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.

 

 

How has August almost vanished, and in such a dizzy whirl of activity?  I blame myself.  When I first started staying in London for the summer season I was astonished to discover how empty it was.  Would that I had kept THAT to myself!  Now everyone without children is refusing to leave which at least means the roads are clear of Prozac-ed mothers in Chelsea tractors, parking with gay abandon across corners and zebra crossings and it is safe to venture onto a pavement without the risk of being mown down by a surly toddler called Bertie on his scooter and his iPhone.

However, all the proper grown ups appear to have stayed on and are determined to enjoy the freedom.  There is a feverish feeling like Delhi after the memsahibs have left for Simla.  (Remember I went to school in Tunbridge Wells where such things were spoken of with reckless abandon.)

My friend Deborah, Doris to my Elsie for those of you who were glued to the wireless during the Blitz, is here from Australia and we have a couple of years of nattering to catch up on – doings of husbands and lovers, children and grandchildren, neighbours and colleagues – mountains of goss all to be washed down with industrial quantities of red wine.  We’re exhausted!

On the plus side the bloody sales are over and shops are filling up with gorgeous Autumn/Winter stock.  We have the bumper September Vogue under our arm and shopping can commence.  I have already invested – code for buying something way out of your budget – in a pink suede trench coat and following on the success of last year’s thigh length red boots,  I have updated to the same thing but in royal blue velvet.  To die for, people and it’s no good thinking you can pop into the shops when you get back from the seaside.  The wise virgins (sic) have got there first.

Today’s event is an organised walk entitled ‘Decadent London’ with my oldest friend who is probably just revisiting the haunts of his youth, aka the years between  20 and 65. Whilst the word decadent has a certain appeal – a possible first outing for the Boots – ‘walk’ is far from my favourite activity.  We are lunching first so I may suggest we have a second bottle and go Christmas shopping instead.  The first cuckoos of Yuletide, the bumper tins of Quality Street,  are already on display.  No time to waste.

 

 

I am back in beautiful Devon this week and it’s hard to avoid the food, even if you wanted to although we’ve always been so full up at all times that we haven’t even attempted to force a cream tea between our lips.  Not even a ‘wafer thin’ one, to quote Mr Creosote.  Last night’s dinner was a fabulous Indian meal, detailed review available on Tripadvisor as it’s Saturday and it will give you an excuse to delay doing all those chores ….

We have also been talking about food – we never spend an idle moment – and trying to decide which country has the best food.  Obviously NOT France.  So very last year, last century in fact, as they haven’t had an idea since Escoffier died.  Germans go for quantity over, over everything really and haven’t tried anything new since a pig fell into a sausage maker.  Switzerland scores surprisingly high with me.  I love cheese and potatoes, their bread is without any question the best in the world and they produce fabulous wine, almost none of which manages to leave the country.  The snag is that there isn’t a lot else so if you’ve a low boredom threshold, and you are not seriously rich, it may not be for you.

Lebanon is also a bit monotonous – day one is great but they serve exactly the same things three times a day until you never want to see them again.  They are also quite often having a war which tends to deter the casual diner.  However, like Switzerland, they score highly on the wines.  Pop out and get something from the Bekka valley if you’ve never tried it.  Greece sinks close to the bottom of the rankings because the food is similarly dreary and the wines are undrinkable.

Don’t even toy with the idea of Russia.  A vegetarian nightmare.  Meat soup followed by meat with meat and meat ice cream to end.  They may even put meat in the coffee.  What kind of meat is, worryingly, lost in translation.  Possibly wisely.  We ate nothing but Italian during our visit and very good it was but you’d do better to go to Italy where the weather is nicer and the people aren’t entered for the ‘Most Surly Race on Earth’ award.

Despite a liking for the odd bit of sushi I could live without ever eating Japanese food again.  I’ve never felt really satisfied by a bowl of brown water with two bits of spring onion floating in it.  People rave about Thai and Chinese food but there’s not much to them except chills and lemon  grass in the former and to my untrained eye, the latter’s fabled  Dim Sum are just a procession of wet dumplings which all taste the same.

