You what love?

Just been stuck behind a man in the supermarket, I would try and get around him but he would stray like a drunkard into my path. It gave me the opportunity to have a sneaky peak at his shopping and on the top of his ready meal was a bottle of Oatex ear wax clearer, no point then I thought of asking him to move.

Carriage return

Back to work today industrious at the computer and keyboard which made me think, it's not 'hard at the coal face' anymore but 'hard at the type face'

I’ll be with you in the Squeezing of a Lemon

To a little Italian restaurant on Friday night and when I say little I mean little I daresay that if you held one end of your spaghetti on one wall the other end would meet the next but we love it.
It's an intimate place next door to the chippie and close by to the betting shop so the passing trade, if one was a snob, could be classed as 'down at heel'.
It was a busy night in the restaurant and we were politely asked to move from our space hogging table of four on to a table for two which was understandable and we obliged. Taking our warm seats and crumbly table were a strange little family who didn't appear to have set foot in a Wimpy let alone an Italian. AND they broke the unwritten rule of asking us what we were eating a few times! I may sound nasty but let me continue...
...when their meals arrived the chap in their party leaned over to us and asked for the black pepper and I thought how wonderful. Here was a man who to all intents and purposes looked like he would say 'brown bread is for poofs' would say 'boo' to a goose and would probably ask to have his crusts cut off his trousers but here he was asking for black pepper, I could have kissed him for making me eat my words.
Elizabeth David I thought can sleep soundly in her grave (her coffin no doubt placed on a bed of rocket leaves) Britain is no longer the place it was in her day where olive oil was 'ointment for ear wax' - now, what a fab name that would be for a gastro pub!

Chin Chin

I was allowed to slip away early from work on Wednesday afternoon due to the bad weather and to cut a long story short ended up in the village pub with the wife having a quick sherry. Well, four hours laters we were trotting home drunk as lords and very light in purse. Oh what a wonderful lost afternoon we had. I met a remarkable lady train driver, two star crossed lovers (an american lady who has to go back to America on Monday to sort a visa so she can return and marry her companion a man many years her junior!)and some men of the woods - hunting, shooting types who are going to teach me how to kill pheasants with my bare hands and put up a bivouac in an inclement wind. Honestly.
It was marvellous but we can't do it too often, if we did the wife and I will be singing the Fairytale of New York by Easter.

I've always been a bit of a stranger to the world of glamour, I tend to be left at the docks as the fashion boat leaves port and I'm a follower of the famous quote "Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes" so I love any opportunity which requires one to look like the back end of a bus. So it was this morning. The ice age cometh and with heavy snow and a walk to work in the offing I stepped out of the door bundled up in hat, boots and knitwear. You could not tell if I was man, woman or beast but to an educated eye I would possibly pass as a cross between Arthur Scargill and Uncle Bulgaria.
However, as I trudged along I met a lady in fur hat, matching gloves and coat, natty boots and drifts of foundation on her chops. She looked remarkably out of place as she negotiated the icy wastelands of the home counties. She did not look the type that walked anywhere but lord knows she had an outfit for it.

Thrilled to receive the new Hugh Fearnley River Cottage Everday Cook book for Christmas which encourages us all to source locally and eat seasonably, hurrah for that but whilst reading the publication notes inside I was shocked to discover the book itself had been printed in Italy! - errr, hello!

Great tits

Feed the birds, tuppence a bag - well that's wrong for starters, try twelve quid and you wont be far wrong. I'm a feeder and I replenished my seed stock at the garden centre yesterday and came away light of purse. So you wont be surprised to hear that I was cursing the sparrows as I watched them from the safe distance of the kitchen window as they scattered my seed to the wind. "That's 0.0001p worth of food that is" I yelled as I thumped the window as the bleeders sorted the wheat from the chaff and let the rest spill to the ground.
Thing is feeding the birds these days is a bit of a 'lifestyle' statement. Fine chuck bread out if all you want is a black bird or two and the occasional wren but if you want neighbour envy you've got to put the time in, chucking out white sliced is comparable to putting an old fridge in your front garden - common! I've got my fat balls, nyger seed and songbird seed and as a result I've got blue and great tits, blackbirds, starlings, robins, green finch, gold finch, common finch, sparrows, ducks (yes, ducks), crows and a pheasant, woodpecker and I am pleased to announce, I have got thrush. But it's a costly business.
I find my birds raise my profile in the neighbourhood. So you can imagine my delight that next door but one has moved. They had ornate bird feeders about their garden and I would look at the flocks they attracted with binoculars, I was a twitcher all right, a curtain twitcher planning ways to lull their birds into my garden!

When you hear the beep

A strange phenomenon is happening to me at the supermarket. Just lately most of my compulsory purchases are up in the noughties. Once upon a time my shopping would total odd thruppeny bits if you know what I mean. It would come to x pounds and 87p for example but these days I’m hitting the nail on the head, £10 on Saturday and just today my crème fraiche (low fat) and packet of linguine came to £2.00 dead on in M&S. Now what’s going on? I’d be interested to know if it’s happening to others or if it’s just me. Is there a surge in electricity inside me that knocks the digits up when I supermarket sweep or is it the work of the paranormal? Am I receiving household management from beyond? Is Mrs Beeton guiding my hand at the deli counter? It could of course be a trickle effect of the VAT adjustment but that would be boring.

Bloomers are off!

