Tuesday 29 August 2023

Tuesday 29th August - two days of August left

Just as well there still are Two Days Left... Ang has posted her August ctoss stitching to me already, having only started stitching a few days ago! I did an hour this afternoon, but ran out of brain before I finished. Tomorrow,  maybe, I'll have it ready to post?

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It's been another day of taking things very quietly, but patience has been rewarded by a steady improvement! 

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I am watching 'Bake-off, the professionals'. Every week I'm astonished by the number of flavours and elements in each tiny morsel, and the fiddly twiddly decorations. I tend to stick to making an 'all-in-one' mix it all up in the bowl sponge cake, with very little decoration or topping, if any. The skill of the bakers is phenomenal. 

I wonder what happened to the uneaten food; do the production team all come equipped with boxes, and fall upon the cakes to scoop them up and take them home as soon as filming stops?. In a similar vein, the mother of one of my piano pupils used to turn up with trays of cooked ready meals or parcels of cooked chickens. The company she worked for tested cooking instructions for supermarket foods. They had to cook dozens of packets in all the different types of oven, bracketing the temperatures and timings to ensure that the instructions were correct. In the run-up to Christmas there were endless roast turkeys...

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Some nattily attired young man knocked on the door this afternoon. 'I represent blahblahblah broadband.' (That obviously wasn't the name of the company but I had stopped listening as soon as I say the lanyard and the clipboard). I'm afraid I interrupted before he could really get into his stride and told him 'we quite enough broadband and did not want to buy any more so I'll let you get on your way'. 

I must have looked and sounded like some deluded old geriatric who thought he was selling something like household brushes or vacuum cleaners. He smiled sweetly, hesitated, but I was already gently closing the door. Toodle-oo, I thought, and toddled back to the settee.


3 comments:

  1. Despite having a 'No callers etc' notice on my front door, I still get the eager young salesmen. Nothing seems to pu them off.

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    1. I heard a story from a colleague once that while he was trying to get a cold caller to leave, his flat mate appeared on all fours in the doorway growling and barking like a fierce dog; that seemed to work, but I'm too old and creaky to try that method now

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  2. I get tired with people trying to sell stuff too. Also, the charities I support do this regular spiel where they want you to donate more and they waffle on for ages with this prewritten script and then work their way down a list of prices they would like until they find one which suits you. This time, when the Alzheimer's society called me last week, they named their opening gambit and I asked them, "What do I currently donate?"- they told me and I said I'd increase to a specific figure with saved a lot of time!
    I also wondered about what happened to the rest of the food. Though I do remember having a friend whose dad worked in TV on Masterchef and he said (back in the 90's) that the crew hoovered everything up!

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