133. Enjoyably Wasting Time

I don't know how it's happened but this post from December 2016, has suddenly appeared here and so if you think you've read it before, you're right.

TW 6-1-22

Around about 10 o’clock every morning, I start thinking about what we are going to eat in the evening.  I have responsibility for food because Caroline works and I don’t.  There are always three alternatives: eat out, buy a ready meal, or cook. 

I like cooking.  I’m no good at it but I rather enjoy everything that goes towards the outcome and sometimes I enjoy eating the end result as well - but not often.  Other people usually seem to enjoy what I’ve cooked more than I do.  There may be some psychological influences going on there or people are just being polite?  I suspect it’s the latter.

Eating out is the simplest and easiest option but it is expensive around here and not something to do every day.  When we lived in North London, we were within walking distance of tens of restaurants and maybe, it was the fierce competition caused by the high density of restaurants, that kept prices low. 

There are no cheap, independent restaurants in this area the way there are in London, just chains like Giraffe, Prezzo and Nando’s.   The days when we would pop out at seven and be back by eight because we had nothing in the fridge have gone. 

Every time we go to a restaurant nowadays, it is an “Event”.  Of course, the event is usually nothing more momentous than the fact that it is a Friday night, but our social life is such that Friday night is quite an event for us. 

I spend most midweek afternoons preparing food to be eaten for dinner that evening.  I made Prawn Caldinho the other day.  First, I had to marinate the prawns.  I had to grind the cumin, coriander seeds and peppercorns to a fine powder and then pound garlic cloves to a paste. After the preparation and cooking, I was left with four dirty pots that had to be washed up and put away. 

It was very nice but it took me more than two hours in all to prepare and cook.  Much simpler and easier to pop a ready meal into the microwave.  I have never had a ready meal from a supermarket that I didn’t enjoy. 

A King Prawn Masala ready meal for two costs £3.30 and it is really good.  As I said at the start, I only bother cooking because I enjoy it. 

I know that many people disagree, but growing your own food seems a particularly daft thing to do.  A couple of years ago, my brother, who appears to have turned horticulture and plant husbandry into an obsession, gave us a cucumber plant.  Cucumbers need to grow in soil that has to be kept moist.

We were supposed to go away for a few days but we nearly didn’t because we were worried that the cucumber might suffer from neglect.  We went but only after my son offered to stay at our house for the time we were away and water the damned thing.

What a to-do!  Look at it: prickly, stunted and thick-skinned.  We looked after it like a newborn baby on life support and at the end of it, all we “harvested” was just one cucumber.  Why bother?

Last March, we planted potatoes.  At least they don’t need nurturing while they grow but what you dig up is nothing like the potatoes you buy at Waitrose.  They are caked in mud for a start!

A few years ago, I spent an October afternoon making date pickle. That is not cooking.  There is virtually no preparation necessary apart from chopping the ingredients.  Mixing is the only technique required.  If you can measure weight and volume, it is impossible to get it wrong and it is worth doing because I’ve never seen it for sale in a store.

The first year I made date pickle, I didn’t know that you could buy pitted dates and I spent two hours removing the stones from two kilograms of them.  I also had to buy several ingredients that I'd never used before such as sumac, tamarind paste and asafoetida (on its own, it smells as its name suggests it might, but it adds an oniony flavour with no odour).

The date pickle I make in October is perfect by Christmas and two kilograms of it lasts a year.  It would all be gone earlier if Caroline liked it but she doesn’t and so I eat it all myself. 

“Why not make a normal pickle?” she suggested.  “Something that I like.”

I bought ingredients to make four kilograms of “Classic Pickle” and at ten o’clock on a Sunday morning, I began.  Apples, onions, beetroot, turnip and swede all had to be peeled and chopped.  Tomatoes had to be skinned before chopping.  It took hours!

I don’t know whether it’s an age thing but my eyes have recently become extremely sensitive to onions.  The moment I start to remove the peel from an onion, my eyes hurt.  It never used to be that bad.  In the end, I had to admit defeat and Caroline finished the job. 

