We spent most of the day in the garden where I planted a new clematis and a small strawberry bed, lobbed a few branches off a japanese quince, hoed the new veg patch, weeded a shaded bed full of alkanet and raked and sowed wildflower seeds in their place. For lunch we picnicked with bread, cheese and meats, and late this afternoon we sat on our drive and spoke to our neighbours (I weeded the drive while there).
Worn out now and not sure what’s for tea.
The 2 minute silence fell as I was tottering homeward with the weekly backpack of groceries, over a flagstone as it happens commemorating a VC. One house had hung out flags, but forbye that I noticed nothing special, just the usual scatter of folk out walking or exercising.
We had pizza courtesy of a local pub tonight. Nothing really around here for VE day, but we're a very ethnically diverse area.
Although the council are encouraging us to do so I'm not swapping the council tax bill from paper to on-line: along with the annual mortgage statement, that and our driving licences are the only physical proof of address we have these days for official things.
We had our glasses of Prosecco and toasted peace in Europe, and while we were doing it my brother and s-i-l arrived with a load of groceries, so we had a nice long (suitably-distanced) natter with them. And it didn't rain - having a Bank Holiday on a Friday must have confused the rain-gods ...
By the time they left, it was time to think about cooking supper (lamb steaks, roasted cauliflower and carrots and new potatoes), so for the first day in a while, I didn't amble.
Yesterday I made, as an experiment, a lemon and polenta cake (ordinary flour is still hard to come by round here, besides which Mr Nen is gluten intolerant) which turned out very well indeed, even though I had to substitute the ground almonds (also hard to come by) with cornflour. We set it out on a table outside our house as part of the socially distanced street party, which was a great success - bunting strung between lamp posts and along walls and garages, everyone with tables and chairs outside; scones, jam, cream, cake, pots of tea, glasses of wine, music and a spot of socially distanced dancing were also involved and some of the more mature neighbours had some displays of wartime memorabilia.
We had green Thai curry for tea, which with hindsight was a slight anomaly - but isn't Friday Night Curry a tradition these days?
A walk to the local shops for milk and bread is on the agenda today, together with lawn mowing. Collections of our green garden waste bins have recommenced, for which we're grateful.
We are blessed with many brass and silver bands around here, and one of the local tutors played the Last Post from our War Memorial (a replica of the Cenotaph, on top of a hill in the village) which we stood and listened to. It was very moving, hearing the notes filtered through the trees, and reminding us of the devastation wrought on so many villages like ours.
Then I went back to cursing my sewing - I'm making scrubs tops for local care homes, from old bedding, but just as I began to feel confident again (I haven't done any dressmaking in decades, just cushion covers and puppet costumes) I was cursed with two cut from high-thread count, pure cotton. Like trying to sew cardboard Anything that could go wrong, did, sometimes twice! Done now, thank the Lord.
After lunch we took our walk, and at the bottom of the path got talking to an old chap (86) who had lived all his life in the village, apart from his wartime stint with the Glosters. Really fascinating...
And supper was a Moghul egg curry (the butcher didn't have any Moghuls, sadly, we had to trap our own, but the eggs are so free-range we sometimes find the chickens in our yard) with chutney wale aloo and lemon rice. A definite yum.
I've looked at some of these initiatives for supporting NHS or care staff and worried about them, because most of the people I've known who have started are now wondering if and when they can stop.
Did you both consciously eat curry for supper to remember those who were still in concentration camps maintaining the Thai/Burma railway they'd built and in other places across Asia? VJ Day didn't happen until August.
We had Chinese stir fry yesterday, followed by gin and tonic yesterday. Not really a nod to anything. I think some streets round here might have had virtually distancing street parties, but this one, though much quieter, still has a lot of traffic. Although it was a bank holiday my writing group met via zoom as usual and we had the two minutes silence in the middle.
Yesterday was our wedding anniversary, but we celebrated that on Wednesday as my husband was working till eight at home yesterday and has gone into work today for a similar long shift.
Nothing much of VE Day here though one house put up bunting. A few other streets nearby did have socially-distanced parties including one we could faintly hear till 11.15pm.
