Bits and pieces

I am constantly surprised that I fail to remember the date of the battle of Trafalgar.  For some reason I have it fixed firmly in my mind that it took place on 23rd October whereas the date was actually 21st October 1805.  So yesterday was the 207th anniversary.  There are those who say that it was Trafalgar that led to the downfall of Napoleon even though the final battle of the Napoleonic wars was Waterloo in 1815, ten years after Trafalgar.  Their point is that Trafalgar ensured the British navy had command of the seas and that meant Napoleon could never invade Britain so he was always on the defensive.  Or something like that.

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Whatever the word is for eating a lot of foreign food (if there even is one), it isn't polyglut.  Perhaps it should be.  We seem to have been eating a lot of foreign food just lately.  By which I really mean that our meals have consisted largely of recipes originating in other countries.  On Thursday we ate boeuf bourguignon (French), Friday we ate Italian (pasta), on Saturday the Old Bat cooked her version of sweet and sour pork (Chinese) and then yesterday we ate the roast beef of old England (and very tasty it was too) followed by a dessert of Viennese cheesecake.  Tonight we shall return to traditional English fare with fish and chips as we are out with the Lions playing toad in the hole (another English dish but in this case an old pub game).

Our local Lions Clubs each arrange a social evening involving a competition of some sort, what we grandly name as the Zone Olympics.  One club organises a quiz, then there is 10-pin bowling, shuffleboard, darts, shove ha'penny, pool, kurling (that's curling payed indoors), skittles and - tonight - toad in the hole.  To play this one needs a stool with a lead top which has a hole in the middle.  The players take turns to throw lead discs (toads) in the hope of landing them on the stool or, better, falling through the hole.  Scoring starts at 21 with one point deducted for a disc on the stool, two points for one in the hole.  Of course, all the Lions are hopeless players as we never actually get any practice, but it is always a fun evening.

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The last couple of mornings have been dry for my walk in the park with the dog and I have taken a camera with me in the hope of getting pictures of what passes in this neck of the woods for autumn tints.  I also tried, completely unsuccessfully, to take pictures of spiders sitting on their webs.  (Do they only spin webs at this time of the year?)  With the heavy overcast, the autumn tint pictures were only marginally better than those of the spiders' webs.  This was the best of the bad bunch.