Oh, My Days!

  I had a traumatic experience with a new recipe yesterday and it’s taken me almost a day to recover. What it is, you see, is that I’m attempting to introduce healthier cooking habits by stealth so that His Lordship Malarkey doesn’t notice. And by ‘healthier’ I mean cooking with ingredients I haven’t toyed with much before, hence the trauma of yesterday.  Sweet potato and red lentil croquettes, it was. All I can say is that if I’d bothered to read the recipe PROPERLY, I would have known to tackle the preparation of the croquettes in the morning, thus leaving the mixture to solidify accordingly, for shaping and cooking in the evening. Instead, I strode confidently to the kitchen at my usual evening meal cooking time, and realised that the mixture needed a period of time to go cold before the process could continue.  ‘Oh, it’ll be okay,’ I said to myself, optimistic as ever in the face of potential culinary adversity. ‘Surely the mixture won’t be THAT difficult to handle.’ ...

 It’s 12th March and Spring has arrived. I know this for sure because Mr and Mrs Duck arrived this morning for their annual ‘let’s make eggy babies’ time chez Damson Cottage. There they are... ...you can just see them in the centre of the photo. They nest in the area of scrubby undergrowth to the bottom left. I love how they arrive at the same time every year. One of these years, I’ll be around when they leave with their babies. We think they go to the nearby canal. Either that or Tenerife. Anyway, Mr and Mrs Duck back in residence, and all is right with the world. Our resident pheasant, whom I’ve decided to call Alan after Alan Partridge (aha!) has also found himself a lady friend. She appeared last weekend. At first I was all excited because I couldn’t see her long tail and thought she was a grouse. But then I DID see her tail and she is a lady pheasant. Of course, she might be a grumpy lady pheasant and therefore ALSO a grouse. Who knows? She’s very good at camouflage, though. A...

  Every week my work place requires me to take a Covid test regardless of whether I have symptoms. I am provided with a kit, so each week I generate considerable rubbish waste namely : a polythene bag containing the kit, a substantial instruction book (printed in glossy colour), a plastic covering surrounding the enormous cotton bud swab thing, several inches of plastic stick because once you’ve swabbed your throat and nose you break off the excess stick so the swab end will fit in the mini test tube. And then I have to construct a small cardboard box in which to post the test, put the test tube in another plastic bag along with a piece of absorbent wadding of material unknown (presumably to catch accidental spillages of bio-hazard liquid) and seal the box with a large sticker. And then I have to find a ‘Priority Post Box’ and post it.  Times this amount of rubbish by the number of people doing tests every day and driving around to locate a priority post box and I think we’ve ...

 Two topics today. Firstly, I am currently suffering, yes SUFFERING, a nasty bout of sciatica. It gets me every now and again, usually after I’ve spent a lot of time doing the book learning (which I am at the moment what with my counselling course and healer training) and I find myself so absorbed that I forget to get up and stretch every half an hour or so, and before I know it I’ve spent three or four hours sitting at an angle to my desk with my left leg wrapped around the back of my right leg and then it’s TOO LATE - the damage is done.  I wonder if I shall ever learn? I know the rules: sit properly in the chair with both feet on the floor, sit square to the desk, not at a squiffy angle even though it’s initially the way I like to sit, and thirdly, get up and move around at regular intervals. I keep telling myself this over and over, all good intentions, then the delights of psychodynamic theory or quantum physics distracts my mind from receiving pain signals from my poor b...

 Well! It seems Bambino Bobble Wilson has quite a fan club! I thought, then, with lack of anything more interesting to write about today (‘Rude!’ says Bambino) I’d put the spotlight on him, because there is nothing he likes being than Centre of Attention, Life and The Universe As We Know It, and Possibly Beyond. Here we go! For all you Bambino fans - enough information to enter Mastermind and win if you really haven’t anything better to do with your lives.  Bambino Bobble Wilson, the kitten, was found wandering the streets of Stoke-on-Trent. He was brought into Andy the Vet’s hospital where Andy hid him from me for two whole weeks before deciding, with a deep sigh I suspect, that he really ought to bring the kitten home to live with us. And so the little black kitten, aged 10 weeks or thereabouts, came home to Damson Cottage at some point in July 2017.  Here he is! Butter wouldn’t melt, eh?  Because every cat needs a birthday, and because the kitten immediately start...