She only moaned about it for about a week.

Unlike date pickle, these constituents of “Classic Pickle” have to be softened for an hour by simmering and it required regular stirring.  As the pan was cooling, I could see I was going to need more containers and so I went out and bought eight Kilner jars.

This pickle is fairly bland but it tastes good and goes particularly well with cheese.  It is unlike any pickle I’ve ever tried before as it doesn't have the sharp, vinegary tang of shop-bought pickle.

I’m making a rather special dessert for Christmas and I need glacé clementines.  I found that I could buy them online but the smallest quantity available is 1 kilogram.  I only need 100 grams and I wasn’t prepared to spend £12.99.  So, I spent 95p on three clementines and glacéed them myself.  It was very easy and they taste pretty good.

Is it worth it?  Making the glacé clementines and date pickle certainly is - but making the classic pickle most definitely was not. 

Branston Pickle in a supermarket costs around 35 pence per 100 grams.  The ingredients that I used cost £25 and so that works out at 62p per 100 grams.  However, if you add in the cost of the eight jars I had to buy at £2.99 each, that puts up the cost to £1.22 per 100 grams.  

But it doesn’t end there.  The value of my labour has to be worth the minimum wage and so that’s another £45.  I ignore the cost of the electricity used over six hours from the first peel to closing the last lid.

Consequently, to make my home-made pickle cost £2.50 per 100 grams.  A 360-gram jar of Branston Pickle is £1.29 in a supermarket. That low price shows the advantages brought about by economies of scale.  Making your own pickle really is not worth the bother. 

I will sell a 400-gram jar of my pickle for just £9.00 and that is a saving for you of 10%.  However, you can have one for £6.00 - but I would like to have the jar back, please.

78. Rural Stress

In March this year we moved out of London and into the country.  We have swapped the bustle of outer London suburbia for the seclusion of rural Buckinghamshire.  We are out-of-the-way here but not isolated.  We are just an hour from North London by car and only twenty-five minutes from Central London by rail.

It is very quiet here except at dawn when the noise from the birds is almost overwhelming.  There is one wood pigeon that really annoys me.  He (it’s probably male) is tone deaf.  He just cannot sing in tune and I find it so intolerable that once he starts, just before five o’clock every morning, I am awake and so irritated that I can never get back to sleep.  

The basic wood pigeon call – they don’t sing – consists of four notes with the fourth one dropping to be the lowest of them.   Once a wood pigeon starts to call it will repeat the sequence for up to an hour.  It can be quite soothing.

The tone-deaf pigeon that keeps me awake calls in a monotone and produces four notes of equal and yet somehow discordant pitch over and over again.  Imagine your favourite tune, a melody that you’ve heard countless times and love, being massacred by a rubbish singer.  That’s what I have been suffering every morning for the last two months.  You see?  It’s not all peace and tranquility out in the country.  There are stresses here too.

We were lucky when we lived in Winchmore Hill that we were only 72 paces away from one of the best Indian restaurants in London.  Just after we had settled in Wavendon we were driving through a neighbouring village and saw a restaurant called “Little India”.  As 'Friday Night is Curry Night' we thought we'd give "Little India" a trial and so we turned up the next evening.

“Would you like drinks while you look at the menu?” asked our waiter as he showed us to our table.

“No but could we have two poppadoms please,” I said.

“I’m sorry sir but we don’t serve poppadoms,” the waiter said, very apologetically.

“No poppadoms!  I’ve never heard of an Indian restaurant that doesn’t serve poppadoms.”

“Neither have I sir.  This is a Thai restaurant.”

Both Caroline and I always try to support local businesses.  Last Christmas we agreed that every present we bought would be from a shop within walking distance of our house.  It all worked out very well although I must say that I was surprised to be given a pair of size 6 trainers that were too small for me but luckily they were exactly the right size for Caroline.

