Wulf's Webden

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12 June 2024
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Days Like These

The poetry I’m reading at the moment is Days Like These by Brian Bilston. Bilston is someone whose work I have often seen on Facebook and Twitter (you know, the one presently being called X) but I spotted the book in the local library the other day and, having enjoyed most of the individual poems I’d read, it was an obvious choice to borrow.

The shtick of the work is that it contains one poem for each day of the year (including leap years). So far, I’m up to about mid-March and, if I’m honest, many of the entries aren’t ones I’ll rush back to read again. However, it is worth putting that in perspective. How many creative people manage to “knock it out of the park” according your tastes with every work they create? The more you know their body of work, the more likely you’ll come across some that are, for you at least, duds. Even in the things I create myself, I don’t have a 100% record of pleasing myself so I’d still count Bilston’s collection as one worth reading.

Out of those which I’ve particularly enjoyed some are purely for the comedic effect, like the one for pancake day / shrove Tuesday. As a movable feast, Bilston has just opted for a date when it could appear and then arranged for the short poem to be printed upside down, like a pancake stuck on the ceiling. Simple but smile-worthy. There are more poignant ones too. I can’t remember which day it was but there was a piece ostensibly about Paddington Bear but really challenging those who love this children’s book character but aren’t willing to offer a welcome to flesh and blood refugees. For me, those are the real gems and I am sure I will discover a few more by the time I reach 31 December.

11 June 2024
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Skittling

Today was another AGM for The Haven, a charity for which I serve as one of the trustees. The annual event is always bookended by a meal (which I missed this year – band rehearsal to attend) and a game of skittles at the pub where the event is held.

Bowling is not one of my strongest skills and this game – played with nine wooden skittles and three heavy rubber balls – is in the same vein. However, I was on a bit of a roll tonight and I think I racked up the highest score on the board (an 8, a 7 and an 8). I won’t let it go to my head through. It was my best performance in the three years I’ve been attending AGMs with the charity and I would be very surprised if I manage to equal or exceed that next year!

10 June 2024
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Cairn Holy

Cairn Holy - 03
Cairn Holy Chambered Cairns

Cairn Holy is a small, ancient site near Creetown in Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland. It isn’t a major tourist attraction, which is probably a good thing given that access is via a single track road twisting up a hill, but after braving the drive you can explore round two neolithic burial sites. There is a little information on boards but, on a glorious morning such as when we visited a week and half ago, it was more than enough to make it worthwhile.

9 June 2024
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Junkyard Cats

I was back at the Queen’s Park bandstand this afternoon but this time to listen rather than perform. This week’s act was the Junkyard Cats, a small combo very much in the New Orleans tradition. They even had bass provided by a sousaphone. A very entertaining act and one I’ll watch out for again.

You can find the schedule of concerts on the council’s website for Queen’s Park (and, if you look down the list, I’m down to be performing again with Charnwood Concert Band on 7 July).

8 June 2024
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Sunk?

I have to wonder if Richie Sunak is really “in it to win it” with the pending UK General Election? From surprising a good number of his Conservative Party colleagues (and announcing it in the pouring rain without even the assistance of someone holding an umbrella) to Thursday’s embarrassment of skipping off early from the D-Day memorial to record an interview with ITV (you’d have thought someone with the power of the PM could have pointed out that they could have come to him, thanks to modern technology), his campaign seems to be built on demonstrating bad judgement. Sadly, in the modern era, that doesn’t seem to be a bar to political office but I’m struggling to understand how anyone could countenance voting for the local representative of a party whose leader seems to be utilising a gaffe-a-day diary (especially when Labour are not as distinguished from the opposite side of the house as some of their more radical supporters might like).

The thought occurred to me shortly after the election announcement that you only have to cross one letter out of Sunak to get “sunk”. That’s probably the result of listening to too much of I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue on Radio 4, which often has rounds on songs, books or films ruined by adding, removing or changing a letter. I decided to resist posting the thought straight away. However, yesterday I saw it on a post on Facebook and I’ll be surprised if it doesn’t become a common meme over the next few weeks of campaigning unless our present PM manages to improve his current track record by a considerable degree.

One can’t help wondering if he has his green card out, tickets booked and school places negotiated for his children already because, thus far, he looks like somebody ready to take on the role of scapegoat for the Tories suffering a massive defeat and not someone who is intending to persist with politics for the longer term.

7 June 2024
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Bean Jam?

If a log jam is when logs get jammed up in a river, I wonder if my allotment is experiencing a bean jam? No rivers there but the broad bean plants I set going at the allotment last winter are harvesting a bit later than expected and so I’ve got other plants that have been waiting longer than I’d like to go in. At least we are on the harvest phase and perhaps it will only be another week or so (and a wonderfully bumper crop of beans) before I can clear enough space to start getting the next round of things in.

6 June 2024
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Getting Less Flexible?

I recently took the plunge and upgraded my Windows box from Win10 to Win11. It is a free upgrade but I decided not be an early adopter on that one in case anything broke. As it happens, it all went very smoothly and everything I have tried out since the update seems to work just fine.

