Bloody Lovely

 

This morning I thought it was time for a scotch egg.

Over the years I have worked very hard in designing a high flavour , lower calorie scotch egg the size of a large hand grenade.

I’m feeling rather altruistic today so I shall share my recipe. 

Lean pork mince ( enough to cover four large organic eggs which have been boiled for four minutes)

A bulb of garlic roasted 

Dry herbs

Paprika 2 tea spoons 

2 eggs beaten 

1 large packet of Panko*  breadcrumbs 

When the garlic cloves are still warm, squeeze out the insides which have the consistency of a paste and mix it with the pork mince, dry herbs, onion salt , pepper and paprika 

Don’t add onions if tempted as they make the scotch egg wet and breaks the pork ring.

Shell the eggs and wrap each one in the mince. Be generous and make sure the scotch egg is large , the size slightly bigger than a tennis ball.

Roll the scotch egg in the egg then press handfuls of the panko breadcrumbs into the meat.

Repeat the process and place of greased oven tray.

Roast at 200 degrees , until the egg is golden and Crispy

Serve one egg per meal with an apple salad coleslaw or low fat creme fraîche as the pork is a little dry

Enjoy!  

My four eggs will make four meals......

No real news today . I have my second covid vaccine appointment for next week.

Alfred Hitchcock lecture tonight on zoom 

* Panko are made from a crustless white bread that is processed into flakes and then dried. ... These breadcrumbs have a dryer and flakier consistency than regular breadcrumbs, and as a result they absorb less oil. Panko produces lighter and crunchier tasting fried food

The Goat In The Dark

 I adore that moment after work where the PPE comes off and you take the first proper breath out of 12 hours.

Tonight the night air was cool and moist and refreshing in the hospice car park

And in the spitting of raindrops I stood and said hello to a family group of mountain goats who had hunkered down for the evening on the grassy bank behind Bluebell 

I heard the other nurses and support workers leave, but I wasn’t in a huge hurry to follow them.

So I chatted to the nearest goat who watched me carefully through bored eyes until I grew damp and properly refreshed and my mask almost turned into blue mush

Ole Laya Loila

 I can’t wait to sing this at choir again 

I drove past my favourite cafe in Colwyn Bay early this morning on my way to work.

It was still dark

For weeks it has looked somewhat dilapidated and empty with whitewashed windows and an unkept sign proclaiming a simple “ Shut”

This morning the mismatched chairs and wooden tables were back in their untidy islands and the counter top swept clean in readiness for the stacks of coffee cups and plates stood neatly behind.

The whole place shrieked 

“ I’m ready....I’m ready post lockdown”

It made my heart sing just a little

Lockdown

 

I wrote this on Suffolk Sue’s blog..it’s kinda like a poem

“ My loneliness is intermittent and cunning,

                       It catches me unawares, when I least want it to

                       Most of the time I’m fine and grateful to have what I have

                       But loneliness still lurks like a child’s monster under my bed” 

Is this news?

 

Dog drawing by Gwynneth Rixon

I’ve just spent nearly a hundred pounds at the supermarket.

How did that effin’ happen? 

I’ve also had an argument with a couple of entitled mothers who let their respective children invade Dorothy’s  body space 

I’ve had several such altercations in my time. 

I cannot abide parents who think it’s perfectly ok for their little darlings to approach a dog they don’t know without permission .

I missed coffee with Chic Eleanor which pissed me off

Dorothy also happily shredded two extra large kitchen rolls in the back of Bluebell  during the ten minutes it took me to collect some meds at the vets.

I had to pull what looked like a ton of white papier-mâché from her mouth and throat in the vets car park with the help of a man with a poorly and very shy dachshund which caused a minor drama in itself  

Three bits of excitement for the day.....

I bought a cheerful fruit bowl, an indoor primula and flowers... from Sainsbury’s ....it’s yellow interior pleased me. 

This afternoon , I made sweet pepper soup, and talked and swapped moans with Nu as she walked around some westLondon parks ......

Tit Of Yourself

 This open letter was posted on the village Facebook page today . 

A sign of the times and a kindness from a nice villager. 

And something I need to share today.

Most of my colleagues at work  now have their second covid jab appointment and I’m proud that my little country is leading the entire world with the percentage of population vaccinated 

One by one my loved ones are getting the jab and are moving one step closer to safety .

I hope to hear about my appointment in the next day or so.

I’ve just come home and although shattered I’ve lit the fire and refused to eat crap for supper.

Work has been hard but I’ve laughed regularly all day.....

Laughter is common in a hospice .

