Well, yesterday disappeared down a rabbit hole under the guise of a small grandson. I was expecting Granddaughter Number Two who wanted to come and work on assignments for university which she feared she would be unable to complete in her own house because her stepfather and her brother both work from home and would assume that she was available to walk the dog, make cups of tea or coffee and generally be a bit of a dogsbody. Our house would be quieter. Okay!
Before I went to bed on Tuesday evening I sent her a message reminding her that if she was going to want a cheese toastie she needed to bring some cheese. I has bread that needed finishing off before setting off for Portugal today but I was not planning to buy a large block of her favourite cheese specially. Besides I knew she had bought some the other day at the supermarket. That was fine. At 7.00 yesterday morning I was woken by my phone pinging with a message to the effect that she was bringing her smallest sibling because he had a cough and a cold and was running a temperature. He was not fit to go to pre-school, Mummy had to go to work, and Daddy was working from home at stuff too important to be disturbed by an ailing 4 year old. So he came on the bus with his big sister and neither of us got much done until he finally gave in and went to sleep mid-afternoon.
Consequently, packing was done in a great hurry, which may explain why we managed to forget a few things, such as a small thermos flask so that Phil can take coffee to the chess tournament in the evenings. So after lunch today we had to take a walk to the Chinese bazaar and purchase another one.
The new flask has this wonderful set of instructions:
“Vacuums flask is the ideal element to preserve hot water or some quite fresh drink, besides it is very comfortable to lead to the work, to the park, to the river, etc.
- The main thing for its care is to try to void the blows.
- To maintain the liquid warm as long as possible, it is suitable to warm the vacuums flask before spilling the liquid inside. This is done by placing little hot water, making it well stoppered during approximately 5 minutes. Then we throw the water and pour the one that we want to keep warm.
- We will carry out the same procedure to keep some cold drink, but in this case we will do it with quite cold water,
- When it is full, we must never put the thermos flask in horizontal position, it is always necessary to try that it is in vertical and stable position.
- Before placing inside any liquid, we must rinse off several times the vacuum flask with clear water, avoiding the use of rags or woven clothes.
Oh, dear! Priceless! Someone skimped on the translating, maybe asked a cousin who did well in high school English ten years or more ago! The French version, by the way, was not a great deal better. From now on a thermos flask will forever be a vacuums flask in our household. And I’ll be careful about rags … not to mention woven clothes!
Our flight this morning was due to leave at 7.00am. We had a taxi booked for 4.30 to take us to the airport. So we were up at 4.00am. It took some twenty minutes to get our luggage through security because Phil’s suitcase and both our small rucksacks were randomly selected to be selected for testing for illicit substances. It’s a good job they didn’t find the ground-up nuts we brought to sprinkle on Phil’s breakfast cereal or my fizzy vitamins!
And then, once on the plane, we were told that there might be a delay of up to THREE hours because of the storm which was hitting the south coast of England! I dozed for about on hour and a half before we set off. We sent a message about the delay but it did not reach the nice gentleman who was giving us a lift to Figueira da Foz. So he sat around at Porto airport for a couple of hours! It’s a good job we had brought him present of some good British (well, actually Scottish) shortbread.
Hey! ho! And it’s very, very windy here, although the sun has been shining intermittently.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
No comments:
Post a Comment