A strange day for me as, after my morning shopping amble, I had to conduct a (non-Covid-related) funeral at the local Crematorium, which was open even though it was a Bank Holiday. One good point was that my route had to pass a Farm Shop which I haven't felt free to visit during lockdown. They aren't stocking everything they usually have but I came away with some good meat, veg and (Piglet please note) PIES.
I hope I haven't already posted all this upthread ...
My mum and dad got married a few days after VJ Day. Mum couldn’t have her hair permed because everything was shut (apparently, you had to leave your hair to settle for some days after perming in those days).
One of our neighbours played a selection of wartime and other songs in his garden yesterday afternoon. All afternoon. Very loudly. I was OK from ‘Kiss me goodnight, Sergeant Major’, ‘We’re going to hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line’ and ‘Run rabbit, run’ to ‘A nightingale sang in Berkeley Square’ but gave up at ‘I’ve got a lovely bunch of coconuts’. I was trying to hold out for ‘London Pride’, but I didn’t make it. Perhaps it had been on earlier.
Yesterday I made, as an experiment, a lemon and polenta cake (ordinary flour is still hard to come by round here, besides which Mr Nen is gluten intolerant) which turned out very well indeed, even though I had to substitute the ground almonds (also hard to come by) with cornflour.
Orange and polenta cake is my go-to for relatives on gluten free diets, and it turns out very tasty.
We have taken to ordering 16kg bags of flour online for our daily baking.
I need to go and do some watering in the garden and this afternoon will be sowing some veg seeds. Not as much gardening as yesterday though, as my tachycardia took a hit; my heart rate took several hours to settle down after all the exertion in the heat!
I told you to take it easy, Heavenlyannie! Seriously though, do look after yourself.
We used to buy 10kg bags of flour in Costco to feed the bread-machine; the last time we did before David died, they didn't have any 10kg bags, so we had to buy a 20kg one. As it was still more than half full when I sold the house, I ended up giving it to a neighbour.
Once all this is over I must get a bread-machine and get back into bread making again - I'm really missing it!
Just had a lovely, suitably-distanced visit from my nephew and his partner; it was really warm and a bit muggy sitting in the garden, and then took myself off for an amble.
I think we could maybe do with a thunderstorm to clear the air, but preferably not until S's laundry has dried ...
Be careful with the sowing, @Heavenlyannie. In my experience (not giving medical advice, just sharing my experience of postural tachycardia, in case it is similar for you), staying seated on the ground while sowing is better than standing and bending down, or you can black out and fall when you straighten up. Better in the evening too. I have not found a way to avoid tachycardia gardening in the sun - gardening seems to be the worst, because it's so easy to think you're just pottering about, not going anywhere far, but then you get absorbed and do more and more, and it really does take a toll, especially when the weather is hot.
Be careful with the sowing, @Heavenlyannie. In my experience (not giving medical advice, just sharing my experience of postural tachycardia, in case it is similar for you), staying seated on the ground while sowing is better than standing and bending down, or you can black out and fall when you straighten up. Better in the evening too. I have not found a way to avoid tachycardia gardening in the sun - gardening seems to be the worst, because it's so easy to think you're just pottering about, not going anywhere far, but then you get absorbed and do more and more, and it really does take a toll, especially when the weather is hot.
Thanks. I’ve been sitting where possible for weeding and sowing. I have found gardening the most difficult thing so far for the same reasons as you state and I think the heat that is making it especially hard - I seem to have lost my temperature control (this has happened before when I was overweight and borderline hypothyroid).
Tachycardia not so bad today, it has not been as high and is returning to normal at rest. Mind you, I haven’t been hoeing and weeding today.
Glad it's not so bad today, HeavenlyAnnie. You'll know this already as a nurse, but another thing with heat is it makes your blood vessels dilate, which is not so good when they are already struggling to pump your blood to your heart efficiently. I've always struggled with heat, so I guess I've learnt to adapt over the years, and I try to always avoid being in the sun, but it's easy to forget sometimes, especially in the disrupted routine of lockdown. I have a huge, floppy sunhat which I need to remember to wear more often. I try to have cold showers too and cold baths to calm down my body too, and wear leggings to give some compression. I really miss being able to go swimming.
