The lady cobbler

THE SHOP is just off the Promenade, on the poorer, West End side of town, and going inside is like stepping back in time. It’s a cobbler’s shop and a leather merchant – but of a type you simply don’t generally see these days. The first thing that strikes you is that it’s a lady who is the proprietor. Behind the heavy wooden counter you see her workshop, and there is nothing high-tech about it; I think the most modern item I can see is a Singer sewing machine, one that’s worked with a treadle. Other tools I can see are a mystery to me, part of the mystique of her craft. It’s in here that she carries out her repairs of shoes and leather clothing, and charges a pittance for her excellent work.

My Good Lady and I are here, though, for a different reason. We’re shopping. We’re shopping for my Chrissie pressy – a pair of leather gloves which MGL is insisting on buying me. I certainly need a new pair, my fingers are poking out of the holes of my existing gloves. And it’s MGL’s idea to come here for them. So here we are, and as we step in, there is an almost overpowering smell of warm, sweet leather. A baffling assortment – I can’t call it an arrangement – of bags and purses greets us, shelf upon shelf of them. We ask for gentlemen’s gloves; and the lady cobbler rummages amongst her stock, first in one place, than another, until - triumphantly – she pulls out a pair gent’s quality black leather gloves. I try them on and they fit perfectly. “How much are they?” I ask. I’m expecting something in the region of £15 to £20. The lady cobbler glances at the ticket. “Six ninety-nine,” she says. Less than seven pounds for a pair of quality leather gloves!

If you are ever in Morecambe and in need of leather goods, I can recommend The Lady Cobbler on Regent Road. Even if you can’t find anything you like, it really is an experience going there, a blast from the past.

The other shoe

WE SEEM to be getting a little more into the festive spirit, what with enjoying our Christmas goose yesterday, and putting up our little tree, and, this evening, attending the candlelit carol service at our local church. Trouble is, though, for me, there’s the spectre of bad news that always haunts this time of year, a bit like Old Marley’s ghost haunts Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. It’s as if I’m waiting rather anxiously for the other shoe to drop. Somehow, all the glitter and excess, the deliberate cheeriness and the impossible expectations of a good time just magnify the fact that bad things still happen. We’ve already had a little troubling news, with friends and family needing to go for medical treatment soon, but we’re just hoping we get away without something more serious cropping up.

Blogging problems

I’M WRITING this in the hope that I can get it posted. For reasons best known to itself, Blogger is not accepting my scribblings. They seem to appear on the edit page, but not on the actual blog. My Good Lady has been having fun with Blogger, too, with her paragraphs unformulating themselves when she clicks to publish. At least she’s managing to get something to appear, more than I am.

Anyhow, here goes, fingers crossed…

E-card

I'VE JUST been sent an E-card, and I thought it so delightful I've decided to share it with you. Just click on the link, or copy the address into your browser.

http://www.jacquielawson.com/viewcard.asp?code=0212320003

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Evening out

OUR FIRST stop on our evening out is to pick up Little B from the Pub. Oh, he’s capable of driving himself, but I think he feels safer with someone else behind the wheel during the dark hours – his eyes aren’t quite what they were. In any case, it makes sense for us to take one car instead of two.

The next people to arrive at the restaurant are PD and his wife Lin. We’ve not seen much of either of them lately, so their appearance is doubly welcome. They seem well. PD has lost weight and is looking good – abstinence clearly has its virtues. He looks at my glass of clear liquid. “What’s that?” he demands. “Gin and tonic,” I reply, “without the gin.” And to his querying look, I add, “Doctor’s orders – seems I’m drinking too much.”

Next come Mike and Helen, and I’m really delighted to see them. It’s Mike’s first evening out in weeks, since his illness has kept him housebound. They both seem in good spirits and glad to be in company, glad to be out.

Finally, Fran and Den make an appearance, and the gang’s all here. The meal is standard fare, unfortunately, although I have to say my game pie is tasty, and the red cabbage excellent – this from one who hates cabbage! It all turns into a grand, cheery, noisy evening of good friends all together.

Oh, how blest we are in our good friends!

The big roast day

IT’S BEEN a hectic week, this, what with workmen in evidence and with our various toing and froing. By the end of the day I’ve been too tired to come along a post a blog and for that I have to apologise to regular readers.

It’s going to be a busy weekend, too. Dave C is coming round in the morning to replace a second double glazed unit which has lost its seal. The Mr P, the music teacher, is holding one of his carol services at the local priory church and he’s keen for us to go; I really would love to oblige him but I don’t know if we’ll have to time. The BIG event of this weekend is the roasting of our Christmas turkey. It’s thawing away beautifully even as I speak – a five and a half kilo bird, free range and corn fed. Naturally, we shall be having all the trimmings: stuffing, roast spuds, Brussels sprouts, both cranberry and bread sauces – the full Monty.

Why do we have Christmas dinner so early? Quite simply, to make life for us easier on the Big Day. This way, we get the trauma of a four hour roast out of the way, and all that’s left for us to do is to freeze the leftovers. On Christmas Day itself we usually take a couple of slices of leftover breast, coat them with a mixture of cream, mustard and grated cheese – pop them under the grill for a few minutes and Bob’s your uncle! With just a few veg on the side, the whole Christmas Day dinner takes about half an hour. In the meantime we can open a bottle of champagne and put on a DVD of Calamity Jane, or Casablanca, or It’s a Wonderful Life.

I must say, though, that this year it’s all going to be a bit different because we’re have Christmas Day lunch out with our friends, Helen and Mike K. This should be very agreeable, too, and we can save our grilled turkey thing for Boxing Day.

