Book and snacks of the day

Hi. I’m upstairs keeping out of the kitchen work again! I took a day’s leave and was due to be out in London with a friend today but she didn’t fancy it with the Omicron situation. Feeling a bit sorry for myself as last month I had also taken a day’s leave to meet up with my sister in London and that was also cancelled.

This is the book (above) I’m reading today: “An Artist of the Floating World” by Kazuo Ishiguro. I have a feeling I may have read it before. He is the author of “The Remains of the Day” which I saw the film version of when I lived in Tokyo. I have a soft spot for Japanese authors and books set in Japan as I had a great time when I lived there for a year in my early twenties, teaching English. Today’s book is very beautifully written and Ishiguro says in the preface that he deliberately constructed the sentences so it sounds like it was written in Japanese and then translated into English. How clever. I love that.

This morning I went to Costa again – not that I’m obsessed with this place- it’s just that at 12 minutes’ walk from my house it is the nearest place for a cup of tea when you can’t get one at home. I had a sausage breakfast bap and a pot of tea and started trying to read my book. The crèche ladies weren’t there today but there were a few chatty people working/having business meetings.

As I can’t access the kitchen I’m living off snacks again. David is out doing his voluntary work this afternoon. Here are the snacks of the day:

Not too unhealthy. I have some fibre and Vitamin C going on here.

I am amazed at how many countries a single item of food is derived from and processed in before it gets to us. If you start looking at food packaging it is truly mind blowing, and ethically and environmentally seems completely wrong. I would like to buy more locally produced food but it is hard to do so without spending loads of extra £££££s. I’ve searched for local farms but not many of them sell directly locally, and the occasional farmers’ markets seem to specialise in things like home made scented candles rather than stuff I’d buy for my weekly food shop.

The M & S crunchy oat bar above is made in Canada. Who’d have thought that? With “ingredients from more than one country”…. which ones I wonder 🤔 and then imported for M & S in Dublin..! Crazy stuff. They’re quite tasty though, but probably not recommended for eating in the bed, very crumbly!

The dried apricots are packed in Turkey for a company in Essex. They are very plump and delicious and dark brown. Apparently this is because they are not preserved in sulphur dioxide and are dried in the hot Turkish sun. 🌞Ah, the hot sun, I remember that. I’ve never been to Turkey, but the heat of the sun on your back, on your hands, on the hair on your head, isn’t that a lovely feeling? Yeah, right, dream on Gail, there are going to be no hot sunny holidays for a while with all this Covid nonsense around the world ☹️☹️☹️.

Here’s David and I in sunny Vienna on a tourist boat trip in July 2017… can’t believe how short my hair was! It was a great trip, very hot that weekend. Our hotel mini bar included complimentary full sized bottles of nice red and white Austrian wine that were replenished daily 🍷. Cheers!

I hope you are all having a good day. It’s nearly the weekend! 🥳 I’m back to my book now 😊 Xx