The girls were curled up on trendy Carol’s trendy conservatory sofa when I collected them and they were so happy to see me

It’s after nine and I’m catching up with the latest Line of duty download, with a chicken salad made by the chef at work.

I will leave you with this my most favourite of line of duty  put downs 

It’s a cracker

 

Crumbs

I came home tonight and went straight to bed after walking and feeding the dogs

And giving Albert some kitikat 

I couldn’t be bothered lighting the fire and the cottage was freezing

So I shared a large bag of cheese and onion crisps 

And watched this 

under the duvet 

The crumbs got everywhere 

And I can’t be bothered removing them 

I’m so degraded 

Nite xxxx

 

Frozen

 

The lane this morning 

Thanks to a local farrier who gave me a push to work

Sir Basil

 When I was 18, I embarked on a very short and exceedingly unsuccessful career as a bank clerk.

Banks in 1980 were still staffed by dozens of clerks, all beavering away behind counters and in machine rooms and in the hierarchy, so evident in those old beige offices, I was the lowest of the low .

Now one of my daily jobs was to fold individual statements and seal them into envelopes before franking and posting . Now Certain statements of the most special customers had to be pulled out separately and their envelopes had to be hand typed by the junior clerk and the one I always remember was Sir Basil Rathbone * 

Now Sir Rathbone had no less than twelve letters after his name and every month I somehow managed to get one of those letters wrong. The B in OBE would be in lowercase, or the K and B in KBE would be reversed: I’d forget a comma between award letters and one time I actually had the audacity to forget a full stop.

I was forever being dragged to Mr William’s, the deputy manager’s booth, stationed behind and above the counter clerks to be bollocked for getting the envelope wrong and after a year I grew to hate Sir Basil and his difficult twelve letters, even though I was the one that had done the wrong thing and he was “petty enough” to shout down the phone to complain .

I eventually started my nurse training a short while later but on my very last day, I spied Sir Basil’s statement waiting patiently for it’s typed envelope and couldn’t resist completing it myself.

Before franking and posting the letter, I read out the top line of the addressed envelope to myself

It read

Sir Basil Rathbone SOD, BUM, ARSE, HOLE, TIT

POSTSCRIPT: a few years ago I remembered Sir Basil and looked him up online 

His obituary was written in 2015 when he was in his nineties and chronicled a war hero of some renown and note a fact that made me feel almost guilty for  the typed letter.

.......almost....... 

 

* not his real name

I Rather Than We

Rachel Phillips said this in her blog of today


“ All you people who wake up in the morning and write about "we this" and "we that", spare a thought for those who it is "I this" and "I that" when they wake up and for the rest of the day“


I heard and understood her loneliness so well this morning. The loneliness of lockdown and the loneliness of living on your own is sometimes a difficult one to deal with and although I think I can speak for Rachel too when I say we are not banging on about all things singleton it’s nice to acknowledge that life is sometimes just a bit tougher when it’s only you at home when the doors are shut and the curtains are drawn.


Last night my friend Ruth popped around for a night in. We have been in each other’s bubbles since the start of lockdown and so it was her turn to organise dinner.
I was online completing my Hitchcock - The spy films lecture when she turned up laden down with food , and so, for a change she pottered around the kitchen preparing a delicious salad to have with Waitrose pizzas, wine and garlic bread as I worked away online.


Seeing someone else in the cottage, albeit in the background of my zoom box made me feel part of something a little bigger from what I have.......and to eat in companionable silence with someone after conversations of interest and light was a treat much more savoured that it ever used to be , because of its rarity .

We watched a film together and someone else but me cried “ oh no” when Dora left Josuè at the end I walked the dogs, whilst Ruth had a cigarette in the garden and this morning I made coffee and breakfast and loved the fact that two plates were on the table rather than just one.


I’m not banging on, I’m not saying poor me..I’m really not ...and nor is Rachel , or Libby, or Sue in Suffolk or Weaver or any of us singletons at home on this cold Friday in February ..but today I understood Rachel so well when she said what she did without self pity but with a certain sadness,


“spare a thought for those that have to say I rather than we”

Central Station

Fernanda Montenegro

Central Station is a film I have always adored

I’ve loved it for twenty years 

Brazilian Dora is a retired  teacher who writes letters for the illiterate at the central Station in Rio 

By chance she meets up with a young orphan Josué and the meeting allows her to find some redemption from a life of cynicism as she finds herself responsible for his future happiness 

Me and Ruth watched it last night and cried buckets at it 

It’s message about redemption and reinvention is universal and recently so pertinent 

It’s a pivotal film in my cinematic history 

I adore it

A Lie-in

I’m doing something I have not done since I was a teenager 

Something indulgent, something certainly selfish, something just a bit wicked.

