It’s another of those days that began dull, gradually improved and was bright and sunny by midday! A person could get used to such a weather pattern!
For those who want to collect stuff that belonged to the rich and famous (a bit like collecting relics of the saints) there is news of stuff on the market. There is the James Bond suit worn by Sean Connery and the axe wielded by Jack Nichilson in The Shining, both up for auction. Where would you display such wonders? A huge axe over fireplace?! And today I have read that a Bentley believed to have been owned by a certain Andrew Mountbatten Windsor has gone for sale at a Doncaster dealership for just under £125,000.
There you go! Stuff to spend your money on.
I also read that Mr Mountbatten Windsor has accused Thames Valley Police of taking personal items during searches of his home. Goodness! How shocking! If true, maybe the policemen concerned were thinking of possible resale value at future auctions.
I suppose people have always wanted to possess something hat links them to famous people but something you pay vast amounts of money for surely is not the dame as a personalised autograph of someone you admire.
Here’s another oddity of the modern world: Specialist butter!?!? According to this article butter is more popular now than ever it has been. People queue up outside a specialist butter shop in Paris apparently. Coincidentally, we have been watching a series of programmes featuring Stanley Tucci travelling around Italy discovering things about Italian cooking. In one part of Italy - which one ai don’t remember - they use huge amounts of butter for cooking. No olive oil for them.
I suppose there are people who savour a little slice of butter on its own, able to recognise the vintage, just as there are people who like to ”drink” samples of olive oil to savour its vintage. I must be too much of a Philistine to do that, although I do like to use extra virgin olive oil for cooking.
The article features at one point a South African journalist, Sofia Patel, who describbes herself as a “butter horader” with selarate categories of butter’ cooking butterm eating butter and “ornamental butter”, the stuff thatvis too precious to eat. In the last category is a half pack of Kerrygold from 2019, frozen ever since. “I have it partly as insurance, in case I run out. But also because it’s reassuring – it reminds me of a different time,” she says. She loves her work but her dream job is to run a dairy farm. “Or at least go to Paris, to that shop, and eat all that butter.”
Now, recently Phil was doing one of his regular research projects into what we should or shouldn’t eat and decided that the very best butter to buy is Kerrygold! What a coincidence!
Since we seem to have moved onto food concerns, here’s something else I found this morning:
“The nutritional value of fruit and vegetables has fallen by up to 50pc because of declining soil quality, according to a new study.
The report, from researchers at Deep Science Ventures, found that humans needed to consume twice the number of vegetables to get the same level of minerals such as potassium, magnesium or copper as would have been present in their food in the 1960s.
The study found that many crops had lost 20pc to 50pc of several key nutrients.
Will Summers, a senior associate at the firm, said: “For 60 years we’ve measured food security in calories and tonnes per hectare.
“On those measures we’ve done remarkably well. But we’ve been quietly hollowing out what’s inside our food.”
The decrease in nutrient and vitamin value is thought to be down to declining soil quality and crops being selectively bred for their ability to grow quickly, rather than there being any focus on their health benefits.”
So much for “five a day”!
Now we can get nostalgic for the vegetables of our childhood too,
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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