is the wind-turbine from which
the central ‘boss’ formed the face I published yesterday. I deliberately used a shutter speed slow enough to allow the rotating blades to show a little movement blur.
And Picture 2 was taken within yards of the Car-park. I had an e-mail this morning from Incy Wincy saying how awful he felt, walking off with the others and leaving me all by myself.
What a kind person, with a sensitive soul. No wonder he is such a brilliant photographer !
I reassured him that I have always impressed upon ‘the chaps’ (which includes Helen) that I prefer to be left because if they stayed with me and travelled at my pace, I would be self-conscious about holding them back. And in anycase there is always something interesting nearby.
Picture 2, to prove the point, was taken about 50 yards from the Car-park. Isn’t nature wonderful ?
As also is 4 ticks’ apple cake. Two varieties – both delicious. You might remember from her yesterday’s blog-comment that I was invited, if passing, to call in to join in the first tasting. I nipped over just after 10.30am and I’m so glad I did. The first cake I tried a slice of was lovely and moist and had cinnamon and mixed spice added to the apple. Superb. The second was more traditionally cakey and had cinnamon alone. Gorgeous. Greedy-guts that I am, I polished off both portions with relish.
And beforehand, Reg had cleaned my camera sensor. I won’t go into details, out of consideration for those less obsessed with photography. Suffice it to say that the blemishes on my pictures are no more – saving me much unnecessary work ‘photoshopping’ them out.
Picture 3 is the Michaelmas Daisies near the kitchen door. And I am finding them a difficult subject. The colour is quite difficult to get precisely right. These were taken in bright sunlight and they just don’t give that impression do they?
Tonight at the club the lecture was 'Farming with Wildlife' by Andrew Parsons ARPS. Basically Andrew is a working farmer supported by Nottinghamshire County Council and various Trusts to farm his land in a manner conducive to Wildlife. The snaps were excellent, and once one became accustomed to his style and delivery, his talk was first rate. An excellent 'booking' and I note from his website (which is linked under the lecture title) that he does other talks too. I would love to see others. School visits, and group visits, are also organised - which sounds splendid.
Comments
bungus ..... You are certainly easy to understand - since you had your ears syringed. If I could get rid of this nagging cough I would be able to hear you better.
Amazing stuff about your mice.
Re the wind-turbine face. It wasn't my aim to set my blog-readers a puzzle - only future viewers if I use the picture competitively ever.
It would be counter productive to try and explain google's filing system to you. You stick with your metaphorical piles of papers - it seems to work for you. I simply like to keep the items in my in-box down to around 10, which involves labelling letters and then 'archiving' them. Thereafter they are so easy to recover. I think Y's in-box is going to be even leaner (maybe 6) because almost immediately after sending something she wants it filed and out of the way.
Re Sunflowers. Jill immediately understood your drift, as I am sure did others. Just 'old flat-top' here got it wrong.
4 ticks .... The apple-cake was worth the risk of getting tired !
Re spiders' webs. We have a quiet day tomorrow, so I can start my research. You will be kept informed.
I will probably store the recipes in Walagata (my file hosters) and I can then publish a link to them, in the blog, rather than copy/paste them straight in.
It seems that Bero books have varied quite alot in the matter of content. I'll let you have a look at mine to see if there is anything different and interesting.
You are right about Pearsons. And Boots used to be better than it is now. If I was feeling self-indulgent, buying trousers in Austin Reed's was a delight. I certainly don't want to emigrate though - I love this country far too much - with all its faults.
Jill ..... Re the 'face'. Like you I don't immediately feel it reminds me of anyone in particular. If I do some work on it, it may emerge.
Trust you to grasp Bungus's 'Sunflower' subtlety straightaway. It must have been only me who misunderstood. Nothing new there then, I can hear Y saying.
Lovely paragraph about the air-raid shelter and your early knitting projects. My mother used to knit socks and I remember the complexities of turning heels. And they used to wear well - I remember the wooden mushroom shaped thing she used to push up the inside to darn them with.
Perhaps the economic situation will worsen to the extent that these type of activities will have to return. And maybe it wouldn't be all bad if they did. By the way Helen tells me that Lidl are selling fruit trees, gooseberry bushed etc., for ridiculously low prices like £1.49p.
