It’s business as usual, now the wanderer has returned from his travels. The smelly bits of ski kit have been subjected to a good thrashing in soapy water, the ski boot inners duly aired and the clanky bits stowed away till next time. True to form, mere minutes in from stepping back through the door,…
Category: Grumpy Corner
Eat, drink, Trump
‘I had my ten a day today,’ said the Gremlin, reeling off what I can only describe as a shopping list of mainly fruit with little else to slow its passage through his guts. <Gremlin rolls eyes as I read this out to him> We’ve been monitoring the situation closely, you see, for the last…
Icebergs? What icebergs?
Well, hands up who knew there was a British Leafy Salads Association? Not me. But there they were, last week, centre stage thanks to the current ‘vegetable crisis’. For, as if we didn’t have enough to worry about, what with impending nuclear doom and the considerably more drawn out, yet equally final, threat to the world of global…
An apple a day…
President Trump’s executive order, barring nationals from seven countries perceived as a threat to the US from entering the country – whilst continuing to allow in those from countries whose track record on the terror front leaves a lot to be desired – continues to excite all manner of debate on and offline. As you might expect. It reminded me…
It’s all downhill from here
Time was when all I required for a day on the piste was a pair of navy and white Salomon rear-entry boots, a nifty one-piece ski suit (padded shoulders, nipped in waist), thermal gloves and a silly hat. Sillier the better. Sun cream and lip salve in one pocket, hankie in another, crumpled piste map…
Spiky balls and bicycles
‘Not that I go round randomly sniffing balls,’ said my neighbour Helen, remarkably seriously, and entirely unsolicited. ‘But I definitely caught a whiff of vanilla’. ‘Really?’ I said, spiky ball under nose, equally seriously. ‘Oh yeah’. We were appraising the Strawberry How torture chamber, from the comfort of the sofas, a couple of glasses of wine into our…
Jabs, jams and scams
What better way to spend a crisp autumn day, eh? Stripped down to a fetching, back-tying gown – one tie already ripped off, I imagine, as its wearer made a last desperate bid for freedom, the other set so tight around my neck I feared the Gremlin was trying to throttle me. Maybe he was? I’m still here,…
Talking conkers
Today I am talking conkers. Yeah, yeah. I know. I’ve been talking conkers for years. Funny. But, seriously, I’m worried. Because things have changed at Strawberry How this autumn. And, for once, it’s nothing to do with Strawberry Swamp. It was only a couple of weeks ago I remarked to the Gremlin, whilst taking a stroll round our front…
Artsy fartsy at large
When Samuel Johnson observed (to his friend and biographer James Boswell), that when ‘a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford’, he’d clearly never hurtled northwards, after four whistle stop days in the capital, thanking the Lord and Virgin trains to be heading…
Developing a taste for Cumbria
Given that the walking weather app that is the Gremlin had been delivering almost hourly gloomy updates along the lines of ‘12.00pm: 90% chance of rain. 1.00pm: 40% chance of rain. 2.00pm: 60% chance of rain’ (you get the gist), we fully expected the Taste Cumbria extravaganza to be a little washed out, to say the least. As…
Mobile madness
Vodafone. Can’t live with ’em. Can’t live without ’em, eh? I swapped to Vodafone a few years ago, when it looked as though I was going to be spending more time in Cumbria than Manchester and they seemed to offer better coverage than O2. So far, I’ve had little cause to complain and you learn to live…
Double yellow peril
Here’s a pub quiz question for you: When did double yellows first make an appearance on our streets? Answer: 1960. Thanks to the Road Traffic Act. Rule 238 of the Highway Code, if you’re going for a bonus. And since then, they – and the tortured souls whose thankless task it is to uphold the law – have been the scourge of the ‘just dropper-offers’, ‘the quickie…
Hackette on the How 