Tropical heat wave?

IF ANYTHING, it's even hotter and muggier than before.

And the temperature seems to be affecting others even more that me.

We arrive at the supermarket, and the first thing we encounter is a young couple, arguing at the top of their voices.

Mothers are snapping at their children, older people seem to be sagging under the burden of their discomfort.

Even the checkout ladies seems to be grumpier than usual.

We get our goodies home and packed away, just in time to get off for a recuperative drink before meeting up with our friends for our last-Monday-of-the-month dinner.

Our friends, at least, seem to be in good spirits, and the dinner is good - Italian, for a change (I have the meatballs in spaghetti in a Neapolitan tomato sauce).

We arrive home for about nine; My Good Lady gets herself changed into her nightwear while I open the bottle of wine which we're already selected and popped into the fridge door.

As we sup, I gaze out at the sky, at the sun sinking behind hazy clouds, and I can almost wish for a good downpour of rain, just to clear the air.

As I put My Good Lady to bed, I remind her of the those tropical nights in St Lucia, and of our bed there where we had to sleep on the sheets, not in them, because it was so hot.

MGL points out, though, that we had no glass in the windows, only mosquito screens, and an overhead fan to help stir the air.

And she reminds me, too, that when the rain fell it brought out the croaking of the tree frogs - tiny creatures about the size of a small fingernail, but with such deafening voices they made even the most exhausted sleep impossible.

"Just pretend we're in St Lucia again," I tell her, "only without the frogs!"

I don't think it's much comfort, though.

Muggy weekend

I MUST say, I don’t function too well in this hot, muggy weather.

The arthritis in my feet plays up something rotten, I’m bunged up with my various allergies as if suffering from a permanent cold, and I’m generally enervated by the closeness of the air.

In short, I’m a bit of limp lettuce these days.

Hence, my lack of much blogging activity lately.

I still manage to do a bit in the garden, though, thinning out my rows of carrots – they’re looking quite healthy now and I’m dead chuffed about them. My Good Lady assures me it’s still far too early to dig them up – the tallest of them is only about one inch high! Nevertheless you may almost start calling me Farmer Fred!

MGL is now stuck into a guide book on Italy, planning our next little jaunt abroad; she’s convinced that I’m in need of a holiday, that we both are, and maybe she’s right.

Today I drag my way through my Sunday chores before doing us some baked fish for dinner – a couple of fillets of sole dusted with lemon and parsley. Very nice and easy.

And then in the relative cool of the evening, we open a bottle of Chardonnay which we enjoy to the sounds of one of Ella’s Songbooks. A lovely finish to the weekend, albeit a muggy one.

Retirement luncheon

I HAD A dream last night,” says the Bishop, at the retirement luncheon of Vicar John.

“I dreamt I was at the pearly gates. I was given a piece of chalk and told to go up the stairs and at the top I’d find a blackboard. There I had to write down all my sins.

“’All of them?’ I asked.

“’All of them!’ I was told.

“I was up climbing the steps, when, to my astonishment, I saw John, here, going down.

“’Where are you going?’ I asked him.

“John replied, ‘I need more chalk!’”

A very bishop-like joke, I reflect, but well-intentioned and, on the whole, well received.

The meal, at one of the local hotels – once quite posh but now running a little to seed – is just about okay, if only I could raise the appetite for a three-course Sunday lunch.

Still, Vicar John is clearly delighted to see us, and is quite touched by all the fuss.

Somehow that makes it all worthwhile.

Fish dish

FOR MY experimental cook, today, I do us a haddock boulangère from a Rick Stein recipe and, before him, from the classic French way of doing the potatoes.

The spuds are thinly sliced then layered, along with onions, herbs and seasoning, and baked in vegetable stock in a hot oven. The dish predates domestic ovens, when people used to take their food to the local bake house (boulangerie) for cooking.

The fish itself is just lightly fried, to seal it off, then placed on top of the potatoes for the last ten or twelve minutes. Served with green broccoli it proves to be quite good, although My Good Lady complains that I overdid the peppering a little.

Ah, well, at least I enjoyed it!

Saga bores

I SHOULD HAVE known. Now that the kitchen is up and running, My Good Lady has started to press for a holiday – we are overdue for one, I suppose.

Our proposed trip to Malaysia has had to be put on hold due to financial constraints and, of course, the cost of the new kitchen.

So, it’s to be Europe, then. But where? It’s a big place. Somewhere warm would be nice. The south of France? We’ve been there three times now, including last year. Portugal, then? We’ve been given favourable reports, but somehow, flicking through the Saga brochure, it fails to excite. Italy perhaps?

Yes, Italy quite appeals. Mountains, lakes, the sea, good food, great wine… This should do us very nicely, thank you.

Not with Saga, though, not again. I live in dread of the Saga bore.

Don’t get me wrong, Saga do provide some great value holidays to a vast range of destinations, and most of the people who go on their trips are perfectly civil and agreeable folks.

However, you do get the infamous Saga bores, often solo travellers who have been everywhere and to whom anywhere is better than where they are now – and about which they go on endlessly…

Often, they are single women of a certain age, women who have lost their partners and who are hungry for – usually male – companionship.

Failing to find one such, they latch onto anyone who gives them a friendly smile – in other words, almost inevitably, to MGL and me.

Two such women attached themselves to us when we went to Tenerife a few years ago, and they nearly put a blight on our whole holiday. Every time they saw us they made a beeline for us, proprietarily assuming that we belonged to them for the duration of the stay.

No way of getting rid of them, short of being deliberately rude – and the bad feelings such rudeness usually brings in its wake.

