Saturday, June 29, 2019


Howzzat:



From the doorstep, of course.

There are lots more to come, because that’s the way peas behave. But we only have 11 days, as I must leave for England on the 11th. I think it’ll work out all right. I must find another recipe for the late-comers. Suggestions gratefully received. These first ones are about to go into a stir-fry supplied by the Hairy Bikers. I got all the way up to the top of Broughton Street this morning to buy some seafood and some more greenery, to join them. Then I had to lie down for a while.

My cleaner came bursting in yesterday full of excitement because there were apples on my apple tree.

I am sorry for yesterday’s silence. I got through the Italian lesson and the Personal Training and a trip to the supermarket and was then paralysed with Tired and went to bed at 6:30.

I haven’t done any knitting yesterday or today, but hope for a bit this evening, after my stir-fry.

Reading

I’ve finished “Nest of Vipers”. (It isn’t called quite that, in the translation I read, but you get the general idea.) It is the most specifically Catholic of the three texts on which our retreat was based, but perhaps a bit too French for my taste. My preference remains with the Kipling story, “The Gardener”. But I must re-read Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”. And maybe some more of her. Seriously good, if tough to swallow.

Of course I knew Kipling before, in the form of “If” and “the great grey-green greasy Limpopo”. And I knew that he had lost his son John in the so-called Great War. But the short stories were unexpected. For my 50p, I got an anthology of ten of them. So far, I haven’t read any others.

I felt I needed something light, today. A casual reference in today’s Financial Times sent me back to Tana French and I am re-reading (apparently) “The Trespasser”. It’s there in my Kindle archive, so I must have read it, but it is coming across as completely new, like “North and South”.

5 comments:

  1. I had this:
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/recipes/10922373/Sauteed-spring-vegetables-with-spices-recipe.html
    for dinner tonight, having picked a handful each of baby broad beans in their pods, sugar snaps and mange-tout from pots outside the back door. I had already eaten the green part of my asparagus so I added the peeled stems, finely sliced. It was absolutely delicious.

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    Replies
    1. That sounds seriously good. Thank you.

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  2. We never have any luck with peas but the courgettes have started firing on all cylinders and the makings of the first summer pudding is simmering on the hob.

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  3. My peas never do that well, so good for you! I am saving my last unread Tana French for a time when I really need it. Right now I am reading "Somewhere Towards the End" by Diana Athill. A quote about someone "She was an object lesson on the essential luck, whatever hardships may come their way, of those born able to make things."

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