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Made it through the week

Wednesday was the third anniversary of Christopher’s death. I know it’s only a date, and only has significance if I choose to give it that, but it has still been a difficult week and I’ve been fighting off headaches and depression. I was invited round to lunch on Sunday by some close friends, and that was enjoyable and a good distraction. On the day itself I had a full-day customer meeting at our Hampshire HQ, which was hard work but at least gave me something constructive to concentrate on and stopped me moping.

I’m trying to “be nice” to myself at the moment and not overdo things, as I am well aware that I’m a bit shaky. So I took Thursday off as Time Off In Lieu of the very long day on Wednesday, and treated myself to lunch in town at the Fig Tree, a bistro that Christopher and I used to enjoy eating at. I just had a light lunch of an open sandwich with Parma ham and goats cheese, followed by a slice of gooey carrot cake and a large coffee. But it made a pleasant change.

On Friday afternoon I met up in town with an ex-colleague of Christopher’s for coffee and a pastry. I hadn’t seen Neil for far too long, and it was really good to catch up with all of his news and gossip.

Overall, the anniversary was easier this year than last year, which in turn was much easier than the year before. So things are definitely getting better. It’s just slower and harder than I had ever imagined.

11 08 2013 icyjumbo status Comments (2) Permalink

Pimms Jellies

It’s been so hot recently. Too hot to feel like cooking properly, and on occasions too hot for me to want to eat much either. I’ve been living off mostly salads, and bread / cheese / pâté for several weeks now. Which is fine during the week, but I do like to make more of an effort on Saturday nights, and salads (no matter how inventive) feel like cheating. So I decided to jazz up dinner last Saturday by making a Pimms jelly.

I bought a small can of ready-mixed Pimms and lemonade, diluted it a bit further with the dregs of a bottle of cloudy lemonade that was lurking in the fridge and needed using up, added a bit of extra sugar and some leaf gelatine. I then chilled it in the fridge for a couple of hours until it looked as if it might be prepared to set eventually, then decanted it into individual glasses with strawberries, red currants and cucumber. The food-miles on the fruit were pretty low – I bought juicy, fat Ledbury-grown strawberries from the greengrocers, and the red-currants were from my back garden. The birds seem to have stripped most of the berries, but there were enough left to use as a garnish. Then it all went back into the fridge until it was set.

I had one for dessert on Saturday night and it was absolutely delicious, and really tasted of summer. It was still very slightly fizzy, which was an added bonus. Well worth the effort involved in making it. And I had enough jellies left over to treat myself on Sunday and Monday too.

06 08 2013 icyjumbo food Comments Off on Pimms Jellies Permalink

Sorting out my IT at last

I had a rather stressful, but ultimately successful day on Wednesday. For several years now (ever since Chris died, in fact) my home IT system has been getting gradually more and more ropey and unsupportable. It didn’t help that he set the network up in a way that made sense to him at the time, but never explained to me (to be fair, I wasn’t particularly interested) so there’s a mixture of WiFi, wired ethernet and ethernet-piggybacking-on-the-ringmain. His desktop computer blue-screen-of-deathed on me months ago, I get the colly-wobbles turning on his laptop, and my laptop was getting slower and slower until it was barely useable. And of course I only know some of his passwords which is very limiting. At some point I really needed to face up to it all and get a system that I understood and was in control of.

The final straw was when my printer died last month. With the third anniversary of his death coming up next week, I decided that now was a good time to get a grip, buy a cheap new laptop and printer and get it all sorted it out. So two weeks ago I went to the local computer repair shop that’s within walking distance of work, and explained my problem. I don’t in general like playing the grieving widow, but it’s helpful on occasions to do so – especially as it turned out that the chap behind the counter had known Chris and was very sympathetic. They gave me a reasonable quote for acting as a sysadmin and sorting it all out, gave me some advice on what sort of laptop to get, and for good measure were able to “sniff” one of my email passwords, which was helpful – and they didn’t even charge me.