As a grown man it has taken me 38 years to revisit it again

It’s a lockdown phenomenon

It’s naughty 

And as one antipodean artist used to say

Can you tell what it is yet? 

I’m talking about the lie in.

Well if I was being totally honest it is a return to bed after a brief early morning dog walk

But you will understand the gist.  

My lie-ins are somewhat loud affairs

They are filled with bulldog snores and the unexpected purring from a cat well know for his silence. 

Occasionally Mary from the window seat will raise a sleepy eye to a passing dog walker and will let out a muffled Woof ! which will in turn illicit a brief hiatus in the purring and the snoring but it is not long before airways are compromised and feline confidence returns and the background noises of the cottage return to normal .

It’s 9.45 am 

Hummmmm.........another half hour is in order.

The Impossible

 I have just re watched the film The Impossible 

A story of the Boxing Day Tsunami 

This scene broke my heart just a little 

Tomorrow my bubble friend Ruth and I will be watching Central Station more sobs xxx

What Day Is it?

 

The view down from the Gop to the coastal plain was magnificent this morning. The snow covered peaks of Snowdon are clear as a bell

It’s cold in Llandudno too and the Goats are down in the town again

I’ve been busy on line shopping

New chew proof leads for Dorothy   

Underpants x 6 

Some zombie dvds

A footstool 

A hand blender 

I paid my speeding fines on line too

Spoke to an old friend who is poorly

Read some more of my book

And realised I have absolutely nothing to talk about 

Snowdrops

 It’s a soup day, butter bean and chicken with paprika .

After three consecutive twelve hour shifts, I had a lie in with a book this morning, then walked the dogs, shopped and photographed the churchyard snowdrops before the cold ushered me back to the cottage in order to light the fire.

Incoming

“ You have to be kidding”

I managed to leave out the fucking in “you have to be FUCKING kidding” 

But it really DID deserve to be inserted there as I stood for a mini second with urine in my face, urine seeping under my mask into my mouth and eyes and all across my head.

The patient and the nurse-who had forgotten that she had left the urine standing inside a covered bedpan looked at me open mouthed 

I lost my usual bouncy sense of humour and bolted to the sluice where I ripped off my sodden mask and washed my face and hair

Urine in open eyes and mouth is the equivalent to a needle stick injury and has to be taken seriously 

After a shower, a failed blood taking effort by the hospice doctor, a long talk to occupational health and cup of hot tea, my sense of humour slowly started to reappear.....just !

 

Once I nursed a psychiatric patient who would intermittently delve down his pants , grab a large and rather wet turd and fling it at the nearest nurse. 

The staff would get used to the melodramatic warning cries of “incoming !!” as turd left hand and a blob of brown hurtled through the air of the ward like a smelly hand grenade .

* photo of Dorothy tonight , sleeping in front of Trendy Carol’s log burner

 

A Dialogue

 

My husband left back in the summer of 2018....three years this summer and I’ve been thinking for a good while now that I was still a bit stuck with the anger of how he left rather than the why he left. 

I’ve already written about my recent approach to his mother where hurts were put to bed so it only seemed   Common sense that he and I finally had a dialogue of sorts sans blame and anger.

The impetus for me to initiate the contact came from a recent video call I set up with a dear friend who has a cancer. He had lost considerable weight since our last meeting and I blurted out the fact as soon as I saw him......like a broken hearted loon . Our conversation ,as conversations always do with friends that are deeply loved, then descended into gossip and chat and laughter but the call left me with the aching reminder of the fragility of the every day and underlined the pointless nature of prolonged anger and hurt when a relationship goes south. 

The dialogue I had today with my ex husband The “ Prof” wasn’t prolonged, but it was to the point. It was honest and most importantly .....and by celebrating the good times ......it was mutually kind.

Time to swim on.........in that big river......

From Now On

Some lovely welsh voices for a Sunday

6 am and off to work

Just bumped into Mrs Trellis who was out with Blue

It is very cold and she had her usual tall babble hat on and a matching super long scarf

She told me that she missed Church so very much

The cockerel is still alive and crowing lustily from the graveyard

I told her

 

Blossom of snow, may you bloom and grow

Long day

Home at 9 pm

Listened to Christopher Plummer in the dark, as I ate homemade soup

.......Now Off to bed 

 

Lazy Blog today

 

I found this video

Mary is now the only survivor 

Bittersweet to watch again 

I’m working three long day shifts together so up at 5.30 making soup in the slow cooker for my supper. My “ big gay team” got fourth last night which was bloody great, not bad cos we are up to 90 participants from all over the world......mave was in my group, suffice to say the conversation was rather .....ribald