Soup…

Sometimes it’s a rant, other times a bit of my life, good and bad, past or present. Often it’s the weather or some meaningless something I’ve seen or heard. But today it is soup.

I suppose you could call me a bit of a soup dragon. I’m a big fan of soup, it’s great. Maybe that’s why I can’t quite understand why it seems to have dropped off people’s culinary radar, particularly in these austere times, particularly as soup is healthy, filling, comforting, warming, easy to make, and cheap.

You can make soup out of almost nothing and very nearly everything, and there are lots of different soups to make – traditional soups, exotic soups, posh soups, single or multi-flavour soups. I love minestrone, spring vegetable, carrot and coriander, chicken and sweetcorn and my all time favourite… paprika spiced goulash soup.

Here’s yesterday’s Chunky Farmhouse Chicken and Vegetable – carrot, swede, parsnip, peas, onion, leeks, sweetcorn, home-made stock and chicken - which I served with hot crusty French bread.

Mmmm... soup.

I think I might start doing a soup of the week spot. Anyone interested?

A bit of bodgery…

Solid Fuel Kettle - Jason Lane

I have to admit to being a bit of a bodger - not, of course, that this is a wholly negative thing. The original bodgers were very fine wood turners who made furniture from the green woods around High Wycombe. Unfortunately, I’m not writing about them today, I’m writing about that other sort of bodger, the ones that are often confused with ‘botchers’ but aren’t and who are nothing to do with butchers by the way.

Butchers prepare and sell meat, whilst bodgers (who may have been named after badgers as they tended to live in rough shelters in the woods) mend stuff in unexpected and imaginative ways.

Are you following this? I don’t want to botch it up.

Bodging, at its purest, is an art form. It’s almost Heath Robinson - not quite, but it does require the same thought processes and the same kind of inventive, imaginative approach.

Anyone can repair anything if they have the right tools, skills, knowledge, the right parts, an instruction manual and patience. But bodging is more difficult, more cerebral by necessity. After all, it isn’t easy to get a job done using whatever tools and materials come to hand and which, whilst not necessarily elegant, is nevertheless successful in being more than serviceable.

Raw plugs, who needs them? I once fixed a heavy mirror to a wall using some kindling, a penknife, two rusty screws I found in the road, and a large stone. It’s still hanging today without a wobble. I have a door frame that’s kept together with superglue and dressmaking pins, a stool upholstered with an old scarf and thumb tacks, a kitchen cabinet cornice held in place with Wrigley’s chewing gum, a curtain rail made from a bamboo garden cane, I once splinted a broken arm with two wooden spoons and some parcel tape... the list goes on and on.

String, coat-hangers, candle wax, clothes pegs, those useful bits and pieces of no apparent use that you find at the back of drawers. This is the stuff of bodging. Why fetch the saw when you have a bread knife to hand? So we’ve lost that allan key but we do have a spoon! I’m not paying for that when I can make it from a bit of old rubber from a Wellington boot. Yeah, who needs a bloody screwdriver when you’ve got a brick?

Of course, a bodged job should never be confused with a ‘botched’ job. A botched job is a poor, incompetent, shoddy, unworkable, incomplete example of work at its very worst. The word ‘botch’ itself is derived from the mediaeval word for a bruise or carbuncle – as in ‘that am a nastye botch youst haffe on thou heade Baldric’.

There’s something very, very, worthy of merit in a ‘bodge’, like its close kin the ‘fudge’, it’s serviceable, it works and it’s worthy of self-congratulation. Well done me! A ‘botched’ job, on the other hand, most certainly isn’t – a botch is a total failure and only worth a boo… BOOOOOOOOOOO!

Of course a ‘bodge’ can become a ‘botch’ when it doesn’t work, and a botch can be a bitch. I’ve had my fair share of those (botches and bitches), like the time I tried to fix a leak in the bathroom with electrical tape (don’t ask). Yes, I’ve had my ‘bodging’ experiences and it’s not that I don’t have the tools to do the job, I do. Of course finding them is a different matter and even bothering to look a little bit too much trouble as I know that I’m not going to find them anyway. Besides, there’s something so satisfying in taking a few random bits that shouldn’t do the job and making them do it anyway. It’s a challenge, a test of intellect, invention at its very best… it’s what made the British Empire great

Well, that and cricket.

Two words: 'survival skills'. Ray Mears is an expert bodger, as are monkeys and Kevin McCloud.

So, vive la ‘bodge’, up to the art of ‘bodgery’ and long live ‘bodgers’ everywhere!

Spooky Stones ...

I spend a lot of time looking at stones; smooth ones, round ones, gnarled and knobbly ones. There’s always something hiding inside them if you know how to look. All you have to do is find it and let it out of it’s hiding place. It could be an owl, it might be a cat. This time it was faces, scary hoodoo voodoo faces; the sort of faces that the Ju-Ju Jesus Peanut’s congregation might have.