In recent years when I called a local tradesman I usually got through to a Rumanian, a Pole or some other Eastern European who had recently arrived in the UK.  They all had several things in common:

1 They all answered their phone and if they didn’t would respond very quickly to any message I left.

2 They all turned up to give an estimate or to commence work at the time and on the day they said they would. 

3 Work done was always completed by the time they promised and was always of a high standard.

4 Their prices were always reasonable.

5 They were all reliable, pleasant and honest.

There don’t seem to be any Eastern Europeans living in North Buckinghamshire.  Now, whenever I call a local plumber, an electrician, a gardener or a carpet fitter, the phone is answered (if he can be bothered) by an Englishman or in the case of the gardener, an Englishwoman although she would probably describe herself as an English Lady.

We bought a new carpet for our living room.  The fitter who came was moaning that he only had two days work that week because people weren’t buying carpets.  “That’s like having a sixty per cent pay cut,” he told me.  I told him that I could help him out as I had a piece of carpet I’d brought with me from London that I’d like him to fit.  He agreed to do it and took my number.  A week later he still hadn’t rung.  I found someone else to do it.

Our boiler has been temperamental ever since we moved in.  Eight days ago it finally stopped working altogether.  I phoned three plumbers before one of them answered his phone and then he failed to arrive to carry out his inspection in order to provide a diagnosis. 

Eventually, after numerous further calls, a plumber came and told us that the pump had seized up.  That was three days ago and since then, despite the assurances he gave me that the work would soon be done we have heard nothing from him.

After several failed attempts this morning I suspected that he was recognising my phone when I rang him and was choosing for whatever reason, not to answer.  I tested my theory by using Caroline’s phone.  He answered straight away.  I said nothing but I hung up on him and now I’m looking for someone else.

The “Lady Gardener” whom I rang turned her nose up at the work I was asking her to do.  “That’s just garden maintenance,” she sneered, haughtily.  “I’m a horticulturalist.  Find a man.”

Those who have turned up to give an estimate don’t appear to be particularly honest either.  “Here’s my number,” a representative from a garden maintenance firm said to me, handing me a scrap of paper.  “Whatever price the company quote you, I’ll do it for twenty per cent less.”

An electrician from a local company tried the same ploy.

The country is said to be in recession.  I’m doing my bit.  I’m trying to stimulate growth and provide employment but I can’t do it without help and assistance.  I am totally disillusioned and fed up with English workers.

There are Polish plumbers but none of them are Liquid Propane Gas certified and that’s what I need because we are not on mains gas supply.  Also, after eight days I need a bath but that’s not something you really need to know about.

10:55 p.m. 5½ hours after posting.

I’ve had a comment from Fiona telling me that Wavendon is not in the country but is part of Milton Keynes.  She went on to tell me that in her town of “7,000 souls” there is a Corgi Registered plumber and two doors down is the local butcher.  Across the street is a great builder, who is related to a plumber and a plasterer. Opposite him is a roofer and at the bottom of the hill she has a really good Indian with takeaway service where I can get a curry that serves 3 (inclusive of poppadoms and pickle tray) for £11.

Well Fiona, so what?  I don't know where you live but those are the services I’d expect in a town of 7000 people but Wavendon isn’t a town.  It isn’t even a village.  As it has no services at all – no shops or a post office – it is technically a hamlet.  It has a population of about 700.  It is surrounded by farmland some five miles from Milton Keynes centre and 2 miles from the town boundary.  Our house is a mile further out of Wavendon towards Apsley Guise and a mile and a half from the nearest shop which is in Woburn Sands.  We are Milton Keynes only in as much as we have a MK post code but then so does Olney (where the annual pancake race is held) and no one would ever call Olney a part of Milton Keynes.  By her reasoning Chalfont St Peter is a part of Slough as it has a SL postcode.

But anyway that wasn’t the point of my blog.  My point is that here at least, tradesmen don’t seem to want to work.  At a time when nationally we are told that times are hard, I am finding it almost impossible to get some of the work done.  In London the recently arrived, skilled migrants were desperate to be offered work and when they were, they did it efficiently, ably and promptly.