Skip to main content

Food and Friends

The temporary incapacitation caused by this pesky bronchial pneumonia has allowed me to indulge in a prolonged bout of reading. I highly recommend an exceptionally well-written first novel by Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, both as a pleasurably bitter-sweet tale and as a seemingly balanced insight into recent Afghan life.

We enjoyed a lovely trip to Chester on Monday. The River Dee had flooded the lower level of the river walk, but I have seen the waters higher on rare occasions. A gorgeous swan came to say hello to me. What beautiful creatures they are; and though to describe them as regal might be an unforgivable cliché, this word truly does belong to these magnificent birds. They can be surprisingly fierce – apparently their wings can break a man’s leg – and yet if you’ve ever watched one sailing along with cygnets hitching a ride on their backs then you’d know how tender they can be also.

We lunched in The Slug and Lettuce, which was rather pleasant, before having a wander round the old city. I bought some rather snazzy stiletto boots. I’ll admit to a fondness for boots… And once we’d wound our way down to the swollen river, we naturally went to our favourite Blue Moon Café for tea and cake – and they do make the most fluffy yummy cakes imaginable!
Chester is easily one of my favourite places. The energy of the place just feels right, somehow.

My mother and sister Evelyn came to visit, too. We had dinner at The Queen Anne in Oxton whose décor was lovely inside. What really caught my eye was the tasteful barn conversion to one side of the pub, though – huge windows, sandstone walls, with a small courtyard in front. I’d love something like that!

Lee and Lyn have just returned from a trip to Cyprus, which they enjoyed. Lee said everything was very expensive, though; they were charged $9 for two coffees and ice-creams.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Cure for Aging?

"All that we profess to do is but this, - to find out the secrets of the human frame; to know why the parts ossify and the blood stagnates, and to apply continual preventatives to the effort of time.  This is not magic; it is the art of medicine rightly understood.  In our order we hold most noble -, first, that knowledge which elevates the intellect; secondly, that which preserves the body.  But the mere art (extracted from the juices and simples) which recruits the animal vigour and arrests the progress of decay, or that more noble secret which I will only hint to thee at present, by which heat or calorific, as ye call it, being, as Heraclitus wisely taught, the primordial principle of life, can be made its perpectual renovator...." Zanoni, book IV, chapter II, by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, first published in 1842. Oroboros keyring - Spooky Cute Designs The idea of being able to achieve an immortal life is probably as old as human life itself.  Folklore and myt...

Remembering Richie Tattoo Artist's Studio

Richard in the street entrance to his tattoo studio in Liverpool. The vertical sign next to Richard is now in the Liverpool Tattoo Museum. Yesterday, my sister Evelyn, Richard and myself stood outside Richard's old tattoo studio and looked up at the few remaining signs, whose paint has now mostly flacked away to reveal bare wood. On the studio's window are stick-on letters which read, "Art", where once it boldly announced his presence as the city's only "Tattoo Artist".  I can remember him buying that simple plastic lettering from an old-fashioned printer's shop. This was in 1993, not long after he'd opened the studio and before he could afford better signs. After he'd patiently stuck them onto the glass we realised that from the outside the sign read "Artist Tattoo", so we had to carefully peel the letters off the window and have another go, laughing over having made such an obvious error yet worried in case we spoiled the letteri...

Dear Diary...

Do you keep a diary? Why did you start it, and, if you started one then stopped, why was that? What sort of things do (or did) you write about? I ask as, as a long-time diarist myself, there is an interesting piece in The Guardian today which talks about one woman's diary habit, which she began at the age of fourteen. I started a diary around that age too, but destroyed it after my mother accused me of using cocaine.  A stern scene followed, with both parents perched ram-rod straight in their armchairs, while I was subjected to a heated inquisition. Where had I bought it, and who from? Didn't I know such things led to death and doom? I struggled to decipher their bewildering accusations, until Mum blurted out, "I read it in your diary!" To find my diary, Mum would first have had to rummage through my dressing table, obviously when I wasn't around to protest. Her intrusion on my privacy was assumed by both parents to be acceptable, and now, with this handwritten c...