We are within days of the Great Adventure: The Lakes and I must say that even Chairman Mao could not have been more greatly blessed on his Long Walk by his choice of Quartermaster. Staff Nurse has risen, nay, soared like an eagle to embrace the task and sends me the following:

Dear Matron,

As your car will be filled with gin and wine, I thought it prudent to order other supplies online and avoid wasting drinking time at the local co-op.  I enclose a sample day’s menu.

Breakfast: Frosted Flakes, long life milk, Nesquik

Lunch: Tesco every day value tinned spaghetti with sausages

Dinner: Heinz tinned tomato soup, Fray Bentos steak and kidney pies, McCain’s oven chips followed by that old school favourite, Gipsy Tart.

Ritz crackers with Dairy Lea triangles and Primula cheese spread.  (No doubt you will be impressed that I am following the advice in your blog and only serving two cheeses).

There will be a choice of Tango or Irn Bru to accompany the gin.

Horlick or Ovaltine at bedtime.

I replied as follows:

Dear Staff Nurse,

My heart positively swelled with pride on reading your email, and not just because of your, albeit belated, mastery of the punctuation mark. Those snooty interferers at the Guardian should have sight of this.  One hears so much moaning from the metropolitan elite about waste in the NHS and here is clear evidence that the 33s 11d expended on your nutrition training in 1943 was not spent in vain and how very cheering it is that there is no sign of the wretched kale and quinoa that is always being thrust down our throats.  I’d rather have a spotted dick any day of the week!

Apart from the gin (sloe and regular) and red wine, which I hope will do justice to your gourmet menus, I shall make space for one of my award winning quiches and a couple of cakes.  This may mean that the junior nurse is consigned to the roof rack but you will be with me in making food hygiene a top priority.

Preparation complete.  Forward, women!

(If you are unfamiliar with that classic of Kentish cuisine, the Gipsy Tart,  I urge you to find the recipe online.  It was a robust reaction to the wartime rationing of sugar).

 

 

 

In the relating of the unending round of excitement that makes up my life I may well have failed to mention that I recently went to a climate change brain-storming session.  Try not to be too jealous; some of us just have more fun than others.  It was fairly easy to work out that I had been included – as the only climate change denier they could think of, given that Nigel Lawson was washing his hair that day.

While you rummage around the depths of your handbag for the smelling salts let me insert a little accuracy.  I am not a denier but a doubter and I tend to think that’s a Good Thing.

Arrogance is, certainly in the long term, not a Good Thing and intellectual arrogance is the highway to a hiding.   History may not teach us much, and we certainly don’t pay much attention to it, but people, and especially scientific people, are not always right.  The problem is that they tend to think they are.  I don’t imagine that dinosaurs were plagued by inner doubts about their immortality – ‘What could wipe us out?’ – but where are they now?  The Spanish Inquisition thought they had the truth nailed and you had better not question them.  Didn’t turn out to be a successful long term policy, did it?

It might be thought that I didn’t pass on much common sense as a Mother but one thing I did drum into them was to ask Every Time ‘Who profits?’.  If you want to get to the bottom of anything, that’s not a bad starting point, be it an unsolved murder or a government policy.

My suspicions on global warming were first aroused when not only did it not get any warmer during the British summer time, although there were a lot of complicated explanations as to why this had signally failed to happen, but the name was quietly changed to ‘Climate change’.  The climate changes every day in England and if you take a slightly longer view it swings about like a drunk on a roundabout.  And why shouldn’t it?  I must have been out when the memo arrived saying that climate would follow a set, unchanging pattern till the end of time.  It never has, to the extent that the Earth has had Ice Ages and survived, and it never will.

Someone at that meeting was trying to convince me that we didn’t need reliable statistics going back two hundred years, hardly a lengthy stretch in terms of planet life as it  happens, because we’ve got tree rings.  You would seriously decide a global policy on tree rings? God help us.

And then last week some scientists (sic) announced that they may have got it a bit wrong.  Sweeties, you’re not running a corner shop. Youve been bullying the world into  changing the way it lives and created an extremely populous and profitable industry along the way.  Just make a little note somewhere of my Tip for the Day.  Doubt is good.  Try to remember that before you open your mouths again.

A girlfriend rang and discovering me at home on a Friday night said ‘I bet you’re baking’ and I was!     How lovely that the world sees me as an obvious candidate to fill that gaping chasm between Nigella Lawson and Mary Berry; more fairy lights than the former and not such an in-your-face sex goddess as the latter.

The occasion that had led me to re-discover the oven was the 30th birthday of the girlfriend of Useless the Younger.  She was throwing an enormous party but I am reluctant to go south of the river, even for her, so I decided to hold my own celebration.  It started out as early evening drinks but soon ballooned into dinner as these things tend to.  One guest asked for the menu in advance so he could select which wine to bring (Imagine the sophistication) so I had abandon the usual lightly disguised Indian takeaway and dream up some proper food.  I decided to go with an autumnal theme – lots of candles, harvest style wreath on the door and dried leaves scattered about the table.  Food had to tick all the au courant boxes – practically no carbs or sugar, locally sourced and organically grown – the last two not even a challenge for the Queen of the allotment.

