Variety meats

Mr WithaY and I were at the butchers yesterday.  We are fortunate to have two good local butchers in town, and I try to buy my meat from them as often as possible.  They do these great deals where you can buy a sack o' meat for about 12 quid, and every time I've done it, the meat's been top quality and made some great meals.

As the butcher was wrapping up the purchases, we got chatting.

Butcher:  There's your mince.

Me:  Oh lovely, thank you.

Butcher:  I'll wrap all these other meats up individually so you can see what's what when you get home.

Me:  Thanks...otherwise it could be interesting when dinner time arrives.

Mr WithaY:  Ah yes, mystery meat casserole, my favourite.

Butcher:  You have to be careful.  We sell pet mince (Note: Pet mince is made of minced meat, but also minced offal like lungs, hearts, livers etcetera that customers are less inclined to buy nowadays.) here, and a chap came in one day and told us that his wife had cooked it and he'd eaten it by accident.  He said it was tasty, but chewy.

I was planning a review of the local paper as well, but this week it's been all about the recent loss of life overseas, so I thought I wouldn't.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17399064

Horsing around

Where have I been? What have I been doing to keep me away from my blog? Was it something truly magnificent and thrilling to justify so long an absence?

In short, no. I was in London on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, and as I tend to get home late, cram dinner down and lie exhausted on the sofa, watching undemanding TV till bedtime, I tend not to blog on the days I'm in town.

Thursday was an extra specially late night home, as we had our work Christmas lunch. We went to the Thai restaurant just off Trafalgar Square, in Norway House (I think) and had a damn fine meal. Very traditional, Thai food. Heh. I shared the vegetarian menu with my vegan colleague, and it was lovely.

Afterwards we went to the Ship and Shovel and did a quiz, mostly about work, which meant I was able to add very little in terms of real value, but I did draw beautiful stars all over the answer sheet, which hopefully earned us some credit.

All this excitement meant I caught a later train than usual, and joy of joys, it was pretty empty as it left Waterloo. Yay. Loads of spare seats, lots of leg room.

But no...wait...what's this? We stop at Clapham and hordes of small children pile aboard. Arse!

There were at least 400 of them in my carriage. They made enough noise for that many anyway. The responsible adults with them sat down at one end of the carriage, and the children, little girls aged from about 5 to 12 dispersed themselves all over the place. They started off well enough, but within 15 minutes were shrieking, whispering loudly and having a fake hair-pulling fight. The air was rapidly filled with high-pitched machine-gun giggling, loud weeping and fragments of snacks*.

Marvellous. I turned up my iPod and tried to pretend I was on a beach somewhere.

Arrived at my station at about 8pm-ish, and took great delight in getting off the train first so I could flee the car park before all the small children did (yes, they got off at my stop).

Overheard one of the responsible adults say to one of the shrieking moppets, who was carrying a huge toy pony/zebra thing under her arm, "Oh, we'll have to phone daddy and tell him we're bringing home another pony!" I'd like to think they were talking about toys, but I think not.

Went straight from there to a party in the village, which was lovely, but I was so tired I only stayed for an hour or so. What a lightweight. Mind you, getting up at 6am three days in a row is knackering. I am still walking at least one of the journeys between Waterloo and Victoria each day, which is a good 30 minute walk. So being a bit tired is to be expected.

We have been preparing a variety of meat-related foodstuffs for the meatfest tonight. But to ensure all the food groups are represented, I have made a chocolate cake for pudding.

Other news: Looks like father in law WithaY will be moving into the care home in the next village before Christmas, which is marvellous news. Will save us a huge amount of driving, to start with.

We've put our Christmas lights up in the front garden and so far West Wiltshire still has electricity, so that's encouraging.

I'm off work now till January the 5th. The longest break I've had from work (not counting 3 weeks when I had bronchitis) since last Christmas. And lord, I feel like I need it.




*Seemed to be fig roll biscuits from where I was sitting. Nice and sticky on the table tops.

I got the power

Well, I have now, anyway.

Picture the scene....Last night, Mr WithaY and I settled ourselves down on the comfy sofas after eating a large curry (home made, and delicious). We'd put the Christmas tree up, and were admiring the twinkling lights, and all the little decorations we always forget we have, and we were starting to feel a bit more festive than we have of late.

I made poor Mr WithaY sit through Will Ferrell in "Elf" as we put the tree up, which was on tv. It was mildly entertaining, and helped with the increase in festive feeling.

So, peace and harmony reigned. Aaah lovely. We were chilling out and planning an early night.

And then, with no warning, all the lights went out.

My first thought was that our twinkly Christmas tree lights had blown a fuse somewhere, but when we looked out of the window, the whole street was in darkness. The pub, the garage, the neighbours. Dark, dark, dark.

Hurrah!

'Tis the season to be subject to prolonged and annoying power cuts once again!

Now I feel Christmassy!

We got power back by about 10pm, when a nice man from the power company came round to make sure all was working once more. In the meantime, to amuse myself while we sat in the rather romantic candlelit sitting room, I played my acoustic guitar. I enjoyed myself, anyway.

Anyhoo, it meant we got to bed a lot later than we'd planned, so I changed my working in London days, and will go in on Wednesday, and am working at home today instead.

Other news: The flood in next door's meadow receded as quickly as it appeared, thankfully. Gave me quite a scare though, seeing the river come up so fast.

We went to see father in law WithaY on Sunday and he is looking much better, and is actually quite positive about things. The hospital staff down there have been brilliant; it looks like he might be getting a place in a nursing home in the next village down from us, five minutes away. Which would be excellent.

He asked us to clear out his freezer. So we did. Oh. My. Word. The things we found in there!

Eels! Pigs trotters! Unidentified jellified brown stuff in margerine tubs!

It was a real voyage of discovery. We filled a couple of black bin bags with stuff to throw out, and the rest is now in our freezer. In fact, we are planning a meatfest dinner party next weekend to help diminish the WithaY meat mountain.

Which will be nice.