The Return of the Native

Perhaps it shows how much I have become used to the quieter and sedate life of East Anglia that I found Leeds to be a really busy city - crowded streets such as are never seen in Norwich, and the train station buzzing with people going in all directions - trans-pennine, Dundee, Plymouth.

It was a really good day, and a grand lunchtime meeting organised by Doorman Priest to meet up with the travelling legend of the deep south, Grandmere Mimi, who looks exactly like her Blog profile picture - so much so that I recognised her from the rear as she and some others were enquiring how to get to the first floor of Leeds Art Gallery without using the stairs. Other blogosphere contributors were also present who I won't name in case they wish to remain out of the picture. I'll leave it for them to reveal their presence if they so wish. Nor will I reveal who it was that had two main courses at our lunch ....



So now I'm back in the slumbering Shires, and putting my clocks forward an hour.

It's the first time I've tried computer dating.

En route

Here we are, on the Leeds to London Kings Cross train, but I shall be getting off at Peterborough - hopefully! Free Wifi access on the train, but it would be better if I had a table seat on which to put the laptop, rather than an airline-type seat with a flap-down tray. There's only just enough room for the keyboard and me, which means the screen is not quite upright and a bit difficult to see. Ah well, could be worse ....

Lunchtime meeting was very enjoyable. More later - we're coming into Wakefield Westgate. Foreign territory!

New every morning ...

I slept really well and have woken refreshed. Great hot shower, and good breakfast buffet - another reason I like the Ibis style. Now to gird my loins for a foray into Leeds city centre and a nose round the shops before the lunchtime meeting at somewhere called "The Tiled Hall Cafe" which is apparently part of the Town Hall/Art Gallery complex. I have a map ....

Heading North

A swift trip to Leeds for a lunchtime meeting tomorrow. Journey by rail started at Norwich station at 12.57.


Then a change at Grantham - which according to my rail network map, doesn't connect anywhere!


Then arrival at Leeds, some helpful information from the Tourist desk in the station, and a short 15 minute walk to the Ibis Hotel.


I did consider having my evening meal here, but it was as dead as the proverbial dodo in the restaurant area, and the lights of "tgiFriday's" were shining from over the road, so skirting the hurtling traffic I dined on a very good steak with peppercorn sauce, fries and seasonal veg - and the broccoli was still hot on the plate, which is something I can never manage at home. Washed down with a large glass of Merlot.

No starter and no dessert, but back for a coffee in my room.


I like the Ibis chain - straightforward, clean and comfortable. What else can one want on a night in an unknown city?

(Answers on a postcard please ....)

Feeding the masses

That's the third weekly Lent Lunch over and done. Tables are cleared, dishes washed and crockery put away. The meal, at £3 per person, consists of home made soup and a warm bread roll, cheese and biscuits, tea or coffee.

The first week 17 people had a choice of Tomato or Winter veg soups. Last week 18 people had a choice of Chicken & leek or Beef & tomato soup. Today 13 people dined on either Crofter's thick vegetable or Chicken, mushroom, spring onion and farfalle pasta soup.

Monies raised for the charities we're supporting, after expenses, has so far been over £50 per week. Two more to go, and no-one's had food poisoning yet!!!

Food, drink and a Cafe

The salmon was wonderful (even if it looks a bit anaemic in this picture!) - oven cooked with olive oil and balsamic vinegar, and made even better with the two glasses of 2005 Cahors that accompanied it! I then watched the Christmas 1991 special "Allo Allo". Bliss. Food for the body and the spirit.

And during Lent as well!!!

Update late

I really should have posted before this, but it's been a busy 7 days or so now that Lent has started. Parish work has kept me occupied - as in previous years I am cooking and hosting a weekly Lent lunch, then having a Lent group the following night - so last week there was Lent Lunch on Wednesday, post-communion "breakfast on Thursday, with the Lent group in the evening, and then two funerals on Friday followed by my monthly Coffee morning on Saturday. Add to that the death of one of our Benefice Readers (not unexpected) and a funeral-planning visit to another parishioner, I have had little spare time. This week the same Lent events, plus I have to get the Benefice magazine compiled and off to the printers, the main work for which I have started today.