We started with champagne – a bit obvious but people expect some traditional stuff, even at my house.  We then had the most amazing parsnip, apple and walnut soup found in an ancient Cranks cookery book.  You would have to be well over thirty to remember the restaurant. It was  just off Carnaby Street and staffed entirely by vegetarians; large women with pendulous breasts loosely swathed in Indian Muslim and stick-thin, wild-eyed, bearded men.

The main course was a tribute to my rural roots, a re-working of Stargazy Pie (You won’t have heard of it) with home grown French beans and slow roasted baby heritage tomatoes.  No kale or avocado?  How last year are you?

But the piece de resistance was what came next.  I need hardly tell you, I hope, that is is now beyond the pale to serve more than two cheeses and I presented them with a Bake Off showstopper.  A courgette, hazelnut and honey cake. Reader, it was fabulous.  I would include a photograph but the camera doesn’t exist with a shutter speed fast enough to capture it before it vanished.  How I wish I’d discovered this during the bloody courgette glut when I was hurling the wretched things out of the car window.

And what wines did we drink to accompany this feast?  God knows but there is quite an assortment of empties in the recycling and a worrying lack of content in the sloe gin bottle.

Yet another triumph then!

Ardent followers will recall the wonderful trips I undertook during the summer and will be eager for news of my next outing.  I may have mentioned that this is to be undertaken with a number of the angels (sic) that make up our National Health Service.  I have appointed myself Matron, more in an organisational capacity than anything else because despite my extensive experience in making medical programmes it has been pointed out in no uncertain terms that I lack hands on experience, in some senses.

Part of the forward planning has been to appoint our Staff Nurse to whip the junior members of the party into shape for the walking part of the expedition.  Let me share with you the unexpurgated response to what I saw as an eminently sensible suggestion.

“Dear Matron,

I am somewhat encouraged that despite your lack of practical training you do appear to have a good grasp of the role of Matron as it is quite clear that you have nothing better to do than sit on your arse and dream up preposterous tasks for your fellow travellers.

I am but a Staff Nurse but I fear that you have mistaken me for our (late) school gym mistress and as such I refuse to undertake the task. My decision is not based on the fitness of the Junior Nurse.  Indeed this was amply illustrated this weekend by her success in the Milton Keynes mini marathon – a distance of no less than 0.6 miles from the train station to my house.  Rather it is her inability to follow the simplest of directions, be it by foot or by car, and as you know she has on More Than One Occasion fallen foul of the law whilst travelling.

You may also recall that whilst holidaying recently in the Scottish Borders she planned to follow a route along the river which she succeeded in doing for a good ten yards.  The remainder of the walk was spent rambling around a council estate in the dark.  Imagine letting her lose in the Lakes – it could well be the last we see of her, especially if we allow her to take the gin with her.

If the Doctor plans to go with her, I hope she has carried out a full risk assessment and is well aware of the possible outcome of any outing organised by the Junior staff.

I suggest that we keep the gin supplies locked in the medicine cabinet or we may not see either of them again.  Whilst this would be mildly regrettable it would mean all the more drinks for our deserving selves.”

Is it obvious that we went to the same school?

 

 

Time again to dip the bucket of opportunity into the bottomless well of knowledge.  The world appears to be in the grip of an epidemic of insomnia and your hearts will be fluttering at the thought that help is at hand.  I offer a number of the more usual solutions; work harder, drink more at bedtime (Whisky, not cocoa.  We’re all over seven.)  or take sleeping pills.  Sadly melatonin is now banned in this country but when available (Only on prescription in Australia, or in any corner shop in America) induces the sleep of a contented baby, were there to be such a thing.

However there is a New Line! And incidentally did you hear the brilliant piece on Radio 4 about the exclamation mark? (Only on British Radio would such a thing draw a delighted audience;  yet another reason to be proud of the BBC. I may even have gleaned this top tip from that very source, or was it The Sporting Post? Whatever).

The way forward is dates.  Not of the romantic version, or a routine appointment with the dentist, but the fruit.  Actually this is a good time to mention that my dental staff are in disgrace.  I write several hundred words of glowing praise about their knowledge of bacterial mutation only to discover they haven’t bothered to read it.  Floss 500 times as a punishment.

Dates.  And almonds, the nuts.  Three of the former and a handful of the latter to be eaten at breakfast time et voila! Why it would work I cannot imagine but it does.  I have had to start setting an alarm to ensure I don’t sleep through lunch.  Get Ocado to rush round with supplies this very morning and order those ‘Thank You’ flowers for me.  Henceforth I shall be posting this blog much later in the day, possibly even on Sundays.

Let me leave you with another Thought for the Day.  Come on shore and we will kill and eat you all.  Not a warning for maritime travellers but the somewhat wordy and unlikely title of my latest reading matter, recommended by a very trusted literary advisor.  According to the back cover it is, and I promise this is an accurate quote, ‘a sensitive and vibrant portrayal …of an unlikely romance’.  I can’t wait to start.