What To Do With Time on Your Hands

As regular readers will have spotted by the reduction in frequency of my posts, time is at a premium recently. So with a week of relative ease - well a week away from work at any rate - I have lighted upon a few things I have neglected.

• I have sharpened all the knives in the kitchen - a task I enjoy and, for the boy scouts among us, a topic of great interest. There are many fascinating methods of achieving razor like sharpness, I prefer the DMT Diamond sharpening system myself, with its angle guide for those of us whose free hand angle maintenance is not sufficiently confident.
  
  
• I have baked bread using the time consuming, flavour developing, old fashioned, sponge method rather than the 'speed is everything so chuck a ton of yeast in it' bread machine method.Yum!
  
  
• We are cooking properly for every meal. This really is a luxury; I hoyed off to Sainsurys and picked up a copy of Delicious magazine. You are always spoilt for choice with Delicious, with more than enough recipes - if you have the time. Usually we avoid the magazine like the plague because it just makes you feel guilty as you chuck a jar of pasta sauce in with the mince on an average work day.
  
  
• If the weather picks up, I am going to dig up part of our middle lawn to make a raised veg bed. We had to give up the allotment because we didn't have the time; but with a bed just outside the patio door we should to at least be able sow garlic this autumn, and then perhaps some beetroot and other easy crops next year.
  

And here is where, with the smoothness of a Radio 2 DJ, I move onto Catherine's kind comments over at her New Zealand based blog. You see she flattered me by recommending my blog among her favourites. Why is this relevant to my week off? Because the other thing I've been doing is catching up on my blog reading, so, by return, I can recommend some of my current favourites too:

• Adventures of an Urban Cowgirl: This, together with my second choice, was one of the first blogs I read. It's the engagingly written account of a woman who moved to New Zealand. Like all the best blogs, it's the writing that does it.
  
• Blunt By Name: Bill Blunt is an institution and his wry look at life through the spectacles of an aged, enbittered hack make this an enjoyable read (especially if you need to know a decent Wetherspoons near you)
• Occupied Country: a fellow Mancunian with a great taste in music and always great pictures
• Mr Woppit: Takes life seriously; in his own words - Emptying the nose of life into the handkerchief of derision
• Mystic Veg: What I'd like to be able to do in the garden and more, from a fellow Oldhamer (a displaced one that is)
• The Toy Cupboard: I like blogs that take a different twist on blogging. This is one of those, and my next choice is another. The Toy Cupboard features, well, a cupboard of childhood toys, memories and anecdotes - makes you feel warm all over (that is assuming your childhood memories haven't cost you thousands in therapy bills).
• Diary of a 70s Teen: Exactly what it says - read it and remember what you were doing when...
• Olga The Travelling Bra: An uplifting travel blog, great fun!

Eeeee He Were a Great Baker Our Dad...

You can scoff, as Bill Blunt and I wax lyrical about the qualities - or lack of them - in the bread most of us buy. But it is true, the doughy pap that is served out by supermarkets as bread is a far cry from the wholesome low-yeast affair made from flour, fat, water and not much else, by the village baker.

Don't believe me? Ask Andrew Whitely the author of that excellent book 'Bread Matters' have a look at what really goes in your bread and you might consider changing where you buy it; or, like Bill and I, baking your own. It really worth the effort.

I'm grateful to Bill for inventing the 'Better Bread Blogger Award' to help further the campaign for real bread. My first awardees are The Village Manor Bakery at Waterhead for its superb traditional breads and the famous Barbakan Delicatessen in Chorlton for their outstanding range of traditional European breads.

Sack supermarket stodge - demand better bread...

right, where's my placard.

Seven Things You Didn't Know About Me and Probably Will Not Benefit From Having Learnt

Thanks to Tracey for tagging me with this meme. It is the sort of theme that runs the risk of revealing too much or of being completely inconsequential - I will do my best to strike a happy medium (I shuddered then as I recalled a Ken Dodd joke involving Doris Stokes).

Here are the seven things you didn't know about me:

1. It has at times been convenient to attribute the slightly broken appearance of the bridge of my nose, to a life of toughness and masculine pursuits. The truth is that it attained its slightly wobbly look during a mid-playground collision with Andrew McLung at Stansfield Rd. County Primary School, Failsworth around 1968.

2. Whilst at sixth form of Chadderton Grammar School I shaved a chunk out of my hairline to emulate my then hero Peter Gabriel. It did not have the effect I desired and considering that I had shoulder length hair at the time, the appearance of a tuft sprouting from my forehead, as it grew back, was definitely not a look I desired.

3. I once almost circumcised myself - accidentally. On a trip to the pantomime at Oldham Coliseum I found myself caught midst pee, when the warning bell sounded for the end of the interval. Being far from confident in my ability to relocate my seat in the dark I rushed the proceedings and caught my little foreskin in the zip of my trousers. Further panicked at the zip's refusal to budge either up or down I forced it - I draw a veil over the remainder of the proceedings for the sake of all men reading this post.

4. Having been invited to a Tarts and Vicars party at short notice and having already drunk a couple or so cans of Breaker, I searched for a suitable dress in my mum's wardrobe. Only many years later have I realised that there were two reasons for her displeasure, not simply the fact of my having stretched the waistband beyond its usable limit (she was a size 10 -12; I am more of a 16). It was also, I now realise, the fact of my having considered her best lacy black dress as being suitable for wearing by a tart that upset her.

