My favourite kitchen gadget

I don't cook.  It's not that I can't cook - I'm quite able to do so if necessary - it's just that I don't.  I don't enjoy cooking, although I do enjoy eating.  Luckily, the Old Bat does enjoy cooking so it is no great hardship for her to take charge of the culinary aspects of our household.  Which is probably just as well as I have never been taught to cook.  My mother, bless her, was firmly of the Old School of Thought.  As far as she was concerned, the woman's place was in the home - washing, cleaning, shopping, cooking - and a man was tolerated in the kitchen only to help with the washing up.  The education system here in England in those days was of a like mind.  There were no mixed-sex schools after the age of 7 or 8 - even university colleges were single-sex - and boys were taught woodwork or metalwork while girls were taught cookery and sewing.

I have a vague recollection of Fanny Craddock, probably England's first television cook.  I don't recall ever seeing her programme when it was broadcast but I have seen clips - and it's probably on Youtube.  Anyway, she had a cut-glass accent and used her husband as an assistant.  Although skivvy probably describes his role more accurately.  I seem to recollect that he was at least half cut all the time and that a glass of wine was always either in his hand or very near to it.  Fanny treated him abominably.  My role in the kitchen is fairly similar, although I must say I am not treated abominably.  But it's washing up that I am used for, although I am occasionally allowed to stir the gravy.  In all that washing up I have become intimately acquainted with a variety of labour-saving devices.  Or so-called labour-saving devices.  I'm almost certain that in the case of some of them the amount of energy used to clean them is considerably greater than has been saved by using them.  However, since it is the Old Bat who uses them and I merely wash them...  Need I say more?

There are quite a number of these devices that are in regular or even frequent use chez Brighton Pensioner.  The bread-maker, the pressure cooker, the slow cooker, the electric whisk, the liquidiser, the Magimix all come into their own at least once a week or so.  The sandwich toaster less frequently, and then only for making waffles for dessert.  The ordinary toaster is used occasionally, and of course the coffee filter machine is used several times every day.  All these I know, and know well.  But there are a few others tucked away that rarely, if ever, see the light of day.  We have thrown out the wok and the fizzy drinks maker, along with the fondue set.  The salad dressing mixers that we bought cheaply in France proved to be too cheap and quickly broke so have been thrown away.  Tucked away in a cupboard, though, is a salad dryer - a plastic basket with a lid and a handle that turns the basket so that centrifugal force ejects the water from the lettuce leaves.  I can't remember the last time that was used.  And then there is a potato masher, a plastic thingummyjig that will probably wave a white flag if ever it is faced with a real potato.  I don't think that has ever been used.


