Isn't it nice when somebody you don't really know that well rings your doorbell and hands you over a nice book that you've been waiting for. And today, a nice man who lives about a mile away from us in Barnard's Green area of Malvern, has called by to put Jamie Oliver's recipe book on One Pan Wonders into Lois's hot little hands.
TV chef Jamie Oliver, author of "One Pan Wonders"
Yes, the man who calls round is our great benefactor - we don't even know his name, but he's not wearing a mask like the Lone Ranger used to do. Nevertheless this is the man who patiently takes in all our Amazon purchases, all mis-delivered to him.
Why is he getting all our deliveries? He isn't a neighbour, by any stretch of the imagination.
Well the reason is apparently because Amazon has employed an apparently really stupid delivery-driver in this area, who hardly speaks English apparently, and who is taking all our purchases to the wrong address about a mile away from here.
a typical case of mis-delivery
And what's more, there seems to be nothing we can do about it. Amazon don't care - we're just one customer, aren't we, and we can't talk to anybody at Amazon except some stupid chatbots.
What a crazy world we live in !!!!!
The important thing, though, is that the book is now in Lois's hot little hands.
14:00 So I have to spend a lonely afternoon in bed having my nap, with nobody to dally or be pally with, while Lois is downstairs planning all the meals for the upcoming visit of our daughter Alison and two of her children from Thursday to Saturday.
Yikes !!!!!!!
Yikes (again)!!! And to think that Lois and I were calmly shopping inside this supermarket just 2 weeks ago, blissfully unaware of the drama that was to come !!!
[That's way too much flood news! - Ed]
Incidentally, how come people like Lois and me who are 77, have been "shuffled off" into the dustbin of being "70 plussers"??? Surely we're the baby-boomers par excellence, aren't we, born as we were just after World War II.
Poor me !!!!!!
But will Alison be able to get here? The River Severn is rising by the hour, thanks to Storm Babet that has been storming through over the UK. All that water that rained down on our river in the Welsh mountains over the last few days, is working its way relentlessly down to these parts. It'll peak at Upton-on-Severn tomorrow - Tuesday - and it will peak at Tewkesbury, a few miles downriver from us, on Wednesday, so we'll have to see.
In the meantime, while Lois is planning her Jamie-meals it's my job to monitor levels in the River Severn - not using an enormous 16 ft ruler at the actual riverside - which I haven't got anyway - but simply by monitoring local news sites on the Internet.
17:00 And later this afternoon the photo below is what our local supermarket, Warners at Upton-upon-Severn, is looking like, according to the news on my phone:
flashback to October 7th: Lois and I shopping in
Warner's supermarket, seen here in happier times. How blissfully
unaware we were of the drama that was to come!!!!
16:00 Lois and I relax on the sofa with a cup of tea and a 4-finger Kit-Kat chocolate biscuit each, in case you're interested. [I hardly think so! - Ed]
As we sip our tea and stuff chocolate into our mouths, Lois tells me about her reactions to the Jamie Oliver "One Pan Wonders" cookbook.
She thinks it's "just the ticket", apart from one flaw: the number of rare-item ingredients, some of which we've never heard of, and which are probably well-known in the fancy South East of England, the so-called "Home Counties", where Jamie and Juliette Oliver and all of England's rich and cultivated elite live.
However, will we get blank looks when we ask for some of these things in our local Morrisons?
a typical dinner-party in the wealthy South-East of England,
the so-called "Home Counties", this one hosted by TV chef
Nigella Lawson
After all, who knows what the following things are, or where you get them from?
Who knows anything about frozen edamame beans, for example, or pecorino cheese, potato gnocchi, jars of char-grilled cooked aubergines, sumac (???), packets of cooked mixed grains, sichuan chilli oil, smoked tofu, white miso paste, tikka masala curry paste, ras el hanout (???) - Jamie suggests "sprinkling it from a height" so Lois asks me if I can help here: I'm 5'10" and she's only 5'3", but even so I might have to use our kitchen steps, I'm guessing.
But what madness !!!!
a typical chef on a chef's ladder, preparing
to sprinkle a bowl of ras el hanout from a great height
The list goes on: cornichons (????) keralan curry paste, pumpkin gnocchi, katsu curry paste, laksa paste, and jerk marinade. Also dukkah (????), which you're supposed to rub over a bit of lamb, and not over yourselves, in case that's what you've been doing. And if you have, STOP IT NOW!
Lois's key takeaways from the book, however, are principally that it's going to be very useful and that it will save on washing-up at the same time. And we decide to try asking for these unusual ingredients at Waitrose or Ocado, which are a bit more upmarket than Morrisons, or else maybe substitute some more "homely" items. Well, we'll see! Watch this space !!!!!
21:00 We wind down for bed by watching the second half of an entertaining TV retrospective on impressionist Mike Yardley, who was the UK's biggest TV star in the 1970's, but who seemed to disappear off the face of the earth some time in the 1980's, so that nobody except 70-years-plus people, and Baby Boomers, and possibly some "Generation X" people (30-49 years old) will even have heard of him.
Poor Mike!!!!
these are the generations of the UK
And according to an opinion poll on preferred dates for the next General Election, sent to me by Steve, our American brother-in-law, Lois and I have been shuffled even further off the scale, into the so-called "Silent Generation". Is that just all those younger people asking us to please just "shut up" for a minute ???!!!!!
I think we should be told! [I think they've just done that! And not before time haha! - Ed]
What a crazy world we live in !!!!!
I'm going to let that one slide for now, however, because the second half of the TV programme about Mike Yarwood is about to begin.
Quiet now haha !!!!!
Although Yarwood had made his name by doing impressions of a range of people in the public eye, including singers, actors, entertainers etc, he was most well-known for his iconic impressions of 1970's prime ministers Harold Wilson, Ted Heath, and Jim Callaghan.
Mike Yarwood as Prime Minister Jim Callaghan....
... and as Prime Minister Harold Wilson
After 1979, Yarwood tried to do Maggie as well, but it didn't quite work, and finally his manager decided to bring Janet Brown into Yarwood's shows, to "do all the Maggie bits".
Yarwood, seen here as Ted Heath, with Janet Brown as Maggie Thatcher
flashback to 1981: Janet playing the then British prime minister,
Maggie Thatcher, in the James Bond film ”For Your Eyes Only”,
with Maggie's husband Denis Thatcher being played by satirist John Wells
And do you remember, in the film, Maggie's phone call from 10 Downing Street to Bond, who was floating with some lovely woman in a life raft or something, somewhere in the Caribbean?
You know! You must remember!!!
All the most tremendous fun, though, wasn't it !!!!!
Marvellous stuff !!!!
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