Welcome to another edition of WWG NEWS!
Managed to get out today, and do a little shopping in the Co-op. Stocks of vegetables are good, likewise bread, but certain things I was hoping to buy have not been replenished (canned meat, and bull-milk, as we used to call it) and I’m still confronted by yards of empty shelf. Tomorrow I shall have to set out on an expedition to Lidl (…Sainsbury is a little bit far to go at the drop of a hat) to see if I can search out some UHT milk for my morning cheesy-porridge.
Though it wouldn’t do any harm to my waistline to make my porridge with water, no cheese, and just a pinch of salt, as my forefathers were wont to do.
Speaking of forefathers reminds me of my visit a few years ago to the Ness of Brodgar, where a five thousand year-old site has yielded remarkable finds. The people who built the site has no fabric and no looms, and were clad exclusively in animal skins. But you mustn’t imagine shaggy cavemen coarsely wrapped in bearskins. Think of rather smooth individuals in multicoloured buckskin, hi-tech craftsmen for the time, using cow leather for their boots, and skins of rabbit, mole and kid for their other clothing, which had all the handmade features of ours – fancy stitching, seams, buttonholes… in short everything bar zip-fasteners and laundry labels.
They didn’t know about bread, but they did brew beer. It appears that Northern European peoples didn’t swap porridge for bread until they became Romanised. And since the Roman empire never extended that far into Scotland, probably not even then. My Ayrshire father told stories of lowland farmers who used to boil up vast quantities of porridge once a year and pour it into the bottom drawer of the kitchen dresser. For the rest of the year they’d lean back in their rocking-chairs and cut off a slice whenever they felt peckish. A layer of mould simply improved the flavour.
Had to call the agents who act for my landlord to come and empty the coin-meter, as it was threatening to jam up and thereby cut off my electricity supply. A simple enough request in the normal scheme of things now has to be designated an emergency – but that classification was readily granted, and the agent came and went silently whilst I was getting my afternoon forty-winks (the meter is outside on my eagle’s-perch landing).
And so life’s little hurdles get surmounted, each in their turn.
Thanks to Lesley for her news, which you can read as a comment attached to yesterday’s NEWS. It seems her cats, recognising that by their client status on humanity they may have unwisely been giving hostages to fortune, are determined to brush up their hunting skills, and have been augmenting their income with a little homework.
Whitby Writers Group 