3 July 2019

Snapshot

Yesterday...

In the late afternoon, I spent an hour carefully trimming our bay tree. It sits just outside our kitchen window and requires a haircut twice a year. Otherwise, it will block our view of the garden and obstruct the steps that link our two decks. A big pile of bay leaves was left - enough to supply every fine restaurant on this island. Instead, I filled our wheelie bin with them.

Shirley told me she was going to a local church hall to play netball with other "mature" ladies so our evening meal would need to be on the table earlier than usual. In Yorkshire, most of us call that evening meal "tea" for some reason. Most readers of this blog would call it dinner but in Yorkshire lunch is called dinner. Very confusing.

I put six pork sausages in the oven and a fistful of new potatoes in a pan to boil. I prepared a side salad and fried chopped onions in olive oil and butter. Pretty soon it was ready and I took our two plates to the dining room. We always eat tea at the table.

Afterwards, I did some more sweeping up of the bay leaf detritus and chatted with our neighbour Tony over the garden wall. Tony and his wife Jill have  been the best next door neighbours you could wish for and they have been our neighbours for exactly thirty years. We moved into this house on July 1st 1989.

Shirley went to netball and I hunkered down to watch the first half of the semi-final of the Women's World Cup from Lyons in France. England were playing the USA and there was much hope and expectation that we might get through to the final but America struck the first blow with a well-crafted goal finished by Christen Press. Ten minutes later England were level again with a goal from our main striker - Ellie White. 

The halftime whistle blew. I put my shoes on and began my mile long walk to "The Hammer and Pincers" for the Tuesday night quiz. It is mostly up hill - a long steady slog - reaching the flat section by High Storrs School. That's where I encountered my quiz mate Mick and we continued to the pub together.

He has on-going health concerns and is naturally worried about his physical condition and his future. This morning he is having a brain scan at one of the city's  big hospitals. He thinks he may be in the throes of Parkinson's. It is impossible to say to him - "Oh don't worry Mick - everything will be all right" because that might be a lie.

At the pub we  met up with Mike and watched the football match through to its end. It was a hard fought game and a great advertisement for women's football. America came out of it as deserved winners but England left the pitch with great credit. They had fought like real lionesses right to the end and even missed a penalty.

In the quiz that followed, I knew that Boris Johnson's girlfriend is called Carrie Symonds but I wasn't sure about the smallest of The Great Lakes. Was it Lake Erie or Lake Ontario? Unfortunately, it was the latter. And we did not work out the anagram. The clue was "female Oscar winner" and the answer was Marion Cotillard. We had never heard of her.

I caught the 88 bus back to Banner Cross and logged on to this laptop for a while. I read about a Kenyan stowaway tragically falling from an aeroplane over London. His dead body landed just feet away from a sunbather in Clapham. There he was soaking up the suburban garden rays in summery relaxation and "Whomp!" there's a frozen dead man beside him. This is the stuff of nightmares... but luckily I slept well last night and did not dream of falling to earth like a modern day Icarus.
The Clapham garden. See the indentation  in the path.

37 comments:

  1. Icarus? Frozen? Fell to earth?

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    Replies
    1. Oh! Should have checked first. OK He did fall to earth, but frozen?

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    2. An analogy does not have to mirror exactly Mr Dunham. The keypoint is that both men fell to Earth.

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  2. A day in the life of Yorkshire Pudding. Interesting. I had never heard of Marion Cotillard either, nor knew what she looked like until you so kindly showed us all. She reminds me of some actress from the forties but I could not tell yhou who, er, whom, er which one.

    I rather like the idea of Shirley ordering you around and you meekly complying.

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    Replies
    1. I like the idea of Ellie ordering you around with a bullwhip in her hand.

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  3. A good day, it sounds like.
    I wish you could go to one of my son's trivias. I wonder what you would think about it. He is very good at his job.

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    Replies
    1. Maybe one day we'll talk Neil and Shirley into visiting the Southeast and we'll all go to one of Hank's trivia nights! Wouldn't that be fun?

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    2. It would be even more fun if you buy the beer Jennifer!

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    3. If you traveled all this way I'd buy you all the beer you can drink! Deal?

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    4. You are a tempting temptress Jennifer!

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  4. Suggest the movie, The Good Year, with Marion Cotillard and Russell Crowe. Albert Finney also had a small part in it. Not the greatest movie ever made, but a fairly decent one. She won the Oscar for playing Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose.

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    Replies
    1. You know more about the cinema world than I do Mary. Thank you.

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  5. A dead body dropping out of the sky? That's crazy! Not sure what I would have done.

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    Replies
    1. He had climbed into the plane's undercarriage at Nairobi Airport in Kenya.

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  6. Marion Cotillard? I had no idea who she is, could be the name of a heroine of the French Revolution or a fashion designer or an architect or anyone else.
    This post was an interesting snapshot of your life. I will have to wait until September for our next pub quiz; the landlord breaks up the quiz for the summer as most people want to sit outdoors until late, and he can't have a quiz outside.

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    Replies
    1. I deliberately tried to give a picture of the everyday realities of my life because I know that most of my posts tend not to go there.

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  7. Thinking of the various 'names' for your evening meal reminded me that The Golfer's family in Nova Scotia Canada call it.......supper.

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    Replies
    1. To English people supper is a little snack or a sandwich or something not long before bedtime. Thanks for calling by Cathy.

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  8. I enjoyed your post of daily activities but I am sorry to hear of your friend's health problems. That would freak the heck out of me to have a dead body fall out of the sky and land next to me!

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    Replies
    1. You could never forget such a terrifying moment. You can perhaps imagine what happened to the body when it hit that paved path...and the sunbather was just a metre away.

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  9. When I saw the photo I thought you were going to mention "The Graham Norton Show" somewhere in your post! I love that show, and I watch it every week. Norton is brilliant...so funny...and has a wonderful knack of putting his guests immediately at ease...actors and actresses, alike :)

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    Replies
    1. He has even interviewed Ian and Henry on BBC Radio 2. They felt very much at ease in his company.

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  10. You had a very good evening to get all those things accomplished.

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  11. I like to see these snapshots of your day.

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    Replies
    1. I'm not so good at domestic details in this blog.

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  12. That was a very nice/interesting post. We used to like going to a regular pub quiz with friends, but it was finishing rather too late and we stopped going. The quiz folded not long after that as it was down to only 2 teams!
    I also have a large bay tree..........I use about 6 leaves a year in my cooking, and when I prune it heavily I always think of the value of the leaves if they were being sold!! Seems such a waste to just shove them in the wheelie!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. There is a health food store near us. Once I offered them all my bay leaves for free but they said they couldn't take them for health and safety reasons.

      In my experience as pubs decline so does quizzing attendance. It's another shame.

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  13. There have been 3 pubs in Harpenden that have recently been closed and refurbished ! It's not me keeping them going...honest!

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    Replies
    1. Don't worry Frances - I have already heard from Harpenden refuse/recycling collectors about the number of empty gin and prosecco bottles that are found in your bin at on collection days. There's clearly no need for you to visit a pub!

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    2. I don't drink prosseco !

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  14. “Female Oscar winner”?? I hope they gave you more than that to go on. That applies to a lot of people!

    Our bay tree is a bit overgrown too. We’ve got to get pruning!

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    Replies
    1. They also gave us the letters within an anagram.

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