So, it is now just on 8.00 p.m. The salmon fillet is cooking, the carrots boiling, and the microwave has just signalled that it has finished "nuking" a potato. So I am going to abandon this machine for a while, sit down, eat, and watch a film.

Stormy weather

It's a rough old night out there - the wind howling in the chimneys, rattling against the windows, and generally making itself felt. It was in weather such as this that I used to love going along the Undercliff Walk from Brighton to Rottingdean. The picture, copied from the Flickr photo site, shows the waves battering the cliffs below Roedean School (from whose flagpole a pair of y-fronts were hung during Rag Week 1969 - not me officer ...). The horizontal line along the bottom of the cliff is the Walk, the huge concrete edging showing, the blocks curved to try and direct the force of the water back out to the sea. They didn't always work, and after major storms quite a number would be found pushed out of place by the force of the waves. It was often a very wet and adventurous stroll. The Health & Safety brigade would not be amused, but it was fun.

Swings and roundabouts

The day started badly, missing the blue bin recyclable waste collection this morning, having forgotten to put the bin out at the end of the drive last night! Bum. Before the end of the next fortnight I shall have to sneak some waste paper into my neighbour's blue bin as she always has space.

But it got better. The web site "Freecycle", where people can ask for or offer items which are given freely, no sales allowed, is one I browse quite regularly. This morning I passed on an old fridge freezer to a young couple who were delighted to receive it. It's done me well, and when I looked at the paperwork it was bought on 8th December 1984! I received it from its original buyer a couple of years later. It cost a whacking £250 then, which was very expensive! It's never needed a repair and still works well. They don't make them like that anymore.



This evening I also passed on a spare VCR recorder to a young family whose own machine had started to chew up their tapes. They were pleased to get a replacement.

Good for them, and good for me, as Lent is a time for down-sizing.

Those days are gone

RIP Wendy Richards - "Miss Brahms"

Brothers and sisters in Christ

Since early days Christians have observed with great devotion the time of our Lord's passion and resurrection and prepared for this by a season of penitence and fasting.

By carefully keeping of these days, Christians take to heart the call to repentance and the assurance of forgiveness proclaimed in the gospel, and so grow in faith and in devotion to our Lord.

I invite you, therefore, in the name of the Church, to the observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God's holy word.

(Introduction to Ash Wednesday liturgy in Common Worship)



On a £12,500 per week pension, I think I could manage that.

The next challenge

Now its a graphics card upgrade.

New card in, and on the first boot-up the pc has frozen, not helped by the fact that I didn't put the mouse plug back! Just about to try again ... at least we got a picture on the monitor, albeit a strange resolution and with my desktop icons and folders all neatly arranged alphabetically down the left side of the screen.

The ZX Spectrum was easier in many respects ....

Recovery

Well, thanks to a little help from a friend, the old hard drive is now in the new pc and working as a "slave" ... (always wanted one of those!) ... which means that I can now access all the documents and templates stored on it. I can't access or run any of the promgrams on there, but I don't really need to. I've found that the Bluetooth dongle won't work with Vista, so I shall need to get a new one of those, and I'm just about to load on my Visual Liturgy software to allow me to concoct services, and I know this works as I've already put it on my laptop. I can also access the various sound files that are lurking on the old disc, some of which I'd forgotten I even had. Snatches from "Father Ted", "Star Trek" and "The Simpsons".

All in all, 95% is back, and the other 5% is not missed, so I've been very fortunate considering there are many people who lose everything in a "crash".

Unfortunately for the congregations of my 11 churches, I've also recovered my sermon files!

Getting there

Of course, if I read things properly, I would have seen that the Home & Student box referred to the version of MS Office, not Vista, and since I didn't purchase Office (having Professional 2003 already), that's why I didn't have the product key!

So far so good

This is being posted via the new pc. No problems yet, though this version of Vista is somewhat different to that on my laptop, and things aren't where I'm used to finding them!