I ordered a printer and laptop off Amazon (the latter running Windows 7, not Windows 8 which has had terrible reviews for non-tablet devices. I don’t want to be an inadvertent beta-tester for them! But it’s surprisingly difficult to get a Windows 7 machine) and they arrived last week. So last Friday after work I walked into town to the computer repair shop – only to find it closed and taken over by a gang of shopfitters! They said that the shop had closed down just the previous day! Drat. But at least they didn’t have any of my money or equipment. I walked back to work feeling distinctly pissed off – I’d psyched myself up to sort this out, and now didn’t have a sysadmin. I decided I needed a treat to cheer myself up, and called in at the bakers to buy a danish pastry. Outside the shop was a van for a rival computer repair/sysadmin company – perfect timing! I called them as soon as I got home, explained my problem all over again, put the grieving widow act back on, and arranged for them to come out on Wednesday to set my system up and leave it working. They charged more per hour than the first place, but on the other hand they were clearly still in business!

At 10am on Wednesday the sysadmin turned up. He didn’t have any sandwiches with him and was clearly expecting to be away by lunchtime. I said to myself “If I thought it would only take two hours, I’d be doing the setup myself one weekend, and wouldn’t have taken the day off work and be paying per hour for sysadmin support!” Sure enough, at 12:30 he was clearly only part way through the job and I had to provide him with some lunch. In the end it took us five hours, working through things methodically, reverse-engineering Christopher’s thought processes, and building a working system a bit at a time. At one point we had three laptops and the iPad all being consulted for various configuration files and setups. It was quite stressful at times, and I was really glad I had someone to help set things up, as I suspect I’d have bottled out at the first hurdle otherwise.

But now I have a much faster laptop, configured pretty much how I want it, with sensible access to my email, with most of my photos and all of my music copied over from my old computer. The only thing we weren’t able to do was change the name of the WiFi network, which is still “Christopher’s Network”. I’d have liked to change that to something more anodyne, but I didn’t have the password needed to do so. We discussed doing a factory reset of the WiFi node, but that would have meant then resetting all the devices that connect to it. Since we deliberately left that to last (on the basis of let’s at least get something working first)  it was 3pm by then, and I decided that enough was enough. If and when the BT exchange gets upgraded to faster broadband, that will be a good time to upgrade my router and WiFi. Until then, I’ll stick with what I’ve got.

I feel a lot happier now that I’ve got something that works and is sustainable into the future. That’s another step further forward, which is good.

02 08 2013 Gillian house
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Definitely NOT taking part in Reality TV!

This is an odd one……. I was contacted recently on behalf of a television company looking for people to take part in a new TV series!

There’s a fair bit of interest in the media at the moment about returning to “traditional skills”, possibly as a reaction to Austerity Britain and the Credit Crunch. There’s loads of TV programmes about cooking, including baking, and there was one on recently about sewing. It seems that a TV production company wants to get in on the act, putting their own twist on it. They are looking for “enthusiastic amateurs” involved in traditional crafts, including working with wood, metal, stone, textiles, glass and clay. They want people who have a secret hankering to make a career out of their hobby, and will give them master classes and tutoring from established experts in their field, plus presumably some mentoring in coming up with a business plan to make a living from the craft. I suppose the element of tension for the viewing public is whether the participants manage to change their lives by succeeding in getting a new craft-based business off the ground, or whether they crash and burn.

I found out about it via Eastnor Pottery – it seems that a number of established craft-based businesses have been approached, and asked if they know of any hobbyists who might be interested. Jon the Potter thought of me – he reckons that my skill levels are high enough that I could make a go of it. That’s very flattering of him, but I’m personally not so convinced. I know what I’m doing and I’m technically competent at throwing, but my skill levels have reached a plateau and I think it would take several hundred hours of diligent practice to reach the next level. I suppose that would be on offer if I seriously went after the opportunity, but I really don’t want to put all that effort in.

I enjoy my pottery as a hobby, but I’ve absolutely no wish (not even a secret, unacknowledged one!) to have a career change and make a living from it. I’ve seen how hard Jon and Sarah have worked to build up Eastnor Pottery over the last decade or more, and I am under no illusions as to how challenging it is. So, although I fit the “enthusiastic amateur” part of the brief, I wouldn’t want to commit to trying to turn my hobby into a career. I’m better off earning my living as an engineer, and playing with clay at the weekends! I enjoy taking the occasional commission from friends and family, and seeing what I can do with it when I’m in the right mood, but I wouldn’t want to be obliged to make things to order. Plus I have an absolute horror of participating in any type of “Reality TV”!