For me, the worst gardening thing is clipping my very high hedge - I have no idea why raising one's arms should make tachycardia worse, but it really does, and seems to be the case in general for people in the Facebook POTS group I'm in too, so not just a quirk of my body. And clipping a hedge always seems like such an easy little job, and quite fun - I get really into it. It's only afterwards that I realise it wasn't such a good idea! I really hope your tachycardia gets better soon and doesn't linger.
Ahh, the raising arms issue! One thing guaranteed to give me tachycardia is carrying the washing downstairs. I noticed this gave me tachycardia when I had the covid infection and thought it was just fatigue, about a week before I realised I had postural tachycardia.
On a lighter note: my wife made some lovely scones which we had out in the garden this afternoon with strawberry jam ("Tiptree" of course) and clotted cream – and tea of course. My late mother would have said that it was “very civilised”!
Scones, cream and jam sounds lovely, I really need to find some time to do some baking (just another week or so of marking to get through).
I met up with my family for a zoom quiz at 6pm, which was nice as I usually only see them at Christmas. Then we had pasta and chicken in pesto for tea, cooked by my fifteen year old son.
I did some baking last week with some of the nettles and wild garlic I picked in the woods - I added it to flour and cheese and yogurt, and made flatbreads, though not properly flat, as I used self-raising flour. It's weird how flour is so hard to get now - mine I already had from last year, as I don't use it much.
I went to Asda yesterday evening, for the first time in two weeks, because it was finally very quiet, I guess because of the bank holiday. I realised there was so much I needed to buy, and I wouldn't be able to carry it all home if I bought everything on my list, so I did two trips, which seemed a bit wrong in current circumstances, but also Asda was practically empty, so I thought I might as well make the most of it, rather than go back another day when it's busier and harder to keep distance. There are some customers who seem either not to care about social distancing or not understand it. But yesterday there was only me and a couple of other customers in the store, so much easier to keep a distance.
... scones which we had out in the garden this afternoon with strawberry jam ("Tiptree" of course) ...
Ah - Tiptree jam* ...
It was always a little ritual whenever we were in Colchester to take D's mum to the cafe at the Tiptree factory for either cream tea or lunch - they also do a pretty awesome Ploughman's.
<sigh>
* Actually I prefer raspberry or blackberry - I don't like the texture of strawberry jam.
It was always a little ritual whenever we were in Colchester to take D's mum to the cafe at the Tiptree factory for either cream tea or lunch - they also do a pretty awesome Ploughman's.
They now have quite a chain of tearooms as well - and a tea-bus! There is a fascinating little museum at the factory, too.
Actually I prefer raspberry or blackberry - I don't like the texture of strawberry jam.
Heretick. BTW Their "Tawny" marmalade beats all others.
The sun has never agreed with me, and the heart 'events' last year (that led to the implanting of an ICD), and the year before, both followed becoming exhausted and unwell in the heat.
One evening this week, although unaware of having been overheated, I could feel my heart racing a bit. Presumably the pacing was corrected by the ICD, thank God before it got bad enough for the defibrillator to kick in. Pottering for too long in the garden in the morning heat also set off a migraine this week.
I miss spring and autumn. We just seem to have summer or winter weather nowadays - currently in the same week!
Yesterday I made, as an experiment, a lemon and polenta cake (ordinary flour is still hard to come by round here, besides which Mr Nen is gluten intolerant) which turned out very well indeed, even though I had to substitute the ground almonds (also hard to come by) with cornflour.
Orange and polenta cake is my go-to for relatives on gluten free diets, and it turns out very tasty.
Thanks to you both for mentioning lemon and polenta/orange and polenta cake. I’d never heard of it, but my wife avoids gluten, so I went googling and found a great looking recipe for orange (with lime) polenta cake that I think she would really like. And bonus—it uses honey instead of refined sugar, which my wife also generally tries to avoid. Had I seen it before today, I might’ve tried to make it for Mothers’ Day, but her birthday isn’t too far off, so I’m looking forward to surprising her with it.
Did you both consciously eat curry for supper to remember those who were still in concentration camps maintaining the Thai/Burma railway they'd built and in other places across Asia? VJ Day didn't happen until August.
