Yes, Friends, "change is in the air" - no question! And people are eating the weirdest things these days, even local dads are "branching out", would you believe!!!!
This story was "all over" this morning's Onion News - see page 94 column 6 !!!!
And reading the story this morning in semi-wooded Liphook, Hampshire brings a bit of a zig-zag-shaped smile to the mouths of me and my wife Lois, to put it mildly!
me and my wife Lois - a recent picture
Health warning: in London's Mayfair the caviar and cream version could set you back a cool £96 a head - what madness !!!!
Yes, what madness!!!! And how different to the simple jacket potato meals that Lois and I love, that just feature a sprinkling of grated cheese on top.
And how different to the jacket potatoes of Victorian times, when they first became popular, and street hawkers modified metal cans into ovens and they became a popular street food, writes Neil Buttery, the aptly named food historian. They were filling, and cheap, and if you carried them home in your jacket potatoes they kept you warm on a cold winter's night, which is one theory as to how "jacket potatoes" got their name.
Neil writes: “It took a couple of hundred years for us [Brits] to get our heads around
potatoes, after they first came across the Atlantic in the Colombian Exchange" [What that? - Ed].
"Then we went crazy,” Buttery continues. "Potatoes fast became the UK’s most
popular crop; at one point there were so many sold, that London's Kings Cross Station had a "potato depot". Then, as now, jacket potatoes offered exceptional value. They provide more energy per acre than any other crop." [my italics].
Well at least it's nice to know that Lois and I are getting properly "fuelled up" on this, one of our fave "go to" lunch dishes, that's for sure!
But what a crazy world we live in !!!!
13:00 It's lunchtime, and today is already proving a quiet but productive day for Lois and me. Rain has been threatening all morning, so we take our daily walk over local soccer giants Liphook United's "hallowed turf" - it's the best choice if there's a threat of rain, because we're never more than 5 minutes from our car. Makes sense to us!
We check the latest "player ratings" from the club's sponsors, local construction firm Puma Engineering: mysteriously somebody has been trying to erase the name of the team's exciting no.16 shirt, Hadley, the substitute now a mere 4 pairs of boots away from getting a chance to "strut his stuff", in the event of 4 better players getting injured or sent off. What's going on - I think we should be told don't you!!!
(left) Lois sewing up some of the rips in her favourite nightie - her altered kilt is also
clearly visible over the back of our shiny new IKEA "Bingsta" armchair, and (right)
Lois's kilt in happier times, pictured on her here before it finally famously
"fell off her" on Burns Night 2024 due to her reduced waist-size - what madness (again) !!!!!
21:00 We go to bed on the first programme in the new series of "Our [Yorkshire] Farm Next Door", starring the now separated couple, Amanda and Clive Owen, on the More4 channel.
Lois and I speculate endlessly on what went wrong with Yorkshire shepherdess Amanda and farmer Clive's marriage - we think we must have missed the episode when the marriage went "belly up". if looking for a new "squeeze", we think Amanda could do worse than, maybe, consider handsome Dan, her equally passionate "window and door fitter". Dan is a bit of a self-confessed perfectionist, who's passionate about making Amanda's windows and doors fit "good'n'snug", as he says! Of course, he may be already "spoken for".
"Handsome Dan" - Amanda's new window-fitter: would he make her
a suitable new "squeeze", now that husband Clive has moved out?
I wonder.....!
Obviously husband Clive is a bit too old, now, for the passionate Amanda, but the couple did produce 9 children together, so the marriage can't have been "all fighting and nothing else", to put it mildly!!!
Poor Clive !!!!
We like best the bits where Amanda delves into the farm's background. Like us, she seems to be a bit of a history buff. She's got hold of the diary of Yorkshire farmer Anthony Clarkson who owned the farm in the early 19th century. The diary tells how Anthony, as a young man, got together with the neighbour girl "Mally", who had caught his eye.
After her parents died, when she was only 15, Mally came to live in Anthony's house as a servant.
In this sequence, Amanda's teenage daughter Raven (?) listens, while her mum reads her extracts from Anthony's diary, where he talks about his burgeoning affair with servant-girl Mally, which began on New Year's Eve 1817.
And Anthony must have been a fast mover: because just 3 days later, things were obviously beginning to get serious for Anthony and Mally the Maid, to put it mildly!!!
Amanda and daughter Raven assume that Anthony "got lucky" with Mally, and that "sweethearting" meant that they had sex, but Lois thinks that given the era, Anthony and Mally may have just kissed and cuddled. On the other hand, the two youngsters were living in the countryside, where life has traditionally always been a bit more on the "earthy side": and the sight of farmyard animals "carrying on" in the mating season would have been something young people in the countryside would have grown up with.
I wonder....!!!!
Will this do?
[Oh just go to bed! - Ed]
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!
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