So our final three and America gets the bronze.  It’s not all burgers and chips.  There are tiny green shoots out there and it is one to watch.  Sweden, which did have the Best Restaurant in the World title for about twenty years running, is my number two.  Amazing, mouth watering food marred only by the eye watering prices and the fact they eat at very peculiar hours.  Go into a restaurant for lunch at one and all you’ll find is a waiter sweeping up and turning the lights out.

And now, at number one is … the United Kingdom, although this is achieved by denying the Eurovision viewers a vote, and not before time.  If it’s food you’re after, from top quality ingredients prepared with constantly changing ideas, you need never worry about Brexit again.  There really is no place like home.

 

I had hoped to have photographic evidence of my recent produce-focussed industry but the chances of mastering the technology to transfer it from one device to another are slim to non-existent.  Just take my word for it that after labours which would make Hercules quail,  my entire home is stacked with bottled produce, from onion and chilli relish through to blackberry liqueur (Of the latter only limited stock still remaining).  Which is probably a Good Thing as according to an article I read yesterday, pictures of your fecund  garden  are up there in the top ten most irritating images on social media,  just behind snaps of your perfect family on a sun kissed Ibizan holiday. Not arguing.

What one always forgets in the headlong springtime dash to get a thousand seedlings into the earth is that the little buggers will, slugs permitting, mature and bear fruit, or vegetables, all of which will eventually require attention.  It’s the modern day equivalent to expecting people who had picked cotton all day getting home and having to start spinning, or looming or whatever process is involved.

All this time spent stirring boiling pans has left me thinking, always a dangerous occupation and it occurs to me that the reason people with money always look so relentlessly miserable is the expectation, not wholely unreasonable, that being rich will take the work, and more importantly, the aggravation out of life.  Sadly it doesn’t.  Planes still don’t leave on time, it continues to rain on your birthday and the shoes you must have or die have been discontinued.  Especially in your size.  Forever.  There is, and always will be, a twelve week wait before the sofa of your dreams can be delivered because that’s how long it takes to make it.  Just for a moment try to imagine how very cross-making that is when you thought, having made your first couple of million, that you were leaving all this frustration behind.

There is, however, a tiny chink of light at the end of the Tunnel of Despair, and this once it’s not an express train bearing down on you.  I have been given membership of a concierge service – possibly a concept with which you’re unfamiliar.  The idea is you pay them an annual, eye-watering fee, mysteriously waived in my case, and in return when something, anything,  wants sorting, they do it.  Top idea or what?  It’s almost a scandal that it isn’t available to everyone but as it is one of the very few upsides of being rich, let’s be big enough not to mind.

A victim of deep Protestant guilt, way sterner than the flimsy Catholic sort which doesn’t BEGIN to compare and can be overcome by a few Hail Mary’s, I had never actually used it until yesterday.  I was due to meet my daughter-in-law designate for lunch at a trendy eaterie which doesn’t take reservations (Why? Why?) and the thought of the poor girl having to queue after a hard week at work was just too heart rending … even my lofty principles buckled. We might even have ended up  too exhausted for shopping afterwards.   One swift phone call and we’ve got the magic password that bumps us to the front of the line and thence to the nicest table in the house.  Search hard enough, or let the concierge do it for you, and there’s always an upside.

Readers, life isn’t all bad.

Morning, morning, morning reader, she said, worryingly briskly. Yes, I am feeling positive, even empowered.  I have been … wait for it … planning. A very new line.  My chequered career was peppered with shouts of “Busk it, darling” ringing across the studio floor in response to pretty fundamental questions such as ‘What in God’s name shall we do?”.  Preparation was, as a certain American lady said about taxes, for the little people.

This week has been a flurry of research, discussion, decisions, a whole series of firsts. We are off on the road again, to the Lake District.  Beat that, Mr Kerouac.  This is going to be like the programmes with Rob Brydon and what’s his name, only with savage cruelty instead of pathos.  I may even take a camera.

First thing to be sorted was the cast list.  No men.  Hardly even worth stating.  We want fun and by definition this is  not listening to someone shouting at the satnav and a thousand prostate-induced loo stops. No one of childbearing age.  We certainly don’t want a contraceptive crisis in the middle of nowhere. Participants must drink like a fish and swear like a trooper.  And no effing vegans.  Obviously.