It was nice to be asked, but I replied effectively “Thanks, but No thanks”. I shall keep an eye out for the resulting TV series though, as it should be very interesting.

30 07 2013 icyjumbo Uncategorized Comments (1) Permalink

Lunch at the Inn at Welland

For the last several years, Christopher’s step-father, Peter, has spent a week or two over the summer visiting some friends of his in Wales. His way home back to Kent takes him pretty close to Malvern, usually passing through around lunch-time. So it seems a very good idea to meet up for a pub-lunch and a catch-up. It was an ideal excuse to go back to the Inn at Welland, which I have been pretty impressed by, so I booked us a table.

The menu looked delicious, as usual, but I didn’t manage to make the most of the opportunity offered, as it was just too hot to eat a huge meal. We sat outside on the decking and just had a sandwich and salad each, though I have to say it was very tasty. My “croque monsieur” wouldn’t have been recognised as such by the French, but was a cheese and ham toastie made with really good ham and a strong cheddar on what looked like home-made bread. Yummy! And the coffee was some of the nicest I’ve had for a long time (helped by the piece of chocolate fridge cake that was served with it!)

The field next door to the pub was full of caravans and camper vans for the Welland Steam Fair, and every so often our conversation was interrupted by a loud whistle from a traction engine. This evening there has been a steady trickle of steam-powered vehicles crawling down the hill past my house on their way home. I hope they haven’t got too far to go, because at the speed they’re going they’ll be lucky to get any significant distance before midnight!

28 07 2013 icyjumbo Day out
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Before Midnight

One of Christopher’s favourite films was Before Sunrise, the 1995 film staring Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke, about a young couple, Celine and Jesse, who meet by chance on a train, and spend the day (or rather, the night) walking around Vienna talking to each other, before going their separate ways. I don’t know when he first saw it – he watched far more films than I did, but when the sequel Before Sunset came out in 2004 he insisted that I watch both of them in the correct order, and I really enjoyed them both too.

The second film caught up with Celine and Jesse nine years after their first meeting. Jesse is now a novelist who wrote a book about their original encounter and is on a book tour promoting it. Celine recognises the story, and goes along to one of his book-signings. They then spend the day walking around Paris talking, and trying to decide whether to get back together again, despite the fact that he’s now married with child.

Another sequel has just come out, Before Midnight. I really wanted to see it – partly because it’s had good reviews, but mostly because I was curious to see what happened to Celine and Jesse over the past nine years. Unfortunately, Malvern Cinema only put it on for three days – Tuesday and Wednesday evenings this week and a Thursday matinee. I’m really tired at the moment – I know that’s getting to be a bit of a boring refrain, but I’m still getting over the back to back equipment trials, and I’m simply not up to going out in the evenings. So if I wanted to see the film, that meant taking this afternoon off work to go to the matinee. That’s a bit awkward, as I have a milestone report due imminently, but I managed to juggle my workload to keep the afternoon free, booked it as leave, and took myself off to the cinema.

Nine years on from the previous film, Celine and Jesse are still together, and have seven year old twins. The film is set in Greece, and once again the two of them spend most of the time just walking around talking to each other. But this one is a lot darker than the previous two. Jesse is overwhelmed with guilt about the effect that breaking up his marriage is having on his teenage son (who actually looks pretty well adjusted to me), and Celine feels that she gets the blame for everything. Despite the fact that they clearly love each other, they bicker and argue and say more and more hurtful things to one another. It was a bit like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf in that respect. I felt like shouting at them “Don’t go for the nuclear option! Stop arguing and LISTEN to each other for a change!”.

I could have done without one of the minor characters, a widow who went on and on in (to me) unnecessary detail about just how much she missed her husband and how she kept imagining she could still see him. That made me wince. And I’m not entirely sure who the film is aimed at – it’s hardly a “date movie”. I think that the brutal honesty about the state of their relationship would be a bit of a downer! Perhaps that’s why Malvern only had it on such limited release. There can’t have been more than a dozen people in the audience this afternoon – it was almost like having a private showing. But overall it was a good film,and I’m pleased I made the effort to get to see it.