If I was a small boy I'd probably like to carry one of these around in my pocket. A Ju-Ju hoodoo voodoo hex to keep the bullies away, a talisman, a fetish stone.

I could hear them screaming from inside the stones, screaming for me to let them out; so I picked up my pen and paint and set them free.

Maybe it was the right thing to do and maybe it wasn’t – I’ll let you be the judge of that. But they’re out now, out and abroad and still screaming.

Listen... can you hear them?

Doctor’s orders…

I don’t really write about my health much. Well, there are plenty of people around who seem only too keen to tell you how they feel and how regular their bowel movements are without me joining in. When asked if I’m okay I generally say ‘yes’, although my other half would probably disagree. But if you can’t moan to your partner then who else can you winge to? Not your doctor that’s for sure.

This morning I had yet another letter demanding that I make an appointment at my local health centre. Apparently I missed my three month appointment and now, almost a year on, not only does the nurse want to take my blood pressure and discuss the results of the exercise questionnaire I haven’t filled in, but the doctor wants to see me for a… chat.

Maybe I should take an apple.

My last chat with the doctor over a year ago revolved around the question as to why I hadn’t been to see him in two years. ‘I’ve been ill,’ I dryly responded at which point he told me I’d put on weight. I explained that if he ate and drank as much as I did then he too might gain a few pounds, but this only led into a soliloquy concerning the state of his pension and how, even though he can retire at 55, he won’t be able to unless he gives up the villa in the Algarve and how a Mediterranean diet is far healthier. I tried to tell him that the Algarve wasn’t actually in the Mediterranean, but by then he was asking if I eat much oily fish? I explained how I adored battered cod and chips, but had difficulty buying whale at the fishmongers these days.

My ten minutes flew by…did you know that doctors pay huge percentages of their salaries into pension funds and are lucky if they realise a mere 50k a year… as he advised me to take more exercise (apparently swimming is good for fat, lazy people), cut down on red meat, cut out salt altogether, reduce my alcohol intake ( declared at a fraction of the reality), walk more, make an appointment to see the nurse and to come back and see him in 3 months without fail.

I failed. Well, I’ve been ill.

I wonder when they’ll send the next letter?

The dream thief…

Here it is; the scene of the crime on one of those cold stormy afternoons when the clouds moved, the wind blew and the customers never came. I didn’t mind, I wasn’t really there to sell; I was there to dream.

I often think of Bangor Pier. Of course I try to remember it before it turned so sour, at that time when it was just another silly adventure, a bit of a lark, a dream and my dream at that. A time before the slowly encroaching tacky toys and the constant rubbing away of the shine made me give it up altogether.

I’d sit, the boy who sees nothing, and make my silly things, listening to the wind crashing in the windchimes above my head. Sometimes I would sit for hours without seeing a single soul, the rain drumming on the lead roof, lashing the tall windows and turning them to wet frosted glass. My own little kingdom; the kingdom of the blind?

Of course I should have known. It was all my own fault. Only a fool lets the dream thief into his world, turning it to grey with his lack of wonder and his understanding of nothing outside the everyday. The real world he calls it. Turning the world to nothing – there’s nothing real about that, except disappointment.

When the dream thief offers help he always lies. He doesn’t do anything without there being something in it for him, a silver coin here, a drop of blood or two there, children's tears, a slap on the back from some slack, sad, Shylock. Eventually he always takes, and takes, and takes everything - until there is nothing left.

I haven’t been to Bangor Pier for a long, long time now. Maybe one day when the clouds rush across the sky and the dark has taken him away, I will again.

Dear John...

"I love you dearly,"

He quietly said.

She couldn’t hear him

She was dead.

Dear John her letter had began,

He’d never been a Dear John fan.

"Till death to us part."

He’d vowed to his wife.

And he’d truly meant it,

Hence the knife.
His heart bunny hopped
As her heart stopped,

Perhaps it would have been better

If she'd never sent that letter.

Bad magic and the curse of the zombie cheese…

I've been thinking about my dream and I think that the zombies have something to do with the Ju-Ju. I don't know why they're connected, the cheese and the peanut, but in some way they are and in some way I'm beginning to think that it's Bad Magic...

Having avoided the zombie goats that were placed strategically on small wooden fruit crates all along the flaming bridge I thought I was safe. Then, as I sped ever faster onwards in the beat up VW campervan I’d stolen, I saw yet another zombie tent city across all three lanes of the motorway in the distance. 'Nooooo!' I screamed as I ploughed into the tents, scattering dazed zombies to left, right, even high into the air. Emerging from the stinking shambles of the zombie shanty town, my face wet with tears of terror, I stared at the trail of destruction I’d left behind me in my mirror. I'd made it! It was then I heard the patter of tiny feet on the roof of the bus and noticed that I had no reflection in the mirror… Bad Magic! 

No more cheese or praying before bedtime for me.