No, not at all - we usually have 'curry' of some sort about three times a week. We had lots of beautiful eggs and as we'd already eaten mushroom omelettes, and frittata (on different nights!) egg curry it had to be.
Delia does a lovely one with lime pickle and lentils...
We got up at four thirty this morning and went for a long walk along the local river. A little cold, but so quiet and so much bird song. Going back to bed now after croissants and coffee for breakfast. For once it felt well deserved.
Rough winds are currently shaking the darling buds of May. But accompanied by overnight rain at least (I can practically hear the slurping sounds from the garden).
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed...
I only realised this morning that I should have paid more attention to the date of Dad's VE day leave. It snowed when the ferry from Belgium drew into Dover harbour, and I somehow had the date May 4th in my mind, which would imply that his group knew the date very early. Or maybe that he had leave due anyway, and it got bundled up with VE day. It definitely had a connection with February 3rd, though.
Same here, very warm and sunny still, but the forecast is it will cool down and maybe rain later. I will go for my walk when it cools down, because I prefer the cool. I also like wearing my raincoat, so I can put my phone in the pocket and it counts my steps.
I have filled a garden sack with precut bramble, and stared at the ground elder, and vinca and self sown bramble. Then given up on any idea of kneeling and weeding and fetched the glyphosate. The ground elder and vinca are invaders from the previous owner's garden next door, where he kept the national collection of vintage motorbikes, and could not weed them. The bramble is my fault. I didn't pick any of the abundant crop last year as it wouldn't have been eaten as part of the invalid diet, and I was too tired to pick it into punnets and give it away. I don't expect the brambles to be true to the parent, though I know they self-pollinate, so I can't give the plants away.
I am led to the corner shop to get bread for lunch then went to the church Zoom service and chatted afterwards. One of the nice things about being online is that we get to chat with our missionaries abroad who are now joining our services.
Now we’re about to have our usual Sunday lunch of bread and cheese.
Mind you, I'm being quite modest about Sunday lunch today - Sossidge & Mash, with onion Gravy.
Rather muggy and cloudy here, with possible Water from the Sky later, and perhaps even a flood - high tide at 330pm, but being pushed up the river by a NE breeze...I have taken the precaution of moving the Episcopal Chariot to higher ground...
The rain woke me up last night. It's good for the plants but the lawn will need cutting again. (Especially as Mr Dragon has literal hayfever.)
We had roast gammon with veg (quite good actually for a cheap supermarket one) followed by Indian sweets picked up at the local emporium when I went yesterday to get ingredients for last night's curry feast. I even managed bahjis! They also supplied the vital ingredient for the parsley sauce, as mine is still in the awaiting germination stage.
We had leftovers for lunch, as we do every Sunday. Today it was Jack Monroe's smoked mackerel kedgeree, remaining from dinner on Friday.
I am sick to death of cooking twice a day six days a week.
It was seven days until I told Mr RoS he could cook his own tea on Sundays and gave up the Sunday Roast in favour of leftovers.
Supermarket delivery due tomorrow, so we really have no leftovers, apart from those where I cooked double portions to put in the freezer. Today it was a lamb steak.
Anyway Mr Puzzler must have his Sunday lunch at 1 pm, even though the other six days he won’t eat his main meal till evening. So no more cooking for me today.
Very cool and windy but not wet so far. I haven’t ventured out! Yesterday evening there were heavy thunderstorms in West Wales with some flash flooding in Carmarthen. Nothing here.
The temperatures here have taken a nose-dive: S. said it was 4° when she got up, and when I surfaced there were little white things falling from the sky. It's now gone up to 7°, and the sun seems to be trying to put in an appearance, so I think I'll go and amble while the going's good.
When I asked S. what she fancied for supper last night, she grinned rather sheepishly and said, "I've had a couple of guilty thoughts ..." Strangely enough, I'd been having exactly the same guilty thoughts - so we ordered a Chinese takeaway.
As we've got a few veggies that could really do with being used, I'm going yo make a ratatouille-type thing for this evening, possibly with pasta.
It's been 22°C all day here in the West Country - I am waiting for it to get cooler.
