Looking over the hedge in a westerly direction in the evening is easy and can be spectacular.For people who save coins in bottles and piggy banks etc there is a machine in Sainsbury's ,which counts the coins you feed into it. A screen shows how much you have and issues you with a voucher to that value. The sound of the money being counted in side the machine - a frantic jingling -is the sound of hoarding speeded up. It conjures fairy stories about misers reckoning their wealth.
I read about prunes soaked in tea, and remember being told that it is a good idea. I think that I may try it soon, perhaps tomorrow, using spicy, Indian chai tea, with its cinnamon breath.
6 comments:
Almost any dried fruit steeped in chai will be delicious. I like dried cherries this way, for making cherry scones.
I admire the colors in your sunset, Plutarch.
Better still, soak them in tea then steep them in Calva for a month or two! With a little sugar. Sounds odd but is delicious, I'd forgotten about that. Though prunes these days don't seem to be the soakable kind, but rather are moist and ready to eat already.
Seems to me Sainsbury's have it made there: for the privilege of counting your money they oblige you to spend it with them.
I think perhaps the Iris M novel with the little dog that gets swept out to see is actually 'The Philosopher's Pupil'. It gets saved by the eponymous baddie in the story, who partially redeems himself by doing so, as I recall. IM does dogs quite well, I think, there are quite a few in her books and they're usually the most sympathetic characters!
Thanks Crow. Yes, I'll try something other than prunes. There's so much fresh fruit around at the moment, that dried seems to be a Winter trea.
Lucy I have some prunes with stones, which seem dry enough to be worth soaking, so I am going to try. What is Calva? Some kind of Breton liqueur I guess.
Funny how I got my Murdoch's muddled.
You're right about the dog characters turning out better than the people, though come to think of it, I can't remember any other dog characters at the moment.
were you muddling iris and rupert ?
Tristan No. As Lucy pointed out it seems that I was muddling Iris's The Sea, The Sea with her The Philosopher's Pupil. Cheers.
Sorry, Calvados.
Picked up a tip somewhere recently: when sloes and gin are separated, don't throw the sloes away but top them up in the jar with sherry or similar - in our case must needs be Rivesaltes. Digestif and aperitif from one batch of fruit.
There's a rather good dog in 'Under the Net' and quite a bit of word-playing about God and Dog I seem to remember, and they pop up elsewhere, I'm sure, though not necessarily as fully rounded characters, but as benign, redemptive or catalysing forces.
Also the nearly drowned dog motif is in 'Nuns and Soldiers' too, when one gets washed down that strange French culvert thingy and again the non-hero raises himself morally and spiritually by jumping in to save it...
Still chuckling about muddling Iris and Rupert. I've read quite a bit of the former but am still unsure whether I really like her, and try to avoid anything pertaining to the latter, though a smugly triumphant Sky box leers at us from under the telly anyway.
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