But my favourite device of all is a mole wrench.  When - as now seems to be pretty much always - my hands are unable to open a bottle of milk or a carton of orange juice or take off the screw-cap from a bottle of wine, the faithful mole wrench is brought forth and, hey presto, the job is done.  What's more, the mole wrench doesn't have to be washed up!


~~~~~

The bluebells in Stanmer woods were just about at their best the other day.  I took far too many photographs but not one is really what I was aiming for.  This is probably the one that came closest.

Be careful what you sow

The following moral tale was sent to me this week by a fellow Lion.


A successful business man was growing old and knew it was time to choose a successor to take over the business.  Instead of choosing one of his directors or his children, he decided to do something different. He called all the young executives in his company together.
He said, "It is time for me to step down and choose the next CEO. I have decided to choose one of you. "The young executives were Shocked, but the boss continued. "I am going to give each one of you a SEED today - one very special SEED. I want you to plant the seed, water it, and come back here one year from today with what you have grown from the seed I have given you. I will then judge the plants that you bring, and the one I choose will be the next CEO."

One man, named Jim, was there that day and he, like the others, received a seed. He went home and excitedly, told his wife the story. She helped him get a pot, soil and compost and he planted the seed. Everyday, he would water it and watch to see if it had grown. After about three weeks, some of the other executives began to talk about their seeds and the plants that were beginning to grow.

Jim kept checking his seed, but nothing ever grew

Three weeks, four weeks, five weeks went by, still nothing.

By now, others were talking about their plants, but Jim didn't have a plant and he felt like a failure.

Six months went by -- still nothing in Jim's pot. He just knew he had killed his seed.

Everyone else had trees and tall plants, but he had nothing.  Jim didn't say anything to his colleagues, however, he just kept watering and fertilizing the soil - he so wanted the seed to grow.

A year finally went by and all the young executives of the company brought their plants to the CEO for inspection.

Jim told his wife that he wasn't going to take an empty pot. But she asked him to be honest about what happened.  Jim felt sick to his stomach, it was going to be the most embarrassing moment of his life, but he knew his wife was right. He took his empty pot to the board room.

When Jim arrived, he was amazed at the variety of plants grown by the other executives. They were beautiful - in all shapes and sizes Jim put his empty pot on the floor and many of his colleagues laughed, a few felt sorry for him!

When the CEO arrived, he surveyed the room and greeted his young executives. Jim just tried to hide in the back. "My, what great plants, trees and flowers you have grown," said the CEO. "Today one of you will be appointed the next CEO!"

All of a sudden, the CEO spotted Jim at the back of the room with his empty pot. He ordered the Financial Director to bring him to the front. Jim was terrified.. He thought, "The CEO knows I'm a failure! Maybe he will have me fired!"

When Jim got to the front, the CEO asked him what had happened to his seed, Jim told him the story.  The CEO asked everyone to sit down except Jim. He looked at Jim, and then announced to the young executives, "This is your next Chief Executive Officer!  His name is Jim!" 

Jim couldn't believe it. Jim couldn't even grow his seed.

"How could he be the new CEO?" the others said.

Then the CEO said, "One year ago today, I gave everyone in this room a seed.  I told you to take the seed, plant it, water it, and bring it back to me today.  But I gave you all boiled seeds; they were dead - it was not possible for them to grow.  All of you, except Jim, have brought me trees and plants and flowers. When you found that the seed would not grow, you substituted another seed for the one I gave you.  Jim was the only one with the courage and honesty to bring me a pot with my seed in it.  Therefore, he is the one who will be the new Chief Executive Officer!"

If you plant honesty, you will reap trust.  If you plant goodness, you will reap friends.  If you plant humility, you will reap greatness.  If you plant perseverance, you will reap contentment.  If you plant consideration, you will reap perspective.  If you plant hard work, you will reap success.  If you plant forgiveness, you will reap reconciliation.

So, be careful what you plant now; it will determine what you will reap later.

~~~~~

I was in Stanmer Park the other day, hoping for a picture similar to the one I took three years ago.  As luck would have it, the sky turned cloudy and grey, so here's the three-year old picture.  Of course, now the flowering cherry trees are bloom, the wind will pick up.  Indeed, we have been warned of 60mph gusts along the coast.

 

It's Thursday today

Which means that my local library might be open for me to change by library books.  I had intended to do that on Monday, but that bank holiday crept up and spoiled things.  Mind you, I'm not entirely certain about the library being open.  Thursday is one of the designated opening days, along with Monday and Saturday, but things local government-wise seem to be going haywire this week and I'm wondering if there is a strike.  Neither our wheelie bin nor our recycling boxes have been emptied this week.  I was expecting that to be done yesterday but it didn't happen.

It's that bank holiday again.  Normally our wheelie bin is emptied on Tuesday each week and the recycling boxes on Tuesday every second week but when there's a bank holiday Monday the collections get put back to Wednesday with the crews working Saturday to make up the lost day.

We used to have dustbins but now, as in practically every other village, town and city, we have a wheelie bin.  Note that: A as in one wheelie bin.  My friend Chris lives under the auspices of a different authority and he has three wheelie bins, each for different material.  We do have two recycling boxes: one for glass and the other for paper, card, plastic and metal.