Bread and cheese is one of my favourite meals - I had it yesterday for lunch and am having it now for lunch. I bought a variety of my favourite cheeses from Asda the other day, and a sourdough boule, and am eating two slices of the bread with four different cheeses: Cambozola, Jarlsberg, Port Salut and Manchego. With some olives and tomato and grapes.
We have bread and cheese on sundays as pre-lockdown we went to the 11.30 service, which finished at 1pm and then we chatted over coffee before driving home for 2pm. This was far too late for cooked dinner so we always had bread and cheese. We like cheese; today we had a British Camembert-type, vintage cheddar, smoked Applewood, Camazola, some type of Welsh blue and a hard goats cheese.
On the way back from the crematorium on Friday, I took the opportunity to pop into a Farm Shop which was on the route. I roasted the lamb I bought there tonight, it was absolutely superb!
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Worn out now and not sure what’s for tea.
Although the council are encouraging us to do so I'm not swapping the council tax bill from paper to on-line: along with the annual mortgage statement, that and our driving licences are the only physical proof of address we have these days for official things.
By the time they left, it was time to think about cooking supper (lamb steaks, roasted cauliflower and carrots and new potatoes), so for the first day in a while, I didn't amble.
We had green Thai curry for tea, which with hindsight was a slight anomaly - but isn't Friday Night Curry a tradition these days?
A walk to the local shops for milk and bread is on the agenda today, together with lawn mowing. Collections of our green garden waste bins have recommenced, for which we're grateful.
Then I went back to cursing my sewing - I'm making scrubs tops for local care homes, from old bedding, but just as I began to feel confident again (I haven't done any dressmaking in decades, just cushion covers and puppet costumes) I was cursed with two cut from high-thread count, pure cotton. Like trying to sew cardboard
After lunch we took our walk, and at the bottom of the path got talking to an old chap (86) who had lived all his life in the village, apart from his wartime stint with the Glosters. Really fascinating...
And supper was a Moghul egg curry (the butcher didn't have any Moghuls, sadly, we had to trap our own, but the eggs are so free-range we sometimes find the chickens in our yard) with chutney wale aloo and lemon rice. A definite yum.
Mrs. S, planning Korean tacos for supper today
Did you both consciously eat curry for supper to remember those who were still in concentration camps maintaining the Thai/Burma railway they'd built and in other places across Asia? VJ Day didn't happen until August.
Yesterday was our wedding anniversary, but we celebrated that on Wednesday as my husband was working till eight at home yesterday and has gone into work today for a similar long shift.
A strange day for me as, after my morning shopping amble, I had to conduct a (non-Covid-related) funeral at the local Crematorium, which was open even though it was a Bank Holiday. One good point was that my route had to pass a Farm Shop which I haven't felt free to visit during lockdown. They aren't stocking everything they usually have but I came away with some good meat, veg and (Piglet please note) PIES.
I hope I haven't already posted all this upthread ...
One of our neighbours played a selection of wartime and other songs in his garden yesterday afternoon. All afternoon. Very loudly. I was OK from ‘Kiss me goodnight, Sergeant Major’, ‘We’re going to hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line’ and ‘Run rabbit, run’ to ‘A nightingale sang in Berkeley Square’ but gave up at ‘I’ve got a lovely bunch of coconuts’. I was trying to hold out for ‘London Pride’, but I didn’t make it. Perhaps it had been on earlier.
MMM
We have taken to ordering 16kg bags of flour online for our daily baking.
I need to go and do some watering in the garden and this afternoon will be sowing some veg seeds. Not as much gardening as yesterday though, as my tachycardia took a hit; my heart rate took several hours to settle down after all the exertion in the heat!
We used to buy 10kg bags of flour in Costco to feed the bread-machine; the last time we did before David died, they didn't have any 10kg bags, so we had to buy a 20kg one. As it was still more than half full when I sold the house, I ended up giving it to a neighbour.
Once all this is over I must get a bread-machine and get back into bread making again - I'm really missing it!
Just had a lovely, suitably-distanced visit from my nephew and his partner; it was really warm and a bit muggy sitting in the garden, and then took myself off for an amble.
I think we could maybe do with a thunderstorm to clear the air, but preferably not until S's laundry has dried ...
Tachycardia not so bad today, it has not been as high and is returning to normal at rest. Mind you, I haven’t been hoeing and weeding today.
