Yesterday evolved into a wonderful day. After my normal weekend routines, my American friend called around and then we cooked a special dish of pork ribs with a red-eye sauce that we had purchased together in the Alcester branch of Waitrose that we visited last Friday. Red-eye gravy gets its name from its visual appearance. When black coffee is added to hot ham pan drippings, a layer of golden-red grease floats on top of the darker liquid. In a round bowl or plate, this pool of fat resembles a bloodshot human eye and hence the name. We served this with some purple sprouting broccoli, sprouts and a stir fry mixture I had prepared earlier and it was absolutely delicious with the meat just dropping off the ribs after half an hour in the oven. After this wonderful meal and a bottle of shared Asti Spumante that we have both come to enjoy with our shared Sunday meal we indulged in a little post-prandial snooze (although I took the opportunity to read most of ‘The Sunday Times’) We rounded off the afternoon with a delayed sweet of custard pies accompanied by some strawberry ice cream I had purchased earlier on in the day. But the highlight of our evening was yet to some. We viewed the J B Priestly film of ‘An Inspector Calls’ which lays bare the pretensions and class privileges of a middle class family at the turn of the century, each member of the family in turn having been exposed (by the Inspector) to a role in the death of a young women in a horrible suicide. This play is gripping in its psychological intensity and always worth a further viewing. After that the iPlayer ran onto the next item which was a dramatisation of Dylan Thomas’s ‘Under Milk Wood’. This is not everyone’s cup of tea as it is really one long extended ‘sound-fest’ in the day of a small Welsh fishing village. In Dylan Thomas’s famous 1954 radio play ‘Under Milk Wood‘, the fictional Welsh seaside village is named Llareggub—which is famously ‘bugger all’ spelled backwards. This cheeky hidden joke reflects the quirky, earthy, and humorous tone of the town’s eccentric residents. For this production, the BBC had assembled the cream of Welsh literati who contributed little sound clips including Michal Sheen, Charlotte Church, Tom Jones, Sîean Philips and many more besides. In fact my friend has asked me to look out the complete cast list so that we can identify more of the characters. There is some vicious black humour contained within the work of which that ticked my fancy was the case of the downtrodden Mr. Pugh who frequently imagines poisoning his nagging wife while reading Lives of the Great Poisoners, a book he hides under a brown-paper cover and pretends to be reading a Theological text. These murderous, often comedic, plots remain purely in his imagination rather than being carried out. So after our wonderful evening’s entertainment, we planned out our week together as I have a Curry Club U3A meal out on Tuesday and on Wednesday we have plans to observe the 90% partial eclipse of the sun together (probably on the TV, given the danger of looking directly at the eclipsed sun). Having my February holiday in mind and asking my son if he would schedule taking us to the airport, I noted the following disturbing news item which is the airport parking change that is catching Britons out – and landing them £100 fines. Anyone picking up or dropping off at some UK airports this summer is being urged to avoid a costly mistake. Birmingham, Gatwick, Heathrow, Luton, Manchester and Stansted are among the airports now using automatic number plate recognition to track how long you park for and how much you owe. That means there are no barriers prompting you to pay, so you’ll have to remember to pay online or by phone, with the deadline being midnight the following day in most airports. If you do not pay on time, you’ll get a parking charge that could range from £80 to £100 – though is reduced if paid in 14 days. In the late morning, I walked down into town to pick up a newspaper and to have a coffee in Waitrose. I ensured that I sought out the shade whenever I could which covered at least half of the journey back
This afternoon I stumbled across a program on the Sky Mix channel detailing the ways in which customs officials in Australia deal with contraband entering the country which includes not only drugs but seeds, meat products as well as people attempting to enter Australia on a tourist visa and then seeking work. After due process, may of these infractions resulted in the visas being withdrawn and the miscreant put onto the next flight back to whence they came but apart from drugs, importation of banned substances was typically met with confiscation and a huge fine. In the late afternoon, the sight of some huge brambles in our back garden got too much to bear so I went and cropped the worst offenders but this entailed a lot of chopping of extremely long tendrils into shorter lengths so that they would fit in the wheelie bin (which is now full) There is a bonus to all of this which is a big crop of blackberries amidst all of the prickles but I will leave this for another day before I attempt to pick a supply. After my walk in the park, I have the European Athletics championships to enjoy and they are actually held in Birmingham this year. There promises to be a host of interesting events between 8.00pm and 10.00pm and the women’s 4 x 400 relay should be exciting and interesting to watch and probably a more exciting watch than the football. An unfortunate record has been set in the wee small hours of the morning as a boat carrying 230 migrants made it across the channel and this easily exceeded the last ‘record’ of 165. It looks as though the people smugglers are changing their tactics and relying upon a smaller number of crossings but in bigger boats. That having been said, the battle against the small boats is gradually being won as a total of 15,049 people are known to have crossed the Channel illegally on 224 small boats so far this year but as of 9 August, the number of small boat arrivals is down by 42% compared to the same period in 2025. The fine weather we have been experiencing must be working in favour of the small boat crossings because they diminish in the winter months and when the weather is stormy.