I’ve got a couple of niggles though about the user interface. I had my programs set up in a set of ’tiles’ that made sense to me and all that is swept away. More annoying still, the task bar can now only sit at the bottom of the screen. It is a common default in many operating systems but most of them (including Win10) offer the option to use the top, left or right of the screen. Personally, I like the top, which means I can still see the important things even when clutter on my desk obscures the bottom of the screen.

I’m glad to be in a position to continue receiving security updates but the lack of UK flexibility seems like a retrograde step.

5 June 2024
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Unduly Complex

We recently bought some new wellington boots from a major DIY chain. I won’t mention the name but it did feature in a joke from the early days of lockdown: “I’m at the DIY store / How big is the queue? / Oh, the same size as the B”! There wasn’t a problem with the boots as boots but Jane found that, despite going a size above her regular shoes, the ones she got didn’t slip on and off easily. Since we’re more likely to use them on wet grass at a campsite than tramping through boot-sucking mud, that counts as a bug rather than a feature and we decided to return them.

In some ways, the process was easy. I’d carefully cleaned them as there were a couple of bits of grass on the bottom from the one time she had tried them and discovered the problem but that wasn’t even checked. However, a couple of things made the process much slower and more complex than perhaps it ought to have been. Firstly, we had to wait for ages to get help at a till. Staff numbers seem to be low and there wasn’t a dedicated returns or help desk. Secondly, we had to go through a process of returning the boots, getting a credit note and then using the credit note to purchase a replacement set one size up. I’m glad we had the foresight to pick up the replacement pair first or that would have been an extra walk up and down the store and even more complication if they didn’t have them in stock.

Given that it was a like for like replacement, in terms of stock line and price, it would surely have been more efficient to place the returned pair in a box for later sorting and just let us walk away with the replacement pair. Even if there was a bit more checking involved, it would have saved everyone time and improved rather than slightly dented our impression of the store.

4 June 2024
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Around Loch Trool

Last week we had a camping holiday in Scotland. Overall, it was excellent although the drive up and back wasn’t the most enjoyable experience and, once on our campsite, we were made fully aware of why people speak of Scottish midges in tones of fear!

One thing the midges did was to encourage us not to hang around on the campsite too much or stand still for long in rural areas unless a decent breeze was blowing. On our second full day, the weather was dominated by light showers but more than ample for doing a circular walk around Loch Trool. Here is one of the photos I took after an Instagram filter:

Around Loch Trool - 6 (Instagram Edit)

One mistake on the day involved my DSLR camera. I’d taken it but, getting it out of my rucksack, I found it had no power. I thought I must have switched it on when I wrapped it in a t-shirt and put it in the bag. I discovered that fairly early in the journey so was able to nip back to the car and put it in the boot rather than carrying the useless camera all the way round the lake. However, it turned out that I hadn’t put the battery back in after charging it before we set off.

I did have the battery back at camp so I also have some DSLR shots from later in the holiday but all Wednesday’s pictures relied on my phone (set uploaded to Flickr) and iPad (pending).

3 June 2024
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Shrubs to be drunk

According to the search engine on my blog, I haven’t mentioned shrub before, which surprises me – it was my drink discovery of last year and I’ve certainly brought it up many times in conversations. You can get a short history on Wikipedia but I came across it via stumbling upon Cook House in Newcastle last year. Jane and I stumbled across it and had such an amazing lunch that she bought me a copy of the cookbook produced by the restaurant’s founder on the spot to wrap up as my birthday present. On the day I remember drinking a fantastic glass of kombucha but the book contained a recipe for shrub, along the lines of the vinegar syrup mentioned by Wikipedia.

The method is quite simple. You take a strongly flavoured ingredient, steep it in vinegar for a couple of weeks (I’ve used white wine and cider vinegars) and then boil the infused vinegar with some sugar to create a sharp syrup. You wouldn’t want to drink it neat but a small portion can be diluted with various other drinks. Just a dash in the bottom of a glass, topped up with cold water is delicious and refreshing and it pairs well with all sorts of spirits and spirit-based cocktails too.

The two ingredients I’ve experiment with so far are lovage and rhubarb. Last year I started with rhubarb and then tried lovage. This year, I’ve already done a first batch with lovage and, today, I’ve set the results of my first rhubarb harvest steeping in a glass jar in the fridge. I jammed the jar full of rhubarb stalks split into two or more spears and topped up with white wine vinegar. By the time it is ready, I expect it will be a beautiful pink colour. I’ll weigh the coloured and flavoured vinegar and then add sugar to take the edge of the acidity – potentially up to the same weight again but I’ll start with less than that. The aim is to balance sharpness and sweetness while allowing for the character of the original ingredient to shine through.

The other thing I’d like to try this year is experimenting with some further ingredients. For example, I’ve got a punnet of plums which, if they start to turn, might end up getting the vinegar bath treatment, and I wonder whether things like welsh onions or nettle tips might produce worthwhile results? Experimentation lies ahead!