We have taken a romantically named cottage.  Could be a cause for concern when one recalls the sodden acres of rusting caravans in Skegness, always called something like Apple Blossom Pastures.  This will probably turn out to be empty only because some desperate refugees turned it down as unfit for human habitation, the pictures on the web site having been Photo-shopped to death. It has a wood burning stove and I have taken the precaution of getting a fire starter kit.  No repeat of the unfortunate smoke-boarding incident in the Borders involving Staff Nurse, an erratic flame thrower and some petrol.

It transpires that there is a medical theme to the dramatis personae and bearing in mind my six memorable months on ‘General Hospital’ and that documentary on leprosy (Do NOT ask for details) I have appointed myself Maton.  We have a doctor, a staff nurse and a student nurse, always referred to as Sluice Room Sue for some reason.  Her inclusion means that there will have to be Extremely Strict Bathroom Protocols.  Who can forget the daily hours we spent waiting to use the lavatory while SRS reclined in bath memorising the Daily Mail? A second bathroom was a must.

Moving on let us discuss Dress Code.  We will not, not be going native.  No thick socks, trousers with zips at the knee, no maps in plastic.  And clean shaven. It’s exactly like dressing for dinner in the jungle.  We must maintain standards and technically, as someone with an engineering degree explained to me, wearing high heels when mountain climbing means that you are always on flat ground, at least on the way up.  On sober reflection  I think I should have asked for a diagram…

And how many times has that phrase crossed my lips?

I do like a statistic.  Just as John Major was the only person ever to run AWAY from a circus, so I was without doubt alone in my longing to leave the glamourous, exciting world of television (sic) to be an actuarist.  Go figure.  This latent longing was recalled yesterday when I read some research that proved that drinking wine prevented you from becoming diabetic.  Result!, fellow topers and clearly true. (Although as with all these ‘Hold the front page’ announcements I only really noticed the headline and was too busy looking for a corkscrew to read the small, inevitably dull details that followed).

I also have evidence to put the matter beyond reasonable doubt, although , like all humans, I am quite capable of persuading myself to believe something I like without a shred of the stuff.  The only time in my life that doctors have been concerned that I was pre-diabetic was when I was pregnant.  And had not touched a drop for months.  Case proven or what?  I could probably save the country millions by offering to do all future research single handed because most of the time the answers they come up with are, to use a well known phrase or saying, bleedin’ obvious.

I was at a meeting the other day when much time (14 minutes of which was, unforgivably, during an airing of  ‘The Archers’) was expended on talk of doing a survey, or to use corporate-speak, a ‘piece of work’ to find out why people joined Friends’ organisations.  ‘Sack the consultants’ I said, ‘I can tell you the answers they’ll find right now and then you tell me how that is going to move us forward one inch’.   Oddly my offer was not taken up but let me share my thoughts on the matter with a more appreciative audience.

Ask anyone a simple question and one hundred per cent of the time they will come up with the reply that they think you’re looking for, whereas the fact of the matter is that people only voluntarily do what they want to do anyway. You, dear reasearcher, just have to ask yourself why they might want to do whatever it is you’re flogging and bingo, you’re sorted.  What’s their  motivation and let’s face it, there isn’t a long list to chose from?  Could be simply sex in which case let’s change the name to ‘Friends with Benefits’ – the way forward!   Sadly the Charity Commissioners might have something to say and we can’t risk another raid by the Vice Squad. There’s no money to be made by signing up so not that one either. We are left with the desire for fame,popularity or immortality.  Give me and my evil sons twenty minutes with a paper and pencil and we will let you have an exhaustive list of how to apply that to membership issues.  Next!

My somewhat jaded palate was also briefly touched this week by the vexing issue of ‘corporate speak ‘ which I mentioned earlier, the gobbledygook that people use in an attempt to blind the listener with science.  Or boredom.  John Humphrey spends his life expressing his incredulity at the nonsense that comes out of the ‘Today’ shows guests and make them explain themselves in simple English, often a task too far. I was therefore particularly pleased to see that ‘The Times’ had a leader devoted to the subject this week.  You may rest assured, reader, that I will never invite you to try blue-sky thinking, that we are not ‘where we are’ and never will be, and the only ‘piece of work’ around here, in the proper sense, is me.