Somewhat amazed that I've managed to connect it to the Internet via a network cable! Thought that I'd have difficulties with the settings, but it went straight on.

Still have to set-up the printer and scanner.

Perhaps I'll get my supper before I tackle that. Medallions of neck fillet of lamb in a quince sauce. Do a bit of veg to go with it .... *slurp*

Right, cross your fingers ....

Old pc in bits on floor surrounded by packaging of new tower unit. Mouse, keyboard, speakers and monitor plugged in - I just need to turn on the power switch ....

Maybe I'll make a coffee and watch "The Simpsons" first .....

Sunday Funeral

Since a power cut some four weeks ago (also on a Sunday), the power switch on the main pc hasn't turned everything off. Even when shut down power was still routing to the mouse and a 4xUSB extension socket, plus a hand-held game controller. If I turned off at the mains, when I turned the power back on, great whirrings and thunderings came from inside the machine and the power button and hard disc drive light flashed merrily. Well today, I turned off at the mains to see if it would re-set the mouse socket. Great knockings from inside the machine again, and I couldn't get it to boot up.

Laptop now connected to the printer and sitting on the desk. Only trouble is, I keep trying to use the old keyboard and wondering why no characters are appearing on the screen!

A trip to a computer store tomorrow is now on the cards.

Aaaagh!

It's just died!

Motherboard dying

I think that ny main desktop computer is on its last legs. Three weeks ago the network socket stopped working and I've had to link the pc to the web via a small wirelss unit plugged into a USB socket. Then I was unable to write anything to a blank CD. I can read discs, but can't write anything to one. Now, today, the mouse has died. The mouse itself is okay, but the pc has stopped recognising the socket. I think the motherboard is slowly dying. Thankfully I saved last night's work for the Benefice magazine onto a thumb drive, so if I link my laptop to the printer I'll be able to print it off and get it into the post tomorrow.

Looks like a new unit is required.

All gone now ...

... but it looked lovely at the Morning Office at 9.15 a.m.

Here we go again

Later than forecast ... the lunchtime weather said it would arrive at 3.00 p.m. The evening forecast said 7.00 p.m. In fact it was about 7.30 p.m. when it started. The world is once again turning white.

Now this is frightening!

In preparation for the Benefice Coffee Morning (for which I have made another 16 jars of 3-fruit marmalade) I delved into the lower shelves of the Butler's pantry to find some ground coffee. I hauled out a pack I bought in the Auchan hypermarket in Dunkirk just before Christmas, and found myself looking at an icon of Grand-mere Mimi!

Images of the Virgin Mary continually appear in and on the most unlikely of places and objects, but to find a picture of the venerable blogger of the deep south looking up at me was a moment of revelation!

Also disturbing was the printed invitation to be familiar and generous! I think I need to go and lie down!

As Lent approaches ...

After the storm

A crisp clear day.

Candlemas Day

If Candlemas Day be sunny and bright,
winter will have another flight;
if Candlemas Day be cloudy with rain,
winter is gone, and won't come again.

or ...

If Maries purifieng daie,
Be cleare and bright with sunnie ray,
The frost and cold shalbe much more,
After the feast than was before.
(1584)

Wintry blast!

The forecast for this Sunday afternoon appears to be fairly accurate!

Gawd, I'm stuffed

Masses of food at our Chinese lunch. The six of us began with prawn crackers, prawn toasts, "money parcels" and spring rolls with a plum sauce dip; then steamed char sui pork dumplings; then the roast duck pancakes; and then egg fried rice accompanying sweet & sour chicken with sweetcorn, sweet & sour battered king prawns, battered chicken in lemon sauce, vegetable chow mein, and beef and mushroom curry. We finished off with fresh fruit salad and lychees, ice cream, and dishes of marzipan stuffed dates, liquer chocolates, dark chocolate preserved ginger, and assorted toffees.

