Today began with blue sky and sunshine. The cloud came and went. We had the odd spit and spot of rain but not enough to worry about. In the late afternoon we had some torrential rain but it didn’t last long and the sunshine came back. What a nice change after some of the dull stuff we’ve had.
In the late morning Granddaughter Number Two turned up, just to spend time with us, which was nice. She’s returning to university at the weekend. Having spent most of the summer working and squirrelling away her savings, she has spent this week running around visiting people, going out with friends, packing a summer’s social life into one week. We had a nice walk round the village in the sunshine.
I had a list of things I had intended to do today but they’ll keep.
Thursday is chess club day. Usually our daughter and the two smallest members of the family come round for tea and then run Phil to chess club in the early evening. Today an old friend, one of the original chess club people, one of those who introduced so many youngsters to get involved, offered to give Phil a lift. So our daughter was not needed. We offered to feed the old friend. I made a tortilla, a proper Spanish tortilla with potatoes and onion of course. A bit of ham. Salad stuff. Some olives. All good. And off they went, leaving me the washing up. I rarely wash the pots, except for Thursday evenings!
I was reading about bike theft. Here’s an article about it. Apparently it’s rife in some parts of London. People are losing expensive bikes … and some of them cost thousands of pounds. Mine cost about £300 pounds, but that was almost 20 years ago so I suppose it would cost a lot more now. When I cycle to the market I spend a good deal of time locking and unlocking my bike, making sure the lock cable goes around something solid and through the spokes of the front wheel. Reading the bit of the article just below, I am reassured that my decision to lock it up every time, even if I am only going to a market stall a few yards from where I have parked it, is the right one:
“It took thieves just 47 seconds to steal Rosie Wetherhill’s ebike from outside a Chinese takeaway.
Wetherhill, a 23-year-old bike courier from Leeds, had considered locking her bike to the railing when she went in to collect the order, but she knew the takeaway was fast. So she locked the back wheel with a D-lock instead. A mistake. As she saw her £1,300 ebike disappear around a corner, Wetherhill felt a sense of dread. “I knew I would probably never see that bike again,” she says. “Because I know how it is.” The bike wasn’t insured. She’d only had it for two months.”
The article makes depressing reading from the point of view of retrieving a stolen bike. I suspect the police are too thinly stretched to deal with such thefts properly. We may be more fortunate here than in big city centres but still I have been tempted to knock on the door of one of the neighbours. One of their children’s bikes is regularly parked in the front garden, not locked up at all. A little careless!
We tend to think that Americans, because they speak our language, are very similar to us. (Actually, even their use of the English language is rather different to ours, but that’s a different story.) not necessarily so. Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist, married to an American. Her wife holds her hands up in horror at the idea of butter on the bread to make a sandwich. Mayonnaise is what Americans use apparently. Who knew? Not me! This is what Arwa Mahdawi writes by way if explanation:
“So why aren’t buttered sandwiches popular in the US? It is easy to understand why Marmite might not make the leap across the Atlantic, but butter is surely a staple. The explanation, I think, is that, like their horrible chocolate, a lot of American butter is substandard, because of looser regulations; European butter has to have a higher butterfat percentage than American butter and those extra percentages add a lot of flavour. American butter is usually designed for cooking and, unless you go out of your way to look for the good stuff, it doesn’t add much to a sandwich.
Anyway, having cleared that up, we can move on to harder-hitting issues: why have Americans not discovered the late-night kebab or the sausage roll? Now there’s a question to sink your teeth into.”
There you go! I do like a nice sandwich, with butter, of course. I had a cheese on with my tortilla.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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