We had to resort to hiring a car, to get away from the rest of the group, staying out for as much of the day as possible, and returning late in the hope that by the time we got into dinner, they would have already dined and left.

Such people can spoil your holiday as effectively as a heat rash or a tummy gyp.

Impatience

AT LAST the weather has decided to rain, instead of hanging over us as a threatening cloud.

The water is certainly welcome to our various crops, My Good Lady’s herbs and my carrots.

I’m out there every morning, peering into the container to see if the first shoots are anywhere in sight.

(And here you see my problem as a gardener – I’m just so bloomin’ impatient to see results. I’ve even threatened to dig up my recently planted seeds to see if they’re doing something, anything!)

I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m temperamentally unsuited to being a son of the soil, even though I come from farming stock on both sides – both my parents grew up on farms.

Mum loved farming, Dad hated it. Guess who I take after!

Actually, I don’t hate it, I’m just itching for something to grow.

Maybe the rain will perform the magic I’m looking for…

Coq au vin

HIGHLIGHT of the weekend is my experimental cook on Saturday – a rather excellent coq au vin.

The French recipe calls for a whole chicken to be cooked in two bottles of Châteauneuf-du-Pape (at around £16 a bottle!).

I improvise. Four chicken thighs, skinned and boned, cooked for three hours in cheap Spanish plonk. I do at least use the whole bottle, though – no need to think of me as niggardly.

The result is a real treat: meat so tender it’s literally melting away. We enjoy it with a cracking Australian Shiraz.

My Good Lady, though, reminds me of one of our stays in France, in a family-run hotel in the Loire Valley. Among our fellow guests were a group of English Bobbies, on some sort of exchange visit with their French counterparts at the local Gendarmerie.

Not one of these fellows could speak the language, of course, and the youngest of the group, little more than a teenager, was hopelessly out of his depth in front of the hotel’s all-French menu.

I stepped in to help out the family, whose guests we were, and who were completely at a loss to explain what was what.

To be fair, once I’d translated the menu most of the Bobbies were quite willing to try something new – all except for the youngster. He wasn’t at all happy at the idea of frogs’ legs or eels and he almost wailed in desperation when I mentioned the hearty country terrine containing offal.

Then I saw the coq au vin. “It’s chicken,” I said, hopefully. He brightened instantly. Unfortunately, this lad’s idea of chicken was as a burger with chips, not something cooked in red wine in French fashion, on the bone. He barely touched it and looked so deeply unhappy that I took pity on him.

I mentioned to one of his companions that there was a MacDonald’s in nearby Saumur; whether they went or not I don’t know.

I have a suspicion that this lad wasn’t a convert to French cuisine on the basis of that coq au vin, though.

Food for thought

I PLANT out a couple of rows of carrot seeds in the container we bought the other day. I gently cover them over, give them a good drink of water and say a silent prayer that they will fare better than the last lot of carrots I planted, when not a single one came up!

I actually got the seeds free, from the BBC, as part of their Dig In campaign – it’s an effort to get us all growing our own vegetables.

As well as carrots, they’ve sent me packets of tomatoes – arrived too late to be sown this year – squash, beetroot and lettuce.

I’m hoping to get a little of all of them out in containers.

The trouble is nothing will persuade me to enjoy salads – rabbit food – only to tolerate one now and again.

And if I start growing my own, in great profusion, My Good Lady might begin to feed us on the stuff, if only to prevent waste, which she loathes.

The carrots should be okay, we both love those, but for the rest, I may just give them away. What’s the point of growing food you don’t want to eat?

Summoned

WE’RE SUMMONED to the Pub; My Good Lady’s legal eye is required to inspect some documents.

So we swing by PD’s house and collect him, and we join Little B, Al the gardener, Mr P the music teacher and one or two others and for once it’s a bit like old times in the Geriatrics’ Corner.

“There’s going to be a séance here, soon,” says Gaz with a rueful smile.

There’s a general local consensus that this old coaching inn is haunted – by whom or what isn’t clear though. Seems that the staff now wants to try to get to the bottom of the mystery and have clubbed together to employ the local Madame Arcati to do her thing.

I have to say I’m a little sceptical about such things myself; to me it would be odd if in building of this age it didn’t have strange noises and cold draughts in it’s dark corners. The place simply reeks of history. No wonder people feel the odd shudder.

Mind you, this said, there’s a seat in the Geriatrics’ Corner that the locals tend to avoid sitting in. It’s known as the dead man’s place and it is associated with serious, even fatal misfortune to any who sit there.

Strangers, unaware of the seat’s significance, often sit on it – and I must say it always strikes me as a little odd; there’s something not quite right about it. I have to resist the impulse to warn them that they shouldn’t be there.

I do use the place myself, sometimes, but it's always with a self-reminder not to be superstitious.

On the other hand, maybe it's unwise for a man of my age to be tempting providence...

Strictly for the birds

THE ONE good thing about this warm weather is that it's very conducive to doziness.

And a quiet-ish weekend is just what I need.

Not that I've been totally idle, though; we recently splashed out on a new bird table - the old one fell apart, due, I suspect, to overuse.

Unfortunately, the new thing arrives in pieces and has to be assembled using the sketchiest instructions I think I've ever seen.

Now I accept that this isn't rocket science - after all, a bird table, how difficult can that be? You'd be surprised!

After an hour's head scratching we do finally succeed in putting something together leaving about half a dozen pieces spare. Surplus to requirements, presumably.

It's still a bit wobbly because the four supportive plant holders have no gravel and compost in them yet - we're off to the garden centre tomorrow to rectify the absence.

Soon our little feathery friends will be dining out in style, lucky beggars!