shoe, soup, table

This is the second or third time that I have photographed the same lone shoe on a ledge, and posted the result. The point is that it is still there, inaccessible and mysterious. This time I have stood back to show the location of the ledge behind stout  bars which deter human contact.

A jug of chicken stock awaits the composition of  a soup this evening. Part of the pleasure lies in deciding the ingredients. In the fridge, apart from the stock, are  a few slices of chicken breast lightly coated with sesame seed,  green beans and some leaves of coriander. There are also a bunch of very dark green,  Italian kale known as cavalo nero,  which very finely shredded will give the soup depth of flavour and, for colour and  sweetness, some small tomatoes cut in half and added to the broth at the last moment.  I may also be tempted at the last minute by a small tin of sweet corn.

For nearly 40 years I have owned an old folding card-table of the sort you do not see around  these days. It is square and its  legs unfold from the vertical   into an X  shape to  clip into place and provide a stable surface. We use it whenever there are more than four of us round the dining table, to provide extra space to serve from. I remember buying it in a jumble sale for a few shillings. The green baize top is worn to  threads, but when it is covered with a table cloth no one would know. A  few years ago someone broke one of the supports by folding the table too roughly. It still worked but there was something  worryingly fragile about the arrangement, which depended on two broken pieces of a leg kept in place, by faith and gravity. This Christmas we will not have to worry because our neighbour, a retired surgeon, who apart form mending flesh and bone, is a whiz at carpentry, has repaired the break with a couple of screws. "It's stronger than it was before," he says, which is very much the sort of thing that surgeons like to say when they have set a broken limb.