I am not normally a fan of football, particularly when England are playing, but the night before last was a little special. England were playing Croatia and I tuned in one minute before the end of the first half just in time to see England score their fourth goal in the half. During the second half, England scored three more times, making the final score 7:0 which is the biggest margin of victory recorded against a top 50 Uefa team. The English forwards were on fire, each of the four scoring and the Croatian defence was dire contributing to the final result. Late on in the day, I intend to scour the airways on ITV wondering if there are any free-to-air matches but I am not very hopeful. The first thing that I did when got up in the morning was to select one large Maris Piper potato and get it sliced, peeled and immersed in cold water to reduce the starch content before I deploy it in my soup-making in the afternoon. Last night, I enjoyed the last of the curried parsnip soup that I had in stock and next week I am going to be more adventurous and try some pumpkin soup. I have looked at a quick YouTube video on this and it looks straightforward enough so all I need to ensure is that I have a large pumpkin or another squash in time for next weekend. There may be a cookery programme to absorb my attention later on in the day and sometimes these prove to be interesting. In the political sphere, one item that attracted my attention was the fact that Andy Burnham is to scrap the plans formulated by the Keir Starmer government to restrict the use of jury trials. I would have thought this was pushing at an open door because on many sides of the political divide there was a degree of uneasiness about plans to limit jury trials. The Conservative party conference is beginning this weekend and commentators are speculating whether Kemi Badenoch can do enough to restore Tory fortunes. Whenever the Tories come up with a new policy with which to attack the Labour government the charge is always that they had enough time in power to solve the problem (e.g. building more prison places) so why had they not done it? The morning’s attendance at church did not go according to plan. Our regular priest is going to be away for a fortnight as he is attending to the funeral of one of his brothers and is then due to a little of a delayed summer holiday. So we were due to have a ‘relief’ priest today but his car had broken down on his way to the church. So the ‘elders’ of the parish scrambled together the elements of a communion service so that the congregation had not made a visit to the church in vain. All of this worked quite well and we sang our usual hymns including the Victorian classic ‘All things bright and beautiful’ but without the offensive third verse which implies that the class of structure of Victorian society was in accordance with God’s plan for humanity. At the end of the service, I went and had my usual coffee dangling an 18-month old on my knee for a few minutes to give their parents some respite. In late November, we are due to have a parish meal in a local hotel but precious few people have signed up for it and I suspect that the price for it is too high for most parishioners so perhaps on future occasions a simpler alternative to the full Christmas fare needs to be considered. I was a little dismayed that I got a low tyre pressure on my car’s dashboard this morning so having collected my newspaper, I spent the money I would have spent on a car wash feeding money into the machine which supplies air in our local BP garage. I have often wondered whether to get one of those domestic tyre inflating machines but my experience of them in the past as not been a very happy one. Having got home, I perused the TV programmes and found something very much to my liking on U&Drama which is a British free-to-air television channel owned by UKTV (a subsidiary of BBC Studios) that broadcasts classic and modern drama series. Late in the afternoon, they are going to broadcast the first two parts of Thomas Hardy’s’ Tess of the D’Urbervilles’. This starts in the late afternoon and goes on until 8.00pm when we shall have more football to entertain us (Wales vs Denmark) I have just checked that Parts 3&4 are to be broadcast next week at the same time.
In the afternoon, I managed to catch a résumé of the England vs Argentina match from the first round of the ‘Nations’ competition, the second round starting in November. Then I spent the rest of the afternoon making my leek and potato soup which I am sure will turn out to be pretty bland but at the time of dishing it up, I will probably enhance it a little with some black pepper and creme fraiche. I always add a bit of coconut milk to these creamed soup recipes in any case. I always prepare the soup in two batches with an initial parboiling and the a quick blast in the microwave oven before I hand over the rest of the job to the soup maker. I have watching my timings quite carefully and hope that I can get the two batches completed just before my viewing of the Thomas Hardy. My Italian friend from down the road gave me a swift telephone call and I invited her out to the Methodist centre next Wednesday, but she has started to take some piano lessons which may coincide on a Wednesday morning. The week in prospect is a fairly humdrum week although I have a ‘Curry Club ‘engagement to which to look forward this Tuesday evening. This week we are gong to sample an Indian restaurant which has fairly recently appeared on the Bromsgrove High Street (although it might just a change of name and ownership which is not uncommon these days) In the meanwhile, if the spell of good weather continues, then I think the grass will need cutting front and rear and, at this time of year, there is always some pruning and cutting back to be done if I have both the time and the energy to do it and then at some stage I will need to employ a gardener to undertake some more radical cutting back as th ack garden is pretty overgrown.