Friday 29 July 2016

Colour bright



The jigsaw I’m doing at present is entitled “The Swinging Sixties”. It has a scene of London around Carnaby Street at the period. For younger readers Carnaby Street was the fashion centre of the world then, or so it seemed.

What really strikes you is the exuberance of the colours. There seemed a veritable explosion of colour at the time. The Fifties had been a very cream & beige time, now bright intense colour arrived. I find myself smiling. The very exuberance cheers me. Admittedly we did go a bit over the top in the sixties with some very luminous, clashing colour combinations when psychedelia arrived.

The other thing I remember so well is the white knee high boots. I was so envious of them. When I did finally get a pair I soon scuffed them, leaving black marks cutting through the white. And worn with them the oh so short mini skirts. Not the thing for me to wear these days with my knee braces & grey hair.

The 60s did seem a time of hope & energy. That’s not to say it was entirely wonderful. It was also the time of anti-Vietnam protests too. It was, though, a time to be young, the new creature a teenager, in this country. It was the time of the “Buy British” campaign & the Union Jack flew on everything & everywhere, as seen in this jigsaw.

I suppose to some extent the vividness of the colour in my memory is partly because I was young then, & when you’re young you seem to live life so much intensely.

I sometimes wonder if everybody, however old they are, has their period when things seem in brilliant technicolour & full of hope. I like to bet you that time was when they were teenagers, when they were discovering their place in the world & the possibilities seemed endless. Reality sets in later.

Thursday 28 July 2016

Eat Well for Less?



Last night we watched “Eat Well for Less?” on BBC1 at 8pm.

We’ve seen a few of these programmes. The way to cut food costs keep coming back to the same things.

1.     At least try shop own brands. They are a lot cheaper & often taste just as good. The most expensive is not always the best nutritionally or tastewise.

2.     Prepare your own fresh vegetables. It’s amazing how much is put on the price to have them ready peeled & chopped. What is more they don’t last as well & so often end up in the bin.

3.     Ignore sell buy dates. Use your eyes & nose instead. It’s easy to tell if veg has gone off. It becomes soft & slimy. Bread goes green. Eggs float.

4.     Grate your own cheese. It only takes minutes to grate, but the cheese keeps better & it’s a lot cheaper.

5.     Do your own cooking from scratch. Takeaways are for convenience/treats, not every day.

6.     Shop with a list & stick to it. Decide what you are going to cook the week ahead & buy just those ingredients you are going to need for those meals.

7.     Tinned & frozen foods are just as good for you as fresh. Indeed often they are fresher than the “fresh” as they are tinned/frozen within hours of harvesting rather than the days it takes to get into the shops. What is more it often means less waste as you can just take out what you need from a packet of frozen veg/fruit, not buy for example a whole cauli/broccoli & then throw out the rest as it’s gone off.

8.     Eat together as a family. That way you use one lot of fuel to cook & the person doing the cooking can put all that love & effort  into one really good meal instead of feeling they’re on a culinary treadmill.

9.     Crisps, chocolate, cakes etc. are for treats, not every day. To eat too much of them is bad for your health, not to mention your waistline.

I have to say my mind boggles how some of these people food shop. Maybe they’ve never known what it is to shop on a small budget. You have to be inventive & canny with prices if you are going to eat well then. Some people end up saving over £100 a week. I can’t even imagine spending that much on a week’s food to save that much.

Maybe part of this reaction is due to the fact, we last night had a Sardine & Tomato Flan for dinner. This old favourite was discovered in the days when money was really tight for us. One full size flan, using one 120g tin of sardines, one tomato, a little milk & egg, makes a satisfying meal for four hungry people when accompanied by some veg.

Admittedly some people do have some excuse for being extravagant. On one show, the parents had a young child who had been in & out of hospital all her life & so tended to indulge her when she was home, to compensate for what the child has had to endure. Yesterday’s mother had had a childhood where food was always running out before the end of the week with the result they had sugar sandwiches as there was nothing else left in the house to eat. As a result she doesn’t feel safe unless she does a big shop & her cupboards are groaning with food. However, there does come a position in between, where all have an adequate amount to eat, love can be shown in the preparation, without the adverse health effects of overindulgence, often with foods that are nutritional bad or there being large amounts ending up being thrown out to feed the rubbish bin.

Tuesday 26 July 2016

Disruption ahead



We hear the news. Our village pub is going to be closed for renovations. It will once more have bedrooms as it did in the 17th century.

We’ve known for a year or so the place was going to be done up. It is once more to be a fully functioning hotel. The bar area is to be extended, loos & kitchen improved, the garden easier for wheelchair users. That’s on top of a new roof & various essential repairs that have been needed for years. It has been badly neglected by previous owners.

However, our landlord had thought the work would be done with the pub still functioning as a pub. We were rather sceptical, feeling they would surely need to close for some of the time as inevitably there will be a lot of noise & rubble around, which might be dangerous for any customers, especially the elderly & disabled. Yesterday we were told the decision has been made to close for 3-6 months starting in September.

On a Monday, we regularly meet up with two other couples & Tony M, the power station worker, at the village pub. Much of yesterday’s visit was spent trying to decide where we should meet up during the closure.

There are three other pubs in the village, one by the port which would mean everyone driving there except Tony, one with some foul-mouthed locals, & one dominated by big screens & is expected to be closed for refurbishment at the same time. Which to try? We think of other places. There’s another pub not too far away but that has the sort of reputation we wouldn’t feel happy to leave our less than two year old car in the car park. It’s in a deprived area with many drug addicts, disgruntled youth & petty criminals so we question what state our car would be in when we were ready to go home. Snatchems, a pub most of us would happily go to, is out of the way, especially for Tony who travels on a bicycle. Do we try a Morecambe pub? That would be on the way home for Tony & on the bus route for those nervous of driving. I can see when the pub closes we’ll be doing a tour of different venues different weeks until we find somewhere we can all feel reasonably happy in. We just hope our usual venue isn’t going to be spoilt in the renovations, no big screens or loud music, & we will be able to go back again at the end of the work.

Saddest of all, was when we inquired as to what will happen to the staff if the place is going to be closed for so long. Most are to be made redundant. Four key workers are to be kept somehow, two bar staff, two kitchen staff, but that doesn’t include the landlord, who at present doesn’t know what his position will be. This really upsets us as we’ve finally found a good landlord, who was making the pub improve its standards & attract more visitors. He’s settling in nicely & we’re gaining a certain affection for him. At the moment he fears he’s looking forward to unemployment. We’d thought he would be regarded as a key worker, maybe doing some fill-in work for other pubs in the chain when landlords wanted holidays or were ill. He’d certainly been looking forward to overseeing the transformation & building up the business once the work was done. At the moment it seems not.