Although I do not look forward to the task, the wee small hours of yesterday marked the end of British Summer Time and the adjustment of the various clocks, time-pieces and some of the electronic equipment in the house. Fortunately, the radios seem to adjust themselves but I still have a total of 15 pieces of equipment to manually alter. But I have got this off to a fairly fine art by now, even including the oven timer which I can never remember how to set. However all of this was done in the middle of the night and I do not feel that I have had the benefit of an extra hour of sleep, except that I am appreciating that it is a tad lighter in the mornings when I get up. But the shock will come this evening when sunset will arrive a few minutes before 5.00pm in the afternoon and then I know that winter has well and truly arrived. My two batches of lamb stew seem to have prepared themselves well enough during the day with a long cooking. I needed to remove the sprigs of thyme in each vessel and then today they have to have the addition of some petit pois and some extra gravy browning before a quick reheating. My only cooking doubts are to ensure that the salmon custard starters work out as planned. Some of yesterday, was spent in reorganising a kitchen cupboard to ensure that the kitchen looks a little less cluttered but I discovered a beautiful oval ceramic serving dish I did know that I had so this can be pressed into service today. My plan is to serve out the portions of the lamb stew in the kitchen but then put the freshly cooked sprouting broccoli and some Yorkshire puddings on the dining room table. I even remembered to buy some bottled table water, both still and sparkling to accompany the meal. My reorganisation of a kitchen cupboard even uncovered a pair of water jugs which, again, can be pressed into service. I even managed in the course of the evening to pop outside and to give the back terrace a quick brush down so that the unsightly gobbets of moss dislodged from the roof tiles can be disposed of. We are now entering the last week before we enter the month of November which is a month to which I do not normally look forward. But we do have the Nations Rugby Competition (basically Northern and Southern hemisphere teams playing each other) and the first of these transmissions is on ITV on Friday 6th November and there should be free. transmissions on ITV during much of November which should make for entertaining weekends. In the forthcoming week, I have my U3A Philosophy group meeting on Friday morning to be followed, if all my plans work out, by a meeting in my house of the church-centred Spanish speakers’ group and I am offering some home-made soup to get the proceedings under way. So, the run-up to Christmas might prove to be quite busy, particularly as I am already ‘booked in’ to a couple of Christmas type collective meals one organised by my church ad the other from U3A on successive days towards the end of November.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After the service, I went for my usual coffee and biscuits, in the course of which I dangled a one-and-a-half year old on my knee, and not for the first time. I know the mother quite well and she is quite happy to let me entertain her little boy who only a week or so could only walk a few tottering steps and can now walk the length of the church with his mother when she receives communion. I am getting to know more and more people by sight, these days and On Tuesday, I am going to visit a fellow parishioner as she is in the same state in which I found myself a couple of years ago, as she cares for aged father who otherwise would be completely on his own during the day apart from the visits of his carers. When I got home, I set about making the final preparations for the lamb stews and I then prepared the salmon custard starters in their little ranekins. This preparation seemed to go well quite well and I had some of the mixture left over so I cooked an experimental one for myself which \u00a0I had as a kind of delayed breakfast. All of this worked out fine and then my two sets of cousins arrived within about two minutes \u00a0of each other, so I took them into the music room and I explained how I made this into our Music Room and, as such, hoped to make it a source of comfort and entertainment for Meg in her final year. My cousins were very good in collectively helping me to dish up the various elements of the meal and I was pleased that my timings worked out exactly as planned and I had a good choice of wines, both alcoholic and non alcoholic to offer my guests. We ate in our formal dining room. and it was a wonderful social occasion and the special arrangements I made for my coeliac cousin (only discovered some three yeas ago) worked out perfectly Afterwards my cousins helped me to do the washing up before they had to depart in the late afternoon. One sad thing that \u00a0discovered was that the partner of another of Meg’s cousins had died last May but I never got to hear of it and consequently I did not attend the funeral. After the final tidying up had been undertaken, I was just in term the watch the final two episodes of ‘Emma’ which was broadcast on an obscure channel starting late in the afternoon. But next week, they have advertised a showing of ‘Sense and Sensibility’ which I do not know well but might read up on the synopsis before next weekend. I am sure that for the rest of the day, I shall quite a relaxing time having a good read through the Sunday newspapers as well as listening to ClassicFM<\/em> which always has a soothing selection on Sunday evenings. Actually, with listening to ClassicFM<\/em> at several times throughout the day, hardly a day passes when a track is not played to which Meg and I had a deep emotional connection of one type or another. After I had put the clocks back an hour last night and was settling down to sleep, the highly appropriate track of ‘The Last Rose of Summer’ was played which seemed particularly apposite. Storm Boelo has fortunately largely passed us by here in the Midlands but the North of England and Scotland have endured gusts of 80mph and the usual crop of fallen trees has proved damaging. We shall expect more more rainy weather in the next few days and then various pieces of political news will unwind with the elections in Israel on Tuesday (which promises to be very tight) and our own Budget on Wednesday. We are now entering \u00a0the critical 8-9 day period before the American mid-term elections and one wonders what tricks Donald Trump will attempt as he stares reverses for the Republican party in the face.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Although I do not look forward to the task, the wee small hours of yesterday marked the end of British Summer Time and the adjustment of the various clocks, time-pieces and some of the electronic equipment in the house. Fortunately, the radios seem to adjust themselves but I still have a total of 15 pieces […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8676"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8676\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8678,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8676\/revisions\/8678"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}