We all wore something new and something red, had lucky money envelopes, and fortune cookies. The latter were found in a Lidl supermarket and the fortunes were in German on one side of the slip of paper, and fortunately in English on the other, though the translations were a bit suspect.

A very enjoyable occasion all round. I expect to sleep well tonight!

*phew*

Gong Hei Fat Choy!

Happy Chinese New Year! Welcome the Year of the Ox.

Back down on the south coast again for another meet-up of the old "off-licence" crew, and this time it coincides with the Chinese New Yaer, so we're cooking Chinese dishes for our lunch together. I've done the roast duck and have the pancakes and hoi sin sauce, spring onions and cucumber to go with it. I'm also doing a large veg stir-fry and a beef curry - yes, curry - the Chinese version, not Indian - much less hot and more aromatic.

In Brighton yesterday evening I found the Chinese take-away I used to go to when I lived there, and it was open, so for old times sake I went in and ordered a bag of chips. (What expense! What luxury!) I didn't like to tell them that the last time I was in there was some 25 - 30 years ago! Not the sort of regular customer they want! Mind you, when I was a regular customer I must have spent a small fortune there, and probably put their young daughter though school! In fact, I think she was the adult lady who served me!

What a let-down

I feel cheated.

No high winds have swept across the Suffolk tundra. No torrential downpours giving rise to fears of an inundation. In fact, the last 24 hours have been almost without a breeze and reasonably, for January at least, dry. Only now on Friday lunchtime is the wind picking up and the (light) rain falling as the back edge of the Low moves through. All my preparations were for nothing. Candles were strategically placed. Matches were to hand. The small camping stove was ready in the kitchen to boil water for hot drinks and maybe heat a tin of curried beans.

Bummocks.

Heads down!

Munching on a slice of Christmas cake and slurping a mug of coffee before the weather sets in tonight. Wind and rain forecast, and I have a PCC meeting to go out for. At least its the one where we get wonderful refreshments afterwards - all home-made things like mini quiche, gingerbread, shortbread, cake ...

And then the forecast for tomorrow night is even worse.



High winds with damaging gusts and torrential rain, maybe snow and sleet in places! The map shows that at 6.00 p.m. we're just about to drown!

Frosty, but no snowman

A fresh morning here in the land of the East Angles.

Back in the city

Another trip to Norwich, and a very French breakfast in Caffe Nero, followed by lunch in Cafe Rouge - which was roast chicken in a cream and roquefort sauce, with baby roast potatoes and french beans. I spent my £10 voucher this time, so for the dish and a glass of fresh orange juice I only had to find just over £4. Not bad.

Shared Supper

The first Benefice Shared Supper of the year, and a feast! Lots of different dishes on offer, and nosh and natter in a warm house until past 11.00 p.m.

I took a dish of king prawns with a sweet chilli dip, a bowl of pork sausages cooked in a hoi sin and spring onion sauce, some potato jackets stuffed with haddock and topped with a cheese and potato mash, and some meringues topped with thick double cream and a mandarin segment.

Roll on the February supper!

Lunch out

My day off was spent in Norwich, and I lunched at my favourite watering-hole, "Cafe Rouge".


I enjoyed their set menu for £9.95, and chose chicken liver pate with french bread; a Normandy pancake stuffed with mushrooms, spinach and creme fraiche, accompanied by salad and frites; and then finished with a Belgian waffle with ice cream and hot chocolate sauce.


It was a tough job, but somebody had to eat it!

*burp*

The beauty of freezing fog ...

... lies not when you're driving through it, but in its aftermath on a fresh new morning.

Me Porgy, you Bess

An enjoyable day today, making a visit to Milton Keynes, the highlight of which was that I got the chance to sing "Summertime" for the legendary chanteuse, Cleo Laine.


Well, actually, I sang "Summertime" to her standing outside the door to her room.

Or to be more accurate, I sang the first word of "Summertime", softly, outside her closed door, and she probably didn't even hear me. But why let the facts get in way of a good story?

Which reminds me - tomorrow is the Feast of the Epiphany .......

WELCOME 2009

London does it in style ....