I wonder why some people paint their house number, sometimes even the road name as well, on their wheelie bins and recycling boxes.  It's not as if they own the things, which remain the property of, in our case, Brighton & Hove City Council.  Do they think there is something special about "their" bins and boxes - or are they perhaps afraid that if somebody else's wheelie bin is returned to them they might catch something like the dreaded lurgy?  Or maybe it's the contents of their bins that are special -  "Our rubbish is of a much higher quality than those common people next door put in their bin" - so they are, in fact, showing off.  They want to world, or at any rate those who pass by and look into their bin (as if anybody would) to see that they can afford to throw away things other people covet.

(I've just checked the council web site which states:

Our refuse, recycling and street cleansing crews have not gone out to work yet. 
There was no refuse recycling or street cleansing service yesterday, Wednesday 8 May, as a result of unofficial industrial action by our workforce in relation [to] discussions on pay and allowances. 
This morning our crews have not gone out to work yet and we do not know whether the service will be operating later today.)

At least that means the library will almost certainly be open.  Of course, even if it isn't, all is not lost.  Last Saturday, while clearing up after the Lions book fair, I spotted a copy of a book I had been wanting to read again - Winter in Madrid, by C J Sansom.  I first read this book several years ago having borrowed it from the library but there has been no sign of it on the shelves for a long time now.  Although I have started reading it, I shall probably put it aside and take it up again when we are next in France.  It is the sort of book that it pays to read in fairly solid chunks rather than dipping into for a page or two at a time.  I think it is also better to absorb it slowly.  At least, that's how I remember it.

~~~~~

The Waterhall dew pond is swarming with tadpoles this year, far more than last.

Arthritis killed my father

But I'm damned if I'll let it kill me!

But before I go any further, let me explain something.  I am well aware that this blog is open to the whole wide world and that anybody can read whatever I have it in mind to say, but I do sometimes treat it as a personal, almost private thing.  It practically doubles as an outlet for random thoughts and moans and also as a personal journal.  The journal bit is usually hidden between the lines and, I hope, is intelligible - even apparent - only to me.  Today's post is overtly of the nature of personal thoughts.  Please do not get the idea that I'm wallowing in self-pity or looking for sympathy from anyone.  This is just to remind me of my intentions and is to be here as a prod when things get bad.  As they may well do at any time.

I started this post with something of...   a lie?  an exaggeration?  Whatever, it is patently untrue that arthritis killed my father.  Arthritis is not a life-threatening condition.  All the same, my father suffered badly and for the last few years of his life was very nearly chair-bound.  I think that was the cause of the pneumonia that killed him.

My experience is that sitting around moaning about how stiff one is only makes matters worse.  Many a day I have struggled to take the dog for a walk in the morning, only to find that after about 20 or 30 minutes of gentle walking, the stiffness has gone from my legs.  Slowly pushing the affected muscles farther and farther does have a beneficial effect.  But I must make sure I don't overdo things, which is what happened yesterday.  After lunch I walked the dog (for the second time) and we strolled in Stanmer woods for nearly an hour.  As soon as I got home, I went out again with the Old Bat and spent 50 minutes walking round the supermarket.  Then I mowed the grass.  By the evening my shoulders were agony.  So I took a couple of paracetamol mid-evening and two more on going to bed - and hey presto, this morning I'm much better.  I can even make a fist of my left hand, something I have been unable to do for several weeks, and enjoyed a small triumph when I picked up the kettle and poured from it using my left hand alone.

So, a final memo to self:  don't give in - but be reasonable in what you try to achieve.

~~~~~

The last two or three days have been glorious, but it's raining again today.  On Monday I walked up the Waterhall valley, which is looking much greener that the last time I posted a picture taken at this spot.

Fashion and the man

And then there's me.

Did I mention that I went to a funeral on Friday?  Actually, I believe I did.  Sue, whose funeral it was, had been a friend of the Old Bat since they were Girl Guides together.  She had been a frequent visitor to us over the years, usually arriving quite some time after we had expected her.  Sue was one of those people who just could not be on time for anything.  I always teased her that she would be late for her own funeral - and she was!  Which was just as well as we were, too, having been held up in the traffic.