For me, the worst gardening thing is clipping my very high hedge - I have no idea why raising one's arms should make tachycardia worse, but it really does, and seems to be the case in general for people in the Facebook POTS group I'm in too, so not just a quirk of my body. And clipping a hedge always seems like such an easy little job, and quite fun - I get really into it. It's only afterwards that I realise it wasn't such a good idea! I really hope your tachycardia gets better soon and doesn't linger.
I met up with my family for a zoom quiz at 6pm, which was nice as I usually only see them at Christmas. Then we had pasta and chicken in pesto for tea, cooked by my fifteen year old son.
I went to Asda yesterday evening, for the first time in two weeks, because it was finally very quiet, I guess because of the bank holiday. I realised there was so much I needed to buy, and I wouldn't be able to carry it all home if I bought everything on my list, so I did two trips, which seemed a bit wrong in current circumstances, but also Asda was practically empty, so I thought I might as well make the most of it, rather than go back another day when it's busier and harder to keep distance. There are some customers who seem either not to care about social distancing or not understand it. But yesterday there was only me and a couple of other customers in the store, so much easier to keep a distance.
It was always a little ritual whenever we were in Colchester to take D's mum to the cafe at the Tiptree factory for either cream tea or lunch - they also do a pretty awesome Ploughman's.
<sigh>
* Actually I prefer raspberry or blackberry - I don't like the texture of strawberry jam.
Heretick. BTW Their "Tawny" marmalade beats all others.
One evening this week, although unaware of having been overheated, I could feel my heart racing a bit. Presumably the pacing was corrected by the ICD, thank God before it got bad enough for the defibrillator to kick in. Pottering for too long in the garden in the morning heat also set off a migraine this week.
I miss spring and autumn. We just seem to have summer or winter weather nowadays - currently in the same week!
Many thanks!
No, not at all - we usually have 'curry' of some sort about three times a week. We had lots of beautiful eggs and as we'd already eaten mushroom omelettes, and frittata (on different nights!) egg curry it had to be.
Delia does a lovely one with lime pickle and lentils...
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed...
Cold and windy today.
I shall clean the house. (Shudder)
Now we’re about to have our usual Sunday lunch of bread and cheese.
Mind you, I'm being quite modest about Sunday lunch today - Sossidge & Mash, with onion Gravy.
Rather muggy and cloudy here, with possible Water from the Sky later, and perhaps even a flood - high tide at 330pm, but being pushed up the river by a NE breeze...I have taken the precaution of moving the Episcopal Chariot to higher ground...
We had roast gammon with veg (quite good actually for a cheap supermarket one) followed by Indian sweets picked up at the local emporium when I went yesterday to get ingredients for last night's curry feast. I even managed bahjis! They also supplied the vital ingredient for the parsley sauce, as mine is still in the awaiting germination stage.
I am sick to death of cooking twice a day six days a week.
It was seven days until I told Mr RoS he could cook his own tea on Sundays and gave up the Sunday Roast in favour of leftovers.
Anyway Mr Puzzler must have his Sunday lunch at 1 pm, even though the other six days he won’t eat his main meal till evening. So no more cooking for me today.
When I asked S. what she fancied for supper last night, she grinned rather sheepishly and said, "I've had a couple of guilty thoughts ..." Strangely enough, I'd been having exactly the same guilty thoughts - so we ordered a Chinese takeaway.
As we've got a few veggies that could really do with being used, I'm going yo make a ratatouille-type thing for this evening, possibly with pasta.
Bread and cheese is one of my favourite meals - I had it yesterday for lunch and am having it now for lunch. I bought a variety of my favourite cheeses from Asda the other day, and a sourdough boule, and am eating two slices of the bread with four different cheeses: Cambozola, Jarlsberg, Port Salut and Manchego. With some olives and tomato and grapes.
Tonight is chicken breasts stuffed with mozzarella and cheddar with roasted tomato and courgette.
The frankly indifferent clementines can be juiced, spiked with marmalade and poured over gammon.
I find I have 8 or 9 tins of coconut milk, plus mince, so that suggests some sort of keema curry.
Then it's probably time for fish again.