I've given up bread for Jesus. For lent this year I have looked at my daily indulgence and find the one thing that plays a big role in my diet is bread. It's something I (funnily enough) have daily, so I've skipped that line in the Lord's prayer so I'm not led into temptation.
Giving up the sauce would be better but just not workable, I attend too many functions and I would fall at the first hurdle or pop of the champagne cork. So it's bread in all its guises that's been given the heave ho.

Fleeting glances

To the Roundhouse last night to see Fleet Foxes, well to be honest I didn't see much of them because it was a complete sell out and I had standing tickets so for the business end of the concert I was staring and being rammed by other people's business ends. They were exceptionally good and a finer live sound I have never heard - except Eddi Reader of course.
As it was the hottest ticket in town last night I expected a few celebs to be peppered in the audience. The only two I saw however was the Times tv critic Caitlin Moran and BBC regional news presenter Mike Ramsden it was hardly the brace I had in mind, no rubbing shoulders with Marianne Faithful cradling a slimline tonic for me.
I was a very lucky girl leaving the gig however, I was caught by the cops for a misdemeanor in Regents Park. I was let go with a slap on the wrist - after a rubber gloved search - and am left now with a lasting impression and nothing but admiration for the police.

Frankly Mr Shankly

Oscar winner Danny Boyle looks more like Morrissey than Morrissey does himself these days.

On the buses

Got the bus this morning and was taken aback. The driver was English. Now, before you scream Chakrabarti! Chakrabarti! I'm not being racist - some of my best friends are of an Eastern european extraction - it was just a bit of a shock to ask for the stop that I wanted and it being understood. I wondered to myself if this was the start of the mass exodus back to Poland? It certainly was nice to have the English chap drive for a change for two reasons, one he did not drive at breakneck speed and two, the bus was decently late, only five or ten minutes - just enough time for a scone and ginger beer instead of a flask of bloody borscht.

Yes chef!

I happened to watch Master Chef the other night. I'm not keen. I watched it a few years back when it first started back again but was turned off immediately. We should be trying to teach our children to eat properly and that Toad man sets a bad example, it turns my tummy to watch him shovel a spoonful in. Not only have we a nation of latchkey children but a nation of laptray ones and the presenters of masterchef certainly wont get the family back around the table.
Anyway, I digress, what shocked me the most about Masterchef 2009 is how it has progressed from being a slightly more high brow version of Ready Steady Cook to something more resembling the X Factor - one could almost call it "Pot Idol"
"It means everything to me", "Cooking is my life" "It's all I've ever wanted to do" oh dearie me, where have we heard these words before?
And what is this food anyway? can you imagine me serving up froth for the wife? No, no, no.

1000!

This is my 1000th post- yay! But the sad fact is I am devastated. I have had the most dreadful dream. I was married to Hugh FW which under normal circumstances would be a lovely experience, I would be a free range organic bird trotting off to the shops with a blank cheque book but in my dream he was a brute of a man. He caught me straining strawberries by the Aga and my dear readers that was it. I fought back bravely and I shouted that "I'm bored here, you wont let me do anything!" and then I woke up.
Last night the wife and I tried to buy some Bach flower rescue remedy in Tesco, the shelves were clear which I took to be a sharp indicator of how far the Recession Depression had hit. The shoppers in my local Tesco are normally a chipper bunch but clearly things were on the fritz.
The rescue remedy is supposed to chill you out and help in times of anxiety but the label is wrapped around the bottle so you can't see inside. Thing is, you don't know how much you have got left so you are in a constant state of worry that it's just about to run out - if anything is going to get your knickers in a twist then that will.

Have you seen this man?

Peculiar day. I stood at the bus stop this morning and it were as if I had been given a new pair of spectacles because everything seemed so vivid and - dare I say it - beautiful. I was listening to some of my 'housey, housey' music and I looked up into the air at one of the more uplifting movements and a murder of crows streamed over head, it would have brought a tear to my eye were it not for the fact that I am terribly cold hearted.
As I stepped off of the bus (that was late, but no matter) the bus shelter had been messed up with graffiti but instead of my customary 'tut' and resentment I marvelled at the use of purple on a dark green background - almost like the Wimbledon Tennis corporate colours.
Lunch was odd. Shanna and I drove to the local M&S choosing the back roads to avoid traffic and as we weaved our way into the back of the retail park (no swings and slides here though kids) we felt as though we had arrived on a crime re-enactment scene. A young girl was walking with a ruck sack (probably to her death) a BMW raced in front of us and builders straight out of central casting toyed with their lorries, all it needed was an old lady to walk out with a shopping trolley and a yap yap dog and we would be there. It was most peculiar. It was almost too normal to be real.

Who do you think you are?

I’ve been a bit off radar recently because I’ve been climbing my family tree and to be honest I’m a bit stuck up in one of the branches. I’ve joined genesreunited and am trying to hack back and find my ancestors. There’s been no pots of gold yet, no royal blood or notorious criminas (not strictly true but I’m keeping schtum) but I daresay it’s just a matter of time.
And it really is ‘time’. To track people you need to look at the Census reports which were taken every ten years. The 1911 one has just been released and us geneologists have been at it like frenzied piranhas.
My Grandfather Bertie Burnham (what a fab name) managed to marry, have three kids and move to the next street in a decade and it made me wonder how much I have done since 1999......not a huge amount.
What’s great about all this ‘who do you think you are’ stuff is that lots of people have already done the hard work, as I’ve come a bit late to the party great swathes of my tree have been completed so I can just copy and paste – it’s a virtual bloody leylandii.

Look! I filmed ghost children!

One in the eye of a needle for the atheists

You've got to do this

In Bruges for lunch

In Bruges for lunch, originally uploaded by LifeForLola.