Oh, isn’t it all very exciting!

Changes

IT’S ALL change time. My computer expert, Rich P, the son of my old friend, Mr P, the music teacher, comes along to advise on setting up our home network. He almost hoots with laughter at some of system setups. “Get away, as fast as you can, from AOL,” he tells me. On checking our telephone exchange, he decides what we need is Eclipse as our new ISP. “It should run at least sixteen times faster you’re your present Internet Service Provider,” he tells me. (Personally, I have difficulty keeping up with our present one – 16 times faster?) But I must bow to his enthusiasm.

It shows my age, I suppose, but I find anyone who is full of energy, and youthful extravagance, very appealing to me. And very persuasive. (Exhausting, too, but that’s just my depleted stores of energy and lack of spare RAM.)

Anyhow, I’ve busily set up a new email address, this one with Google, and sent off a batch of emails to inform friends and family of our new location. On Rich P’s advice I’ve also reinstalled Mozilla Firefox as our main search engine. I always liked Firefox, and I’m not sure quite why it disappeared from our desktop.

_________________________

IT’S BEEN a good day, what with seeing our friends, Mike and Helen, and only spoilt by my semi-deafness. My old earwax problems have hit me with a vengeance and in both ears at once. I can hear – but it’s as if everything’s outside an oil drum. One thing you always know, when you’re with real friends, three hours seems like three minutes.

We stop at our favourite Cantonese restaurant on the way home, and have a delicious meal of chicken and mushroom soup, followed by pan-fried chicken in a lemon and honey sauce, exquisitely balance in true yin-yang fashion that only truly great Chinese chefs achieve.

I eat my meal using chopsticks rather than a fork. I was once told off by a waiter in Sydney: it was a Japanese restaurant and I asked for a knife and fork to eat my meal; he told me, disapprovingly, that if I respected Asian food I should eat it in the Asian way, using chopsticks. Cack-handed as I am, the waiter slid a piece of card between the sticks, and then attached a rubber band around them. This is the way the Chinese teach children how to use the sticks, he told me, and this is the way I eat my meal today. Today, the waitress snigger, at seeing the rubber band, but I’m too deaf to hear any disparaging comments she might have…

Christmas dinner

THE EVENING goes well enough. There is much laugher, some of it bawdy, and a general congeniality amongst everyone – except me. And perhaps, My Good Lady. We seem to be struggling to get into the Christmas spirit – we’re a pair of Scrooges, really. It isn’t too bad a meal: the broth is just what you’d expect, a few vegetable floating in a clear stock. Okay, but nothing special. I have the turkey next, and MGL chooses the salmon. Both good, if not exceptional. The dessert we opt for is ice cream, which tastes like ice cream - again, nothing out of the ordinary. That’s where the meal is disappointing, it’s okay at best. Nothing exceptional. Last year, they pulled out all the stops. Their first year in business, they went overboard to impress. Now, they’ve gone almost too safe in their menu. Don’t get me wrong, there are some very talented chefs at the Pub – one of them has even contributed to a standard modern textbook on professional cooking. They somehow just don’t seem to get their balance right.

Food aside, though, neither of us is quite in the festive spirit at the moment. Maybe it’s just the disappointments of the week - we’ve written about those earlier. Anyhow, MGL and I return home and pop open a bottle of Chardonnay. To the sounds of some classic jazz recordings, we console ourselves before retiring to an early bedtime. It was an interesting, if somewhat (for us) a bit of a downer.

Anti-climax

IT’S ALL a bit anti-climatic in the end. The weather clears up at our end, so we set too to prepare the meal for the dinner party. But then, about lunchtime, we get the call: Ellie and Ged feel they can’t risk coming after all. The roads around them are already like ice rinks, and more foul weather is predicted for the evening. So there we have it: starter and dessert made, new potatoes par-boiled and ready for the sauté pan – and all in quantities for four people. It’s all rather deflating, really. My Good Lady and I make a meal of it as best we can, but we can’t manage double portions; but after all the planning and shopping, of all the mixing and blitzing and cooking, we end up feeling somewhat let down – not so much by our friends as by the wretched weather. We pop along for an hour’s consolation at the Pub and some of the gang in the Geriatrics’ Corner, on learning of our efforts, suggest that we should have brought some of this food in. Thick crab soup, cherry cheesecake… “M’m,” says Little B, smacking his lips. Ah, well, maybe next time…

Bittersweet

AS I WRITE, the outside world dons a silent, white mantle of snow.

Normally, this shouldn’t bother me at all, but we’re expecting company tonight. We’ve got the menu planned, and the shopping’s all done. We’re about to prepare a thick crab soup for starters, then a duck confit with parliament potatoes, and for dessert, one of My Good Lady’s delightful red cherry cheesecakes. We’re under starter’s orders, ready to go – and of course, this is when it starts to snow for the first time in about five years. Our friends are driving down from a village in Cumbria where we used to live – not a journey to be undertaken when the weather is iffy. All we can do, I suppose, is wait until the very last minute, and if the snow doesn’t clear, give them a call and ask what’s best to do.

Meanwhile, I’m continuing to scan my photo slides, and I’m now in the midst of that miscellany of people pictures that don’t quite fit in any other category of time and place. And I’m struck by the depressing realisation of how many of our family, friends and colleagues have died over the last few years. While I can look back on happy memories with a smile, I also get the sad awareness that I shall never see some of these people again. Whoever coined the word “bittersweet” was right on the mark.