25 07 2013 icyjumbo Day out Comments Off on Before Midnight Permalink

Lidded pots

Lidded pots - only slightly wonky!

I popped down to Eastnor Pottery this afternoon to collect the pots which I turned and decorated a few weeks ago, and which have just come out of the kiln. These were a commission from my father, who wanted a lidded pot to use as a sugar bowl. He particularly requested that the lid should have a largish knob, to make it easy to grasp. That was quite tricky to accomplish – it’s a bit of an art to throw a lid to get the correct depth and spread anyway, let alone ensuring there is enough clay left in the middle to make a chunky handle. The yellow pot is 9cm high; the other two are 10cm high, and they’re all 9cm across at the top. So even though I was throwing freehand and wasn’t using calipers, they’ve come out pretty consistent in size. I always struggle to know how to decorate my pots. I’m competent at the technical aspects of throwing after all these years, but I’m not particularly artistic and tend to go for very simple decorations – I don’t want to detract from the shape of the pot. I’m quite pleased with the shape of these three pots – they’re the “classic vase” shape that I was aiming for.

21 07 2013 Gillian Day out
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Liverpool Care Pathway

There has been a great deal in the press over the last few months about the Liverpool Care Pathway, a method of treating dying patients with sedation and withdrawal of both food and active treatment once it is recognised that they are very close to death. The pathway was developed out of methods of treatment used in hospices, which are used to palliative care of the terminally ill, and has become widely used within the NHS including in general hospital settings.

Too widely used, apparently. The papers have been full of horror stories of elderly people being put on the Pathway under inappropriate circumstances – when they weren’t actually dying, without the knowledge and agreement of their next of kin, and allegedly to “unblock” beds and for monetary reward for targets met. If true, the allegations are shocking and a classic example of dysfunctional targets leading to dysfunctional corporate behaviours. There has been a high-level report into the practice, and the politicians have decreed that It Must Stop Forthwith. So the Liverpool Care Pathway is going to be withdrawn from use.

On the one hand, that’s good, if it stops the apparent abuses of the system. But I do wonder what will replace it. There has to be some way of recognising when active treatment has done all it can and that death is inevitable, and in my view it should be made as untraumatic as possible, both for the patient and their family.

I have a personal interest here. Although it wasn’t actually given that name, I’m pretty sure that Christopher was on the Liverpool Care Pathway for the last two days at the hospice. It wasn’t pleasant (and that’s an understatement), but I could tell he wasn’t suffering. The difference from the horror stories was that the Palliative Care consultant sat me down, explained what the options were and why she was recommending sedation etc, and made sure I understood what it meant. She said that it was her decision that Christopher had reached the point where active treatment was no longer appropriate, but I corrected her. I said that I was Next of Kin, and that the decision and responsibility for it was a joint one between me and her. But I agreed wholeheartedly with the decision. Christopher had told me the day before, in a lucid moment, that he had had enough, and all he wanted to do was die. So it was clearly my duty not to encourage the hospice staff to prolong the inevitable.

So in our case, and I believe in many others, the Liverpool Care Pathway or a variant thereof was used appropriately, compassionately, and with the informed consent of the Next of Kin. Once Christopher had said he wanted to die, it would have been wrong to aggressively treat him and prolong the inevitable, not to mention being even harder on me to watch him suffer. So, although I find it brings back very unhappy memories when I read the newspaper articles about the Pathway and see the fuss the Press has kicked up about it, I shall continue to follow the story to see what the Powers That Be propose to do to replace it. When used correctly, it was a reasonable solution to a very tricky problem, and if it gets banned completely I think a lot of terminally ill people may suffer unnecessarily.

18 07 2013 icyjumbo cancer Comments (1) Permalink

Malvern Food Bank

It’s absolutely shocking to think that in a relatively affluent place like Malvern there are people who can’t afford to feed themselves or their families. I know there are pockets of deprivation on some of the estates and in the surrounding villages, but still, I hadn’t realised it was so bad that people were having to rely on charity to be able to eat. I associate those levels of hunger and deprivation with the developing world, not the UK with an allegedly functioning Welfare State. But a few months ago there was an article in the local newspaper saying that volunteers had just set up a food bank in Malvern, and were expecting considerable demand for their services. It’s not meant as a long term solution, but people in need can be referred to them by front-line services (GPs, nurseries, jobcentre etc) and get a voucher to exchange at the food bank for three days worth of food to tide them over the crisis.