I had dressed suitably, as I thought, for the occasion.  Dark lounge suit (the only one I possess anyway), pale lilac shirt (the white one doesn't fasten at the collar any longer) and black tie.  I wouldn't usually dress like that to do the supermarket shopping, but needs must.  There would be no time to come back home, change, and then drive to collect the Old Bat from her session in the oxygen chamber.

The number of people attending the funeral surprised me, but I was also surprised that, apart from members of Sue's family, Chris, Ron and I seemed to be the only men wearing ties.  (Chris and Ron's wives are also long-standing friends of the Old Bat having been in Guides together.)  Am I really so far behind the times in terms of fashion?  What did surprise me was the number of men of about my age - OK, maybe a bit younger, but still retired - who wore no ties.  Or jackets, either, in some cases.

I recall that when I was still in my teens, I would never take a girl out for the evening without putting on a jacket and tie.  It didn't matter where we were going - to the pictures or just out for a coffee - a jacket and tie was de rigeur.  Come to that, it was for a walk on the Downs on Sunday afternoons in summer.  And that was while I was still at school.  When I started work, I was expected to wear a lounge suit Monday to Friday.  We were permitted to dress down on Saturday mornings by wearing a sports coat instead of a suit!

So I'm talking fifty years ago - that's half a century! - and understandably things change in that time.  The standard apparel for our Lions meetings has changed.  When I joined the club 25 years ago it was expected that everybody would wear a jacket and tie for meetings (and I mean everybody as there were no women members back then).  Some years ago we had a good summer and it was suggested that the dress code for business meetings should be relaxed, just for the summer and just for business meetings; dinner meetings would still call for the jacket and tie.  Somehow that relaxation for business meetings spread throughout the year, and now it has even spread to dinner meetings, although nobody has ever said anything.  It's just happened.

Even our Lions' Charter Nights are not what they were.  (Charter Nights are the annual birthday bashes for the clubs.)  Here in England they were always DJs for men and long dresses ("posh frocks") for the ladies.  Most men still wear DJs but the posh frocks have been put back in the wardrobes and cocktail dresses are now more usual.  The number of men wearing lounge suits instead of DJs is increasing rapidly.

I suppose it marks a lowering of standards generally.  Well, some would call it a lowering of standards; others would say different.  I have never been one of the class of people that changes for dinner, by which I mean changes into evening dress.  But all the same, I do sometimes regret the loss of a certain formality.  Like not leaving the dinner table before the loyal toast at a formal do.  Somehow it seems to me to indicate a certain lack of respect.  Which brings us back to the black tie for a funeral.

~~~~~

There was fog across the Downs first thing yesterday but that cleared fairly quickly and we had a glorious day.  The fog had almost cleared by the time I managed to get away from the kitchen sink to take a picture.

Oh no! Another bank holiday!

Now that I have been retired for (ahem) nearly eleven years, I have a tendency to treat every day as a holiday.  Well, one does when one doesn't have to get out of bed at the crack of sparrow fart to catch a train to London.  But it does mean that I tend to get just a little blasé about those days that meant so much to me during my working life.  In fact, I get so blasé that the wretched days have a habit of sneaking up behind me and taking me unawares.  Like last Wednesday.  I told you the other day that 1st May, May Day, is a public holiday in France.  There are people who say that France today is rather like England was 50 years ago.  They have a point, as shops in France stay resolutely shut on Sundays (except the boulangeries) and all shops are closed on public holidays.  Even though my favourite boulangerie had for several days been displaying a notice advising their esteemed clientele (or something like that) of the forthcoming holiday on which the shop would be shut, it sort of drifted over or past me and it was only on the morning we were leaving - May Day - that I remembered.  So we were unable to do our usual shopping for essentials like wine.

(I must apologise to those of you who are regular readers and who are therefore fully cognisant of the foregoing.  But stick with it; this does have a bearing on what follows.)

My local library is open on just three days each week: Monday, Thursday and Saturday.  I had borrowed a couple of books which I read while in France and although they were not due back for another week, I wanted to exchange them.  But Thursday passed in a blur of catching up, so I had to wait until Saturday.  The day dawned promisingly and I got up early to walk the dog before hieing me to my duty at the Lions book fair.  Then lunch, walk the dog again, check emails etc - and blow me down!  The library is closed now.  Oh well, there's always Monday.  Except that today is a bank holiday so the library isn't open.  Another sneaky holiday has crept up behind me!  And not only is the library closed - there's no post collection either, which means my brother's birthday card will be late arriving.

Saturday may well have dawned fine, but it didn't last.  Which was a shame as that was the first day of the Brighton Festival, the biggest arts festival in England.  The Festival always opens on Saturday morning with the children's parade through the town.  This year, unfortunately, they would have got a bit wet as it was damping - and not very warm.  The weather improved in the afternoon and I was quite happy to walk the dog in Stanmer Great Wood.  I wanted to check how the bluebells were doing.  Many were in bloom, and there was a delightful scent, but they won't be at their best for a few days yet.  Not like those in Withdean Park, very few of which have progressed even as far as the bud stage.

Withdean Park is the venue for Brighton Lions' contribution to the Festival.  The Lilac Lark, which we organise in conjunction with the Friends of Withdean Park, is part of the Festival Fringe.  The fair is to held next Sunday but I noticed yesterday how very few of the lilacs are anywhere near blooming.  Given that the posters for the Lilac Lark carry the strap line "all this and the scent of the lilacs too" that will be rather a shame.  We must just hope for warm, sunny weather this week to bring the blooms on fast.

