SARAH AND GEOFF AND HELENA - UNCANNY

Lucas, that is:

and me:

then of course Helena Bonham Carter:

EATING LIKE A KING (NOT CHAS 3, OBVIOUSLY)

 It was Stephen King’s birthday on September 24^th– he was 75.

 

This is the trim and attractive (and possibly lean and hungry) picture he has on his website, taken by Shane Leonard.  Not a bad looking 75 year old:

 

The story goes that back in the 80s King porked up and was his doctor told him to lose weight.  Like any decent novelist he decided to turn his experience into a novel, in this case Thinner, written under the pseudonym Richard Bachman.

 

The plot as I understand it (I mean I haven’t read the book, though I do have some vague memories of seeing the film on TV) involves a fat lawyer who runs over and kills an old Romany woman. He gets away with it because of his connections but the woman’s father puts a a curse on him and he starts to lose weight regardless of how much he eats. This is a still from the film:

If you could patent that curse you’d have yourself a helluva start up

 

Anyway, I only knew it was Mr. K’s birthday because the blessed Anne Billson posted on Facebook these two fine images she took of Mr. K reacting to a fish paste sandwich at Brown’s hotel. (Thanks Anne).

 

 

He might have been happier with some of this:

CONTINUITY

 It was the weekend of the Queen’s funeral and I was in Felixstowe eating fish and chips in a pub.

I wish the pub had been called the Prince of Wales, but it wasn't. I’m not eating two platefuls – the other belongs to the photographer – Caroline Gannon. You probably worked that out.

 

Previously, between the Platinum Jubilee and the funeral I ate this Coronation Chicken sandwich, in Dedham.  It was good, if slightly over-toasted.

On the weekend of the Jubilee itself I was, partly, in a pub in Hoddesdon with winsome men of a certain age (though younger than me – Simon Poulter and Dr. Pete Gomes), and if the picture is to be believed I made do with a glass of lager.  Photo again by Caroline Gannon.

And today, as the memory fades, the local Co-op has started selling mince pies.  It’ll soon be Christmas.  Life, and the monarchy, goes on. 

TROUBLE WITH THE FOOD GODS

 Following up from the previous post, I’ve been thinking about mushrooms.  

I actually think about mushrooms pretty regularly.  Mushrooms are (very 

often) on the ground to begin with, so the five second rule obviously 

doesn’t apply there.  On the other hand, not all mushrooms are to be 

snatched up and eaten.

My friend Nick who used to be a hospital administrator, tells the story of a family – mother, father, two children - who came to the hospital complaining of stomach pains.  They’d been out foraging and had eaten some dodgy mushrooms. They were admitted to hospital – AND ALL FOUR OF THEM NEEDED LIVER TRANSPLANTS!!

 

This has made Nick, and me too, very wary about eating mushrooms in the wild.  I have a couple of books that supposedly help you identify them, and I’ve even played around with an app, but I remain unconfident about my identification abilities.  This, of course, has nothing to do with them being on the ground.

 

Above is one of the more melancholy photographs I’ve ever taken – at the seaside in Walton on the Naze.  This sad ice cream was just lying there on the stepped parapet at the seafront.  You know there must be a backstory, very possibly one involving some unhappy and disappointed child who dropped it.  Unless maybe the child was peevish and discarded the ice cream while having a tantrum. Also, I admit, the ice cream isn’t quite on the ground, but it’s definitely heading that way.

 

And just so you know that the food gods are there to punish you if you start feeling the slightest confident, yesterday afternoon, I knocked a tub of cream out of the fridge and onto the floor.

 

I know there’s no use crying over split milk, but couldn’t an exception possibly be made for split cream?

THE FIVE SECOND RULE (NOT)

If you walk about ten minutes due south from where I live you come to a 

small public orchard, or anyway a small group of apple trees, planted I 

suppose in the interests of saving the planet. And there, at this time of 

year, on the ground are hundreds of apples that have fallen off the trees.  

I’ve been known to gather up a few of these wormy old fruits to put in my 

compost bin, and I’ve picked a fair number of apples off the trees and 

eaten them.  They’re crisp and a bit sour, and just the kind I like, though I 

couldn’t tell you the breed.

This reminded me of a recent walk I did, I did not very far from home, around some potato fields, where a good many discarded or rejected potatoes by the potato harvester machine, and could be snatched up from the ground, and they were, by me and my walking companions. Not the potatoes in this picture, obviously.

 

And OK, you may say, ‘Well of course there are edible things on the ground where you live, in a very slightly rural bit of Essex.’

 

And this is true enough, but a couple of weeks ago I was in London, in Spitalfields.some and there were ‘windfall’ potatoes to be had right there on the ground.  I imagine they’d fallen off the back of a lorry but they looked perfectly edible (apart from the odd one that had been run over) though I admit I didn’t swoop down on them.

And then, because I go around taking pictures of these things,  I remembered this perfectly good looking piece of bread, close to the rear tyre of a pickup truck in Los  Angeles. They have everything in that city!  But again I didn’t forage it.