Re TV - there are so many things I would love to watch (your list sounded great) but one job leads to another and I finish up not watching anything. Strictly come Dancing excepted of course and yesterday evening we watched and enjoyed The Book Quiz - Kirsty Wark does very well. The link under the title will take you to the BBC iPlayer recording, should you want to watch it.
Almost predictably the Guardian's TV critic was po-faced about it. Often the case that, if a show earns bad reviews, we enjoy it.
Quotation time .......
"The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time"
Good Socialist, great writer, super sense of humour. His beard was impressive too.
Sleep tight - catch you tomorrow
2 comments:
DIARY
Here is the apple scone recipe I mentioned and which I have decided is brief enough to be blogged. Not from the Bero Book where I looked first (we have 3 copies, the oldest being wartime recipes with only half the fat content in the Victoria sponge, etc, the next just after metrication, most recent edition 38) but hand written on a scrap of paper.
DORSET APPLE CAKE
OK warm, preferred cold (with cheese?)
8 oz SR flour, 4 oz butter or marge, 2 oz sugar, 12 oz cooking apples chopped, 3 tbspn milk, demerara sugar.
Sift flour with a pinch of salt. Rub in fat to breadcrumb stage. Mix in sugar. Add apple and milk.
Form into ball and shape on floured board. Sprinkle with demerara.
Bake 50 min at gas Mk 4.
(A suggestion to use ½ fat and ½ grated cheddar but I haven’t tried it).
Jessica has a new pet, a bark called Colin (photo by email).
BLOG COMMENT
My first thought? Don’t like the serif font. But easy enough to change in Word before copy/paste (if you agree?).
As matter of interest, comments may be prepared in Word in any font or size or colour or mix of fonts, sizes, colours without it affecting what appears in ‘Comment’.
Pic 1. I absolutely agree with your showing blurred blades to catch sense of movement.
Not sure of significance of photo 2. You hadn’t fallen down after being deserted, I hope?
Pleased you enjoyed 4ticks’ apple cake. I hope the recipes will be coming along.
Please do not become obsessed with the Michelmas Daisies. Have you tried printing the photos? I suspect the colours will change yet again.
Good for farmer Andrew Parsons. Hope he manages to make his good work pay enough.
In view of your cough, SHOULD I SAY IT LOUDER?
Hope your wind-turbine face does make it as a puzzle. I might be able to make a killing.
Quite right to not explain the intricacies of filing. You are a much tidier creature than me. I recall being astounded at your little labelled boxes of screws and what-have-you at Hucknall.
I archive my stuff every couple of months or so (I ditch the rubbish straight away though, but often with some reluctance).
I’ll bet Beatrix Potter or Kenneth Grahame could have based some characters on us (Sandra would say that Roy Clarke already has).
Your suggestion of a recipe link (not necessarily of sausage) sounds fine to me.
Bero books – you show me yours…
They have certainly changed.
As mentioned, the biggest difference that I noticed was the concession to rationing.
I pretty much agree with you about not emigrating if only ‘better the devil…’
That said, having only visited 4 other countries (I am not counting Scotland and Wales) I liked most things about Norway except that in a lot of places you couldn’t buy a drink (probably changed now) in spite of Norwegians being drinkers on a par with Poles and Scots (and others, before anyone gets upset at being left out).
I could also happily have stayed in Libya (pre Ghaddafi that is, although I am sure he has benefited his countrymen tremendously unlike so many other African leaders).
Spain (Torremolinos and Majorca) and France (Paris and le Mans) did not have any tremendous appeal.
Has anyone mentioned Griffin & Spalding yet?
Until I was in my late 20s I always had my trousers (and suits and overcoats) bespoke, as did my father and his brothers, at Robinsons of Mansfield. Very charming and old-fashioned, it was owned by two brothers, both Wayne Speake size – they had to stand on a chair to measure for a suit – and Douglas, their faithful employee, used to play the piano in the ‘Bird in Hand’ at Blidworth to supplement his income.
I CANNOT get that Sandra to darn socks.
The once that she did it nearly got me and a neighbour thrown out of a Wellow village meeting.
I have never thought easy credit to be a good thing. I think most of us need protecting from our own excesses. Let’s get back to having to put a substantial deposit down (it used to a third for HP, as I recall, and not much less for mortgage). I blame the Americans.
