I went to a party on Friday night for the 50th anniversary of a guide group starting. Someone described me as tne OG (original guide) since my mum started the whole thing 50 years ago.
Many of those who were guides or leaders came back to meet and greet and celebrate. There were photos and scrapbooks and camp blankets… all the good stuff. The new guides did a show for us with dancing and sketches too.
And there was cake…..really good fruit cake.
I know it’s been a while. I’ve been distracted by going to stay with my elderly dad. He’s not too steady on his feet but won’t sit still. Mum, on the other hand, is arthritic but won’t stay still (largely because it hurts) and it heavily involved in the WI (Women’s Institute) and the Trefoil Guild of the Girl Guides. Those organisations have conferences. These may involve a long, bust meeting but they also involve a chance to go away with your chums to a nice hotel and have a change of scenery. Mum has been to a couple of these lately. I’m called in to stay with Dad. It’s not a chore. When you consider everything my parents did for me it’s my turn to give back and I do it happily.
Our plan on this occasion was to make some black puddings as well as the usual gardening and running about in the car to fetch this and that. (Dad seldom drives these days and never beyond the village). I’d ordered dried blood, seasoning and groats. Pig fat would be acquired once I’d arrived. The groats were put in to soak overnight. Dad has it in has head that his mum made black puddings with more groats (barley) than blood. This was to be the basis for our attempt. Sadly, the skins we got hold of were not edible, but cleaned intestines do not keep well and can be pretty dangerous if not cleaned thoroughly. We could peel the skins away once the puddings were cooked. We treated back fly on the broad beans, did a run to the farm shop for bird seed and to the butchers for the aforementioned pig fat, picked blackcurrants, and watered the tomatoes. Enough for one day and there’s cricket on the telly.
Day two.
Yep, we succeeded in making a black pudding without making too much mess in the kitchen. It was a little of the recipand a little by dad’s memories, so the resulting out was a little unusual but not bad. It weighed in at close to a kilo. We let it cool and had a slice for breakfast next day. Notes to self : more blood, less barley, and cook the barley first. I still have a stack of ingredients so I’ll experiment with them til we get this as he remembers. The whole thing basically came in kit form and it’s not as hard as you think its going to be. The great thing was to do something he really wanted to do and to try together. Cherish your parents, they will be gone before you know it.
Apart from being an excellent Doors song, it is true as we approach the longest day already (unless you are Aussie chums). Its been a bit on the warm side for the UK i.e. over 30 degrees. Occasional thunder storms have definitely not helped l, in our area at least. I did note that we may actually be growing mashes potatoes. This has proved not to be true as we had a great crop from one of the tubs earlier this week.
This year we moved things around in the beds to see if they might grow better. On the whole.it seems the brassica may be better where they were and the potatoes like being in tubs not the purpose built boxes. The blackcurrant looks like it will crop despite only being put in late Feb. No gooseberries this year though.
Then came the thunderstorms. It’s not so fierce as predicted.
I did get a bit soggy earlier as I drifted between buildings at the local university where I’d gone to use the WiFi in the library for a PhD meeting online. The storms seem to have devastated our home WiFi. Not sure really but it’s been slow to none existent. Good meeting BTW. Its about now that I begin to think what has happened since I were young and how little we now seem able to do without the damn www. In fairness I’m a reader, as our local charity shops and library can attest so it wasn’t too bad but all the doctoral work is stored in the ‘cloud’ as they say. I do have backup copies, but infuriating all the same. I implore you all to save local copies of your documents. Indeed a pencil and paper seldom fail even if you run out of paper or break your pencil.
Which takes me back to the garden. My non digital starting place and a note to self that it’s impossible to rely on technology all the time and important to have some skills that don’t involve electrical devices. I’m going outside now to play my tongue drum.
Or at least things I don’t need. In the process of redecorating the house (these things we do when retired) there’s always been that charity shop bag by the door. I had a notification this week to say that, with gift aid (a tax back scheme for charities in the UK), the things we’ve chucked in this bag and walked to one of the shops in town had raised over £170 for the charity. How’s that for one person’s trash?
I’ve also been up in the attic (loft) and brought down the small library that has lived up there for the last 15 years. We’ve had new bookshelves built-in to the living room. Obviously, space is limited, but with some books stored in the office space, there had to be a cull. I hate giving up on books, but here’s the question do I need them? Many have not seen daylight in years. Thankfully, I have lots of friends who are happy to take some off my hands, there are apps that let you sell books, and I’d all else fails that the charity shop bag will be filled.