5. I once allowed a man to shit in the palm of my hand. This is worth a blog post in itself. I say no more, for now.

6. When I was a student nurse we resented the prestige given to even the most junior house officer compared to the nurses who by and large were treated as skivvies despite the high level of skill and expertise they possessed; and, I must add, the amount of time they spent getting junior doctors out of the poop by telling them what they ought to do in certain circumstances. This prejudicial approach extended outside of hospital too; for example when we dined regularly in a long since gone Indian restaurant on King St in Oldham - I forget the name - the staff found it inconceivable that I was a nurse and not a doctor. Clearly a young man surrounded by a bevy of young attractive nurses must be a doctor. I am ashamed to say that we hammed it up to the extent that Doctor Steve and his harem were treated like royalty and afforded many privileges well beyond the odd free pappadum or two.

7. I am fond of saying to people, whilst adopting a tough, manly expression and glowering from beneath my life furrowed brow, "The last bloke that assaulted me is dead." Combined with the wonky nose I mentioned earlier you can imagine the intended effect. What I habitually fail to mention is that although the expression is in all ways true, the poor sod who hit me died of a heroin overdose 2 years after his encounter with me.

That's your lot; all that remains is for me to tag five more people. I am going to cheat a little as you shall see -

1. Mr Woppit: if you haven't read his excellent blog, you should.

2. Bill Blunt: we haven't heard from him for a while and I would like to hear things we didn't know about the ageing hack.

3. Mystic Veg: It would be good to hear seven unknown vegetable vignettes from the allotment plot doc.

4. (here starts the cheating) The Fuel My Blog Blog writers - I want to know seven things about the excellent FMB website that we didn't know

5. (and here is the other cheaty bit) Lisa - who doesn't write a blog. I challenge Lisa to add seven pictures to her excellent Flickr site that tell us things about her we didn't know.

P.S. the hits I get based on the labels I've added to this post should be interesting - I'll let you know.

It's Definitely an Age Thing

Sorry to harp on again about this ageing stuff; but I'm beginning to worry that middle age is turning me into a sad old git - not to put too fine a point on it - because when I looked back on my notes from our week in the Lake District they were full of enthusiasm about wildlife - particularly bird life - and - here comes the crunch point - trains, yes trains. One of our most enjoyable days out was on the Ravenglass to Eskdale Railway.

"Am I turning into a trainspotting, beer mat collecting, anorak wearing weirdo", I asked myself; and once again, getting know comprehensible reply, I found myself reassured by my fellow bloggers. Bill Blunt's recent post on collecting things was hugely reassuring. His collection speciality is Wetherspoons pubs. He disputes that he is a collector per se; but I think that anyone who aims to sample and review as many pubs in the famous national chain as possible is, to all intents and purposes, a collector - I was reassured.

The Ravenglass to Eskdale Railway must be about the prettiest example of public transport I have ever seen. It is a narrow gauge railway saved from being scrapped, quite literally, by a group of steam enthusiasts in the 1960s. It is not simply a tourist attraction but a relic of an age when narrow gauge railways were built to fulfil an industrial necessity: in this case transporting quarried stone, once crushed, to the regular gauge trains at the mainline Ravenglass station built conveniently directly adjacent to the little one. Apparently the narrow gauge track was easier and cheaper to lay in the rugged Lakeland fell terrain (no pun intended - but it is quite nice isn't it: train/terrain).

The station itself is a beautifully restored example of the type of country railway station John Betjamin would have gushed poetically about; it simply oozes sleepy country charm. Smartly painted and resplendent with summer floral displays it takes one of the things I love about railway stations - that feeling of ordered calm, the quiet and emptiness between trains - to a new level.

The journey is a pleasurable chug, in mainly open sided carriages, from the open esturial waters of the Lakeland coast up through the increasingly craggy countryside of the Eskdale valley, to the final destination at Dalegarth where Scafell towers in the distance.

Hanging out of the carriage, pointing at birds I spotted and waving wildly at pedestrians, I was entranced by the whole experience; and part of me can understand the pleasure that trainspotters must get from the time they spend around this form of transport. But, not to stray too far from where I started this journey: bird watching, I found, as the number of previously unseen birds increased that I hankered after some sort of checklist where I could perhaps tick them off...now that is worrying.

Man's Estate

After his comment on Back Where I Belong , Bill Blunt got me thinking about estates: the sprawling housing developments that in the sixties and seventies replaced streets of terrace housing flattened in the name of progress, communities fragmented and people stacked in towers where they were highly unlikely to be able to talk over the back yard wall with their neighbours.

I have a jaundiced view, as Bill noticed, of these places after both sets of grandparents lost their homes in this manner. My paternal grandma lost her home to the Asda store in Longsight, Manchester; in fact if you stand in the frozen food section you are probably not far from her kitchen. She was moved to Armitage Court in West Gorton, which is at the centre of the inner city suburb used to film Channel 4's Shameless. The community spirit described in Shameless is not that of my grandma's back to back terraced housing.

My maternal grandparents lost out when Bertha Street and - the hub of the community - Edge Lane Methodist Church in Oldham were crushed to make way for St Mary's Estate and Shaw Rd Estate in Oldham. They were moved onto Radcliffe St, St Mary's were I spent most of my summer holidays whilst mum and dad worked.

If communities survived after their enforced exodus they did so in spite of the new estates, not because of them; the social engineers hoped it would be otherwise. And I do feel that the architects of the time had much to answer for; I am a believer in the theory that building designs affect how we feel about a place. If you don't believe me, have a look how successful some of the more recent enlightened designs in social housing are.

And before I forget, Bill Blunt and I are not the only people talking about the estates where they live. Tracey over at Gwelva Kernewek has been busy writing about the estate where she lives. If you need something else to convince you that where you live affects how you feel about life take a look at Tracey's post.