Category: Family
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Today we’re expecting our two nieces and their Mum. They’re at just the right ages to play with our boys, so it should be a fun day for them as usual, and a hectic one for me.
Breathing calmed down so went for a short walk to the corner shop with Kid A where he bought a can of baked beans with his own cash.
Then we walked around the long block talking about how those beans are now his beans, what would happen to the beans if I reimbursed him with a bank transfer, what he could do with a bottomless backpack, the striking similarity between the Chinese lion adorning a neighbour’s drive wall and the Chinese lions outside the Chinese restaurant in Spilsby, and how Lime bikes are taking over the world.
Breathless!
A million housewives every day
Pick up a can of beans and say
“What an amazing example of
Synchronisation!”
Or in my case, “£1.59?! What a rip-off!”
Sausages
Lincolnshire sausages are the finest sausages you can get.
I remember as a boy, fifty years ago, my grandmother making sausages at home for the local butcher. Sometimes, she would let me feed the sausage meat into the machine and then turn the handle to push it through into the skins.
A special treat then was boiled sausages for breakfast. The skins would fall off, and we ate them with white bread soaked in the soup or broth they created in the pan along with a dash of English mustard.
In later years, my Mum would travel to Boston in south Lincolnshire from her home in north Lincolnshire specially to buy sausages from the butcher who made the best Lincolnshire sausages.
She would freeze them and pack me off with ten or twelve wrapped in old newspaper whenever I came back to visit from university or when I first moved to Manchester and then London.
I haven’t had a proper Lincolnshire sausage for many years now. The ones we get now are made in Hampshire. They’re nice enough, better than any other variety of supermarket sausage I’ve tried, but you wouldn’t want to boil them.
They’re pretty versatile. They’re great with mashed potatoes and gravy, in a special Valentine’s casserole, in a Yorkshire pudding, with xmas dinner wrapped in bacon, in a bread finger roll with (or without) onions and ketchup, in a sandwich or, as my kids like to eat them, cold on their own in the bath after school.
Every time someone mentions Croissant (for cross-posting) I hear big kid’s Mum telling him, “You can’t have croissants for breakfast every morning!”
Family Connection Restored
Spent the day at my Mum’s, and a good portion of our final half an hour with her trying to fix the wifi connection on her phone.
Restarting her router slightly improved connectivity.
Just as we’re about to leave, she says, “I’ve got loads of new routers they keep sending me.”
Quickly set up her new router and now everything works perfectly.
When we got back to our caravan, I got a text. “You didn’t take the plum loaf I got you.”
Spuds Up!
We harvested the last three of eleven potato bags at the weekend. A decent crop, and very tasty.
Highlights were regular watering and earthing up (using homegrown compost) with my kids, and big kid’s tenth birthday party where his friends got to (among other fun activities) harvest the first three bags and take home a potato bag each.
Fond memories of going potato picking with my mum in the Lincolnshire Wolds in the early 1970s.
Stop the Planes
My wife was born in Uganda. She’s Black, like our kids. She came to the UK when she was five.
She’s just told me she feels like she should put herself on a plane to Rwanda.
Then she said she realised she came here legally, she has indefinite leave to remain, and she’s a British citizen.
I asked her what was it that made her feel like she should deport herself.
Unsurprisingly, she said it’s because of all the anti-immigration rhetoric in the news. As she said,
It’s obvious no one wants my Black face here.
Frank
Frank was my great grandfather on my dad’s side.
I only met him a couple of times. One time, me and my brother were made to wear the most ridiculous and embarrassing outfits, and we just felt very uncomfortable and ill-at-ease meeting this very old man from another time.
He was born in the early 1901. So he must have been 80 or so when we met him. Not so old these days, but back then he really was like a dinosaur, or a fossil.
I remember a couple of stories about him. After the Great War, when he was a young man with a new wife and baby daughter (my grandmother), he had to walk twenty-five miles to work, where he would labour hard for sixteen hours before walking home again, only to be brutally murdered by his father before going to bed and getting up the next morning to do the same thing over and over again. Well, he certainly had to work hard, just to survive and raise a family.
Life was no doubt much harder then than any of us can really imagine, but you try and tell that to the young people of today. Would they believe you? No!
My great grandmother, Ellen, was committed to Lancaster Asylum some time after my grandmother Freda was born. I don’t know what the reason was, but it’s possible it was because she was suffering from what would now be recognised as post-natal depression.
In those days, it was a life sentence, not to mention the shame it brought upon the family.
Frank divorced Ellen and married “Auntie Florrie”. I don’t know if Florrie was actually Ellen’s sister, but it’s possible.
Freda never forgot her mum, and secretly visited her whenever she could.
When Frank got the cancer that would kill him, Freda took him in and looked after him in her bed until he died.
Top o' the mornin'
Showing my age this morning.
I ‘heard’ my wife say, “My First Vegetables!” as our little boy chose a new TV show to watch.
I ‘saw’ a picture of a broccoli on the screen. I got a broccoli from the fridge (along with some carrots and a cauliflower) to show him and keep it real. 🥦🥬🥕
Turns out the show is called “My First Festivals, Series 2: 4. St Patrick’s Day”, and the picture was a shamrock. ☘️
At least the vegetables were the same colour as the Irish flag! 🇮🇪