Category Archives: Bits and Pieces

Hedgerow changes

Over the last few years, I’ve progressively been changing the hedgerow at the bottom of the garden from deciduous to evergreen.

After cutting out the Forsythia, I started from the left side with a red Robin, followed by cherry laurels up to the halfway point.

I then asked my maintenance gardener a year ago to rip out the rest and pop in laurels and a red Robin on the right. He’s a top chap, but people who know me, will testify that I do not like waiting around. So over the last two weeks, I have gotten on with it!

I took out the forsythia, plus an absolute bastard of a Holly Bush with never-ending roots, additionally also a jasmine and also a big shrub. Phew!

Last night I dug my trench and then today I popped the new shrubs in. Drenched the roots, popped some chicken manure pellets around them and covered with a bark layer.

Fingers crossed we are beyond the deep freeze that we’ve seen over the winter! I am excited to see this hedgerow thicken up and add some evergreen colour to my garden!

Bargain Camelia and potting Ericaceous plants

So I found 5 camelias at Dobies garden centre for £1 each. Bargain!

They looked a bit Bill Withered, but I decided to have a gamble on them and grow them on.

Polystyrene chunks at the bottom of the new pots and then a 50/50 mix of perlite and ericaceous soil, topped with pure ericaceous soil! That should give the Camelias a decent chance of kicking on.

I’ll post an update if they survive!

Runner bean slicing

One of my favourite childhood memories was slicing runner beans. Yes, you read that correctly, slicing runner beans!

My Godparents Joe and Joanie had a metal runner bean slicer and I had the great joy of feeding their beans into the machine whenever they had a roast dinner!

It was all quite a process. We’d go to the farmhouse at the back of Banstead Road (Near Oaks Park) to get the veggies and I loved hearing the tick tick tick noise as I sliced the beans to my hearts content!

Sometime during December 2020, I had a very vivid dream about my Godparents and remembered my childhood bean slicing nirvana; turns out that the Universe is a very strange twat. My beloved Joanie passed away around the time I had my dream, I had been estranged from her for over 8 years due to her very spiteful ‘family’. Very odd 🙂

Anyway! I am ridiculously nostalgic, anyone who knows me well knows this!  So I procured a slicer from Ebay!

The slicer is secured to the kitchen counter by a clamp and you feed the runner bean in the top hole, then use the handle to turn the circular blade. A very satisfying pile of sliced beans builds up as you go.

To do the slicer justice, I grew my own runner beans this year! Some of them are bloody massive 🙂 think I’ll grow them every year now!

So here we go, nostalgic box well and truly ticked. Roll on dinner time!

Bread

When the first lockdown kicked in last year, it was very difficult to get hold of decent fresh bread; I quickly realised that it was one of the things that I missed most!

A baguette! A crusty roll! My kingdom for a poppy seeded bloomer!

My love affair with bread started quite early on in life.  On occasion, I used to go with my Godparents and pick up warm bread from a local bakery in Carshalton Beeches in Surrey.

I can still remember standing in line at the bakers very early on a Saturday morning, knowing that I would soon hold the warm bread in my hands; the smell in the bakery was bloody AMAZING and the loaf radiated its own mouthwatering scent in the car on the way home! Torture it was!

The vacuum packed baguettes that you can chuck in the oven or the bog standard pre-sliced loaves that you find in Supermarkets simply do not cut it. I vowed that I would learn how to make my own bread to an acceptable level, to satisfy my craving!

Now that the UK has returned to a second lockdown, I felt it was time to start making my own bread.

I was determined to do so with my own fair hands and without the convenience or dependency of the expensive bread making machines; said machines are currently sold out anyway, largely due to covid-19 panic buying and the logistics nightmare that has currently paralysed importing (shitty Brexit).

Thanks to a Jamie Oliver video on YouTube, I have already made a couple of loaves in 2021 and I am very pleased with the results! https://youtu.be/aUtxKeupYFg

For the recipe within the video, you only need strong flour, a sachet of yeast in water, a pinch of sugar and a pinch of salt. Couple of periods where you leave the dough to prove before you bake it in the oven for 35 mins on 180oC. Very simple.

My next goal is to add in a little wholemeal flower and top the loaf with black poppy seeds or seseme seeds 🙂 watch this space!

Give it a go! It is fun! Especially the kneeding of the dough, a good stress relief.

In-flight safety cards

I love in-flight safety cards, they’re a fucking right old hoot!

For example:

What you should do, when you’re a ginger and attacked by a giant octopus, whilst you’re aboard an aeroplane.

When you’re in Business class, you can do whatever you like. Throw a window out of the window! Fuck the police!

In-flight botox is available for trophy wives that are travelling in Premium Economy with their spoilt bastard kids.

Oslo – Feb 14th

Popped to Oslo on Valentine’s day to see a client for a review meeting and caught the last of the snow (hopefully!).

I always love visiting Norway, it is especially beautiful and full of kind people. Coming in to land at Oslo, you’ll see beautiful woodlands, lakes and then quaint housing before you finally touch down amongst the trees.

Glad I travel there with work; a drink, packet of crisps and a choc bar can set you back about a tenner which is painful!

For some strange reason, vegetarian food is very, very expensive here but that’s to be expecting given how Norwegians love their meat!

Didn’t see any wildlife this time as I was in central Oslo for a meeting! Maybe next time!