~~~~~

Looking across the fields to the château de Tressé in Pouancé.

On the box

One of the things I do before we leave Brighton for any trip, be it to France or the farm or anywhere else for a few days, is to check the television schedules for the time we are planning to be away from home.  I did it for our recent trip and noticed that there was just one completely new programme that I wanted to see plus a repeat of a programme I had not seen first time round and a couple of other repeats of repeats that I may or may not remember.  Anyway, I set the recorder for all those, plus another couple that the Old Bat spotted.

Tonight the Beeb will broadcast the last episode of six of a series that should have been extremely good.  The first episode was broadcast when I couldn't watch for some reason - I think we were probably away - but I did watch it a few days later on the catch-up facility.  We then watched the second episode.  But that was it - no more; the programme proved to be an irritation to me and the OB just didn't like it.  I had read some blurb about it before the series started and I had thought this was a great idea.  Basically, the story, as I understood it to be, was the story of a village and its people for the past 100 years.  But I must have misunderstood the blurb I read - or I didn't read it properly.  As I understood things, there was to be a main character and the story would be told as a series of his reminiscences.  But the first episode was set in 1914 and our "narrator" recalled the arrival in the village that year of the first motor bus.  Given that he was then about 6 or 7 years old and on screen (as the narrator) he looked no older than his early 70s, there was an immediate anomaly.  And I understand that tonight's last episode is only set in 1920 so there is no way the story covers 100 years.

Then there were the inaccuracies.  In the first episode we saw army recruits marching off behind a brass band.  The band was playing "Jerusalem".  Now, I couldn't have told you when that music was composed, but there were several letters published in the paper pointing out that the music was composed in 1916 so there was no way that a band could have been playing the tune in 1914.  The next inaccuracy was obvious to me, although I dare say a lot of people might have missed it.  For some reason I have forgotten, the central character - then still a young schoolboy - needed to raise money and he charged his classmates sixpence for something; it doesn't matter what.  The point is that in those days there would have been no way that schoolboys in a poor Derbyshire village would have had sixpence.

Despite my criticisms, the show has apparently attracted an audience of over 6 million and further series are planned to take the story through the 1920s, the second World War and post-war austerity Britain.  I don't think I shall be watching.

On the other hand, I doubt there is a television company anywhere that does better wildlife programmes.  Quite recently we watched a series of five about wildlife in Africa, each programme concentrating on a different area of the continent.  The superb photography took four years.  Lord only knows how much that must have cost, but what a series.  Absolutely fantastic.

~~~~~

Not far from our village in France is the forêt de Juigné and each time we are over there we take a drive through.