During the week there was a programme on the BBC, The Great British Budget Menu, challenging three Michelin starred chefs to befriend people living in food poverty, and try to help them eat better on their food budget – which was sometimes as low as £1 per person per day. Absolutely appalling. The chefs looked as gobsmacked as I was, and all three of them failed to stick to the stated budgets when they went shopping for their hosts. And today there was an article in my Sunday newspaper about the proliferation of food banks across the UK. The Trussell Trust, to which the Malvern food bank is affiliated, has over 325 food banks across the country and fed nearly 350,000 people in the last year, so clearly it is a pernicious and widespread problem.

Last weekend they were set up outside Waitrose in the centre of Malvern, handing out shopping lists to the customers and asking us all to add just one extra item to our weekly shop and donate it to them. It was quite a depressing list – all tinned meat/fish, tinned veg/fruit, packets of rice, cereal etc. Nothing fresh or perishable – I suppose it would be just too difficult for a small charity to handle use-by dates and stock turnover with perishable goods. They say that they put together nutritionally balanced food parcels, though I suspect that one would have to be quite imaginative and indeed competent about cooking to turn a bag full of tins and packets into something interesting and palatable.

Like what seemed most of the other customers, I took a shopping list out of curiosity, and added an extra tin to my trolley out of a feeling of middle-class guilt. There was a letter in the local paper this week from the charity thanking us all and saying that they’d collected nearly 1000kg of food and essential toiletries in the two days they were there. On the one hand, that’s really good. But on the other, it’s extremely depressing that there is such a need for it. I wonder how many local people they are feeding and how long they expect 1000kg of stuff to last before they have to restock?

14 07 2013 icyjumbo food Comments (4) Permalink

Yorkshire Puddings

Although I rather like Yorkshire puddings, and often have them if they’re on the menu at the canteen at work, I’d never cooked one. Partly I think that was because Christopher never cooked them – he wasn’t particularly keen on the texture, so they never formed part of the accompaniments when he did a roast dinner. And partly I think it was because we had them very rarely when I was growing up. I found out years later that in fact my mother had cooked them regularly for Sunday lunch, but they “didn’t work” for one reason or another, and usually went straight from the oven to the bin, without going anywhere near the dining table! Since my mother is a very good cook, I got the idea fixed in my head that Yorkshire puddings were firmly on the “too difficult” list.

I’ve been so busy recently at work, preparing for the two back-to-back equipment trials, that I’ve been really tired in the evenings, and consequently I think I’ve got into a bit of a rut with my cooking. So I decided to use the fact that I was off work all last week to try out some new recipes and challenge myself a bit. I looked through Jamie’s Fifteen Minute Meals to find something that looked interesting and a bit different, and came across a recipe for rosemary-flavoured yorkshire pudding with smoked salmon. I gave it a go, and was pleasantly surprised when the batter rose on cue, and the dish came out of the oven looking just like in the picture. I’d cooked it for exactly as long as the recipe stated, 13 minutes, and to my eyes it was a bit under-done, being a pale golden yellow. It tasted fine, but the texture was a little rubbery. I then looked up a basic Yorkshire pudding recipe in my other cookbooks, and found that they all specified baking it for at least 30 minutes. So I think Jamie was perhaps trying to be a bit over-ambitious, trying to do it all within 15 minutes!

However, it was close enough to a “proper” Yorkshire pudding that I thought I’d try again, but this time cook the batter for half an hour, as instructed by Delia. I often have sausages on a Sunday evening, so I had a go at Toad-in-the-hole with onion gravy. The gravy turned out to be more like onion marmalade – tasty, but not as runny as I had envisioned. But the Toad-in-the-hole worked really well, with a light crispy batter. I was very pleased, and will definitely do it again.

10 07 2013 icyjumbo food Comments (1) Permalink