Increasing our ‘one in one out’ policy is becoming a ‘meh I don’t need that’ policy. The house is slowly emptying. Slowly. Tne decorating, new garden, time spent here because pandemic/retirement/working-from-home means that paying more attention to these surroundings became inevitable. When was the last time you really stopped to appreciate all that you have and wonder what you can actually live without. If nothing else ebay might help you pay for your next holiday!
We’ve been away but more of that later. One thing we often do is take a wander around a second-hand or junk shop. You can tell a lot about a nation by the things people resell. In Alice Springs, for example (yes, even on our great Australian adventure), we could’ve had anything from a teapot to a shirt to mining helmet. Brummen in Holland has a great 2nd hand warehouse. Gus’ back corner (achter hoek) . Seriously, you could furnish a house from there and clothe its inhabitants. There’s even paint, crockery, and electrical items. I’m not sure the cds and vinyl would be to everyone’s taste, but what can you do? Lol.
There were one or two glass cases with cast-off watches and small items of jewellery. In the back of one of these, I spotted several cameras. I love a camera. The box brownies and bellows based cameras now very difficult to get film for, but there was one little gem, an old 12 megapixel Samsung. Takes both photos and video. Look back on YouTube and someone the originals were using these things. Ten euro? Sold!
Now, I had no idea if this was in working order, but, at that price, it was worth a punt. Reader, it works! 12 MP glory is mine. There was an SD card inside. I took a couple of test shots and flipped the display on to see the results…. guess what? In 1990, a family of Surinamese origin, somewhere in Holland, had taken pictures of their home and each other and, very sweetly, their pet rabbit. They are very ordinary photographs of an ordinary family doing ordinary things yet somehow trapped in time. I’m not going to publish their photos. I’m not sure yet if I should delete them since they have survived this long and they made me stop to think about the things we take for granted. One persons waste is someone else’s treasure. One person’s past is someone’s future.
Not something that I can recommend. This week, however, I managed to do just that. I’m a big fan of Casio watches and have one or two. The F-91W is my go-to, don’t cate if it gets damaged dirty jobs watch. They cost next to nothing. I mean, like 10 or 15 quid. (That’s pounds sterling). Not even the price of two fancy cappuccinos or bubble teas. Yep, the only splash proof don’t shower in it watch went through the full cycle (I don’t tumble dry, save the planet, cut your energy bills etc.) And I dried the outside and slapped it back on my wrist. Would I like a Rolex? No. Really, no. Would I like to be able to afford a Rolex? Yep, I can think of loads I could do with the money. Travel, probably.
I noticed an article on my social media feed this morning (yes, I’m a tea in bed scroller) stating that some folks are able to upgrade lovely old ipods. Now I adore my old beast and music uninterrupted and off grid so, obviously, this struck me as an excellent idea. I fired up the web browser in search of a local ‘modder’ and found one who definitely recommended backing up the music library before having a new disc and battery set in place. Hmmmm… This, of course, meant either firing up the ancient mac or finding a way to put the library onto the windows machine. Given that the mac is buried in the kitchen under a pile of hobby projects I found my way to the ‘store’ where I was delighted to find that it is now possible to log in to my apple account from the laptop after downloading the appropriate software. That was over 5 hours ago.
I mean I understand that the disc on the ipod needs to be formatted to windows and that doing so blanks the memory. It now seems that in order to access the said tunes I need to download the lot, album by album, to the laptop. Hence 5 plus hours…. If this doesn’t work I’m going to be a bit cross. … and I’ll have to dig out the old mac.
Actually one of the joys of watching each song as it slips into my library is that I’ve had a joyous (if unproductive) afternoon listening to half forgotten tracks from way longer ago than I care to remember. I do have most of my music in physical form. Call me ancient but I can still play those tracks deleted from the store on tape (yes, I have a cassette player. 80s style and huge), vinyl or even on CD. There’s been a box of 7″ singles (ask your grandparents) sitting in the living room begging to be played for some time now with all their crackle and hiss.
It could be nostalgia. All the get rich gurus tell me that owning stuff is so last century and I’m sure that piles or dusty old albums are cluttering up my karma somehow but I make no apologies for my love of the physical, hold it in your hands, pleasure of setting a disc or cassette into the appropriate player and sitting back to listen to a whole album, not or shuffle or anything. Very meditative … well, depending on your choice of genre but to each their own.
Its up to R now in my downloads. Next trick will be to upload the new CDs through the external disc drive I bought for the laptop. They don’t have them anymore since no one wants them apparently. I mine for retro gaming with actual games not an emulator. Even after the apocalypse given a solar panel and a battery to store the power I will still have my tunes. Failing that the world will have to suffer my harmonica playing.
ffiftypluses 