Feeling autumnal. Thinking about where our food comes from. Renaming things.

 Yesterday it rained on and off for most of the day. When it didn’t rain it was dull and grey. This morning we woke to blue sky and sunshine again. It was, however, quite crisp, positively autumnal. At this rate there will be frost one of these mornings! I had to hunt out my cycling gloves before riding to the market. By the time I was on my way home it was warming up nicely, nothing like as hot as it was last week but very pleasant to be out and about in.

John Keats might well say that this is the “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” but crisp morning like today make me think it is the season of soups and roasted vegetables with chestnuts. So after coming back from the market and having some coffee, I set to and chopped vegetables to make soup. I have bought chestnuts, so I’ll do cauliflower and broccoli florets with chestnuts, maybe today, maybe tomorrow. We’ll see.

i think everything I put in my vegetable soup was grown in this country. I confess to not having checked all the ingredients thoroughly but they are all the sort of things that I might grow myself if I still had an allotment. The strawberries I bought today are British but I doubt that the same can be said for the cherries and nectarines. Possibly the cherries, probably the plums. My son grows grapes in his garden in Buckinghamshire, although this year he has been concerned that they’ve not been ripening fast enough for them to make jam as they didd last summer.  

But we’ve all grown accustomed to having fruit and vegetables from further afield. Now, according to this article many of the grocery items we currently take for granted may well become more difficult to get hold of because of climate change. We could face shortages of bananas, grapes, avocados, cashews, cocoa, peas, canned tuna and tea in the coming years, as the countries they come from are hit by changing weather patterns because of CO2 emissions, the charity Christian Aid has said. I could manage without canned tuna and cashews but all the rest are regular items in my shopping basket. We need to think carefully about our food supply, not just for the exotica we might like to add to our menus but simply to feed people basic stuff in so many parts of the world.

Down at the crossroads this morning the annoying traffic lights were back. This time I think it was because woodcutters were at work in one of the big trees by the bus shelter. Nowadays I’m supposed to call them “tree surgeons”. 

 

We noticed a similar pompous re-naming recently. We were on the tram, travelling from Manchester to Oldham, almost the last leg of our journey back from Buckinghamshire. This bit of the tram network uses the old railway route from Manchester to Oldham and on to Rochdale. As we went through Newton Heath Phil noticed that the old engine sheds were still standing but now they are called the “train care centre”. Delightful!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!