I’ll bet the Lidl fruit trees/bushes come from Fiji or somewhere. I fetched frozen fish from our supplier today, including cooked, shellfree mussels at £1.87 for a one pound pack (he’s old-fashioned enough to not trust metric). They are good and handy to have available for fish pies but they come from CHILE!
GBS would be praising himself, of course, as usual (thought I would just throw that one in!). I shall never match him for beard I’m afraid (all right, before you say it, nor for anything else).
4 TICKS:
I think the turbine face looks like the mask from the 'Scream' films.
One of my maternal great-grandmothers was a Pearson of the Nottingham store family.
Two of her daughters, my mother’s maiden aunts Emily and Elizabeth Strutt, were missionaries to Narrowmarsh and India. I visited them with my mother in the 30s and 40s when they lived in George Street at Daybrook in a house backing onto the park. From India they moved to South Africa to care for one of my mother’s cousins, Charles Duncan McPherson, the 9-year old orphaned son of a younger sister, who was destined to became manager of Pearson’s Store. (family photos emailed to RG, if there is a sufficient link for anyone to be interested).
I hate suspension bridges (other than to look at from afar) and once travelled across one in N France lying on the floor in the back of the car (someone else was driving).
I never cared much for the suspension footbridge over the Trent (at Wilford?) either, it having gaps between the boards.
I once went to take a trip on the Settle/Carlyle line but chickened out.
Nor do I like mountain passes with hairpin bends (one in Majorca, the back seats of the bus hang over the drop).
My mother’s sister and family emigrated to S Africa post-war and came back after a month (to stay with us for half a year).
I have heard of too many people who have retired abroad and to the coast only to come back (or want to if only they could afford it).
Being an only child, male, born into a relatively affluent working/middle class family in 1931, I never had to do anything! That proved good basic training for redundancy and early retirement. I am also fortunate never to have been in debt apart from one mortgage which, when taken out in 1963, had to be within my means in order to meet the sensible rules of the time.
I can understand anyone, in extremis, stealing to feed his/her family but I cannot understand anyone deliberately going into avoidable debt.
I simply don’t know how people can sleep easy when living on credit. It is only a few weeks since Iceland was the best place in the world to live!
Jill:
Painting the sun-flower wasn’t a great joke but thank you for getting it.
I used to take my Dinky Spitfire into the shelter we shared with our neighbours and I remember being allowed up and out for a few minutes to see Sheffield burning.
I presume that you suffer from anaphylaxis? Very frightening.
Wasps don’t bother me although I have been stung a few times. I am quite prepared to share my slice of toast & marmalade with one or two and I once sat unperturbed on a roof with my eyes shut for what seemed like an hour as half-a-dozen crawled about my face. I reckon if you don’t hurt them they won’t hurt you (anaphylaxis apart). Scorpions however are too similar to spiders and do give me the creeps, even though I know that the sting of most varieties (I think there are some 3,000 in all) is no worse than a wasp sting.
No, I don't think I do suffer from anaphylaxis - the twice I ended up in A & E was because of where I was stung, once on my lip which swelled up alarmingly and once on my tongue (wasp was inside sandwich)ditto. I have since been stung on leg and arm, no worse that usual wasp stng, but I give them a very wide berth. We had scorpions in our cabin when we stayed on a dude ranch in Texas, I didn't like them either, it was the way they scuttled about. Mind you I didn't like the horses very much either! Did love the armadillos though.
I went to the National Knitting and Stitching Show at Alexandra Palace today, arrived home completely cream-crackered - don't think I shall go next year. I was in two minds this year, but I have been every year since it started. Our local buses were on strike today, it took me about two hours to get there and the same back, and all that walking about when i got there. I do enjoy seeing all the things, and met up with friends I don't see very often for lunch, we picnicked outside in the sunshine with the great view spread out in front of us. But it is such a huge exhibition and so crowded, over two hundred stands and all the exhibitions from students, and Royal School of Needlework, I just don't have the energy to go round and look at it all. And a great shortage of chairs.....I really enjoyed the much much smaller IKnitLondon Day, but this one I just can't cope with any more. Pity. I did look at all the Guild stands, no tatting anywhere, I spoke to some people who said they didn't think anyone did it any more! but they were interested, thought there was a group in the US and possibly NZ!
Have kept the cake recipe, thank you.
The michaelmas daisies do seem a bit fluorescent on my monitor....
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