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 |   A tentative blog to test the temperature. |
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Ten years ago I was writing several blogs on various subjects - F1 motor racing, Music, Classic Cars, Great Romances and, most crushingly, a personal journal that included my thoughts on America, memories of England and Africa, opinion, humour, writing and anything else that occurred. It all became too much (I was attempting to update the journal every day) and I collapsed, exhausted and thoroughly disillusioned in the end. So this blog is indeed a Toe in the Water, a place to document my thoughts in and on WdC but with a determination not to get sucked into the blog whirlpool ever again. Here's hoping.     |
| Bland Schmand One subject that’ll get the oldies crowding around your blog, trying to get their say in, is food. It’s absolute meat and drink to us wrinklies, if I may coin a phrase. Just express a liking for a particular favourite food and the geriatric world will be lining up to tell you what they prefer. You’ll probably get instructions on how to prepare it correctly and recipes as well. So, when Lilli 🧿 ☕  asks in Question of the Day!  what I could not go a day without, my mind turns immediately to food. And that’s when I realise that there’s nothing I must have to survive. Be it food or otherwise, I’ve been without everything at some time in the past and yet I’m still here. It’s a much more difficult question than I thought.You’d think that, with the Brit reputation for eating only bland, tasteless food, it would be easy for me to single out something in the New World to tempt my palate and insist upon regular infusion into my eager alimentary system. The problem is that the reputation is totally wrong. Yes, it’s true that we like fairly ordinary stuff like roast beef and veg or fish and chips, but that’s ignoring the sauces we put on such things. Like mustard for instance. Ohoh, I hear you cry, we have mustard in America! And I must beg to differ. Real mustard comes in a small, yellow, metal container with a plastic top and Coleman’s written on the side. Flip off the lid and you’ll find a yellow powder inside. Take a tiny amount (we actually have miniature spoons for this operation), put it in an egg cup (remember them?) and mix to a paste with carefully administered drops of water. Leave to produce its magic for at least a minute, then spread sparingly on ham or a hot dog. Don’t go mad and slather it all over the place - this is real mustard and you’re about to find out that the Brits don’t eat only bland food. This bright, cheery, yellow paste will eat your mouth off, if you’re not careful. You think your Tex Mex concoctions laden with chillies are hot? There’s a reason why Indian curries are now the favourite take away food in Britain. We’re trained to the job by things like mustard. Personally, I lick the spoon after making a batch of Coleman’s mustard but I’m not saying that isn’t painful. I’m accustomed to the job thanks to a father who lived in India for years and loved a good, hot, eye-watering curry. And it’s not just mustard. There’s also this thing called horseradish sauce. Yes, I know it’s possible to get it in the States but you’ll have to hunt for it. At this very moment I am looking at a bottle of Bookbinders Horseradish bought in an American store and not in the exotic foods section. Never seen a Statesider use the stuff, however, and I can understand why. If you’ve not come across it before, handle with care. Spread it on lamb (I know you guys don’t eat lamb but I can dream, can’t I?) or pork or even beef as sparingly as if it were English mustard. That’ll kick your taste buds into life. I put it on cheese sandwiches as well and suffer the searing, tongue-scalding pain when I hit a bit where it’s spread a little too generously. But I love it! That’s a couple of examples to show that the Brits don’t just love bland food. Sure, we’re a bit conservative when it comes to trying new foods, but our sauces prove that we can cut it with the hottest things out there. It’s also true that I can live without them. But only just. Word count: 637 |
| I wish people would stop calling their posts "Invalid Entry." |
| Liking Likes I have to admit I’m a Like counter. It’s a habit that stems from being in Facebook for far too long. The very fact that someone has been taken enough with one’s comment is sufficient to indicate some form of popularity. And, if the Likes begin to mount, we can take it that we have hit the nail fairly squarely upon the head. At least, it’s about all we have to go on when commenting in Facebook. In WdC it may be different, however. I can’t even imagine the number of times I’ve forgotten to hit that Like button after thoroughly enjoying what someone else has said. And you’d be quite right to accuse me of depriving them of their justified rewards for being so accurate and agreeable in their commenting. But I’m quite sure it happens to me as well. There are times, too, when I hit the button because I want to encourage the person commenting. I am fairly flexible in that regard and may well be influenced by mood too. So maybe these things balance out and we all get our due. This all applies to comments, of course. When it comes to creative writing, the Like button is the easy way out. If it’s that good, we ought to reward it with a review. But that’s a considerable investment of time and effort and I doubt we do it that often. Speaking for myself, it’s only the stuff I really rave about that I’ll review. Unless I’m actively looking for things to review, like on a raid or adding to the GP stash. Even then, I won’t review the poor stuff - that’s too much like hard work! So reviews are a better indicator of how we’re doing than Likes are (I still count ‘em. however). It’s a pity we don’t have more time to get reviews done. But there is a way to indicate approval without doing a full review. We could nominate the piece for a Quill. This year I copied the relevant links to allow me to nominate without the hassle of finding the relevant form. It’s all there in my little notebook (https://notepad-plus-plus.org/downloads/), ready to supply the necessary at a moment’s notice. That there is a link to Notepad++, the most useful little freeware app on the net. Take a look. And now would be a good opportunity to go hit that Like button for this post! Word count: 407 |
| The Dinosaur Speaks For some time now I have wanted to write about a book that is disappearing into the mists of time. It’s a children’s book that I read long ago and it was, for a time, quite famous. Lately it has fallen into disfavour, largely because of a few prejudiced statements, common to the time in which the book was written. These can be numbered on the fingers of one hand, however, and, considering the quality and beauty of the rest of the book, it seems a pity to throw away everything for the sake of a few misguided asides. The book would not suffer from the offending words being expunged, in fact they are so unimportant to the main drive of the tale that it would definitely be improved by such trimming. But no, our era is so convinced of its superiority in all things moral that even the slight whiff of an earlier age must be expunged from our experience, as though we were not able to take the good from something while leaving the bad. We must obliterate all memory of the past so that our tender minds never be infected by opinions different from our own. When they start banning such classics as To Kill a Mockingbird and Gone with the Wind, it must surely be obvious that we go too far. What will the world look like when we have trimmed our culture to include only those things seen as politically correct? I should not have to remind us that “those who do not know their history are doomed to repeat it.” Perhaps this is merely my “raging against the dying of the light.”* But, if you’re interested in reading something magical before it disappears, it is still possible to get hold of a copy of Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies from Amazon on the used thriftbook stand. https://www.google.com/search?q=the+water+babies&oq=the+water+babies&aqs=chrome.... *From Dylan Thomas’ poem, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night. Word count: 312 |
| The Bright Side The good thing about being ahead of your time is that you’ll grow into it. Word count: 15 |
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I've always remembered that episode and thought that was a fun idea.