pumpkinstrokemarrow

And since everybody else is at it, I had better add my thoughts of Baroness Scotland. First, a rather odd law that can result in a £5,000 fine for failing to copy some documents. Particularly as the documents relate to someone who is married to a UK citizen and so whom one might presume to be allowed to live and work here. Second, but a law which BS helped onto the statue book and which she should therefore show as much respect for now as she did then. Sack her! Absolutely no special exemptions for members of the cabinet. If we have to cope with all the stuff they dream up, then so do they. Third, I take a peek at the web site of our shiny new UK Border Agency at http://www.bia.homeoffice.gov.uk/. As a result of which I have very little idea of who is allowed to work here and who is not. What on earth is a small employer without the luxury of an HR department supposed to do with all this stuff? Let alone a hard working mum who hasn't time to look after her own home? Fourth, when I was little, the drill was that you could not work for a respectable employer without producing your national insurance card. So why can't something like that work now. If our masters have seen fit to issue person X with a national insurance number, why should I not be able to assume that person X is allowed to work? One should be able to rely on our masters to tell us if someone was working who should not be in slow time, when tax started going through to them on that number. Then send in the dogs.

But there is some good news. I have had occasion to moan about the machine that converts coin into credit at Mr S., more specifically the arrangement whereby Mr S. charges some 7%, which struck me as rather greedy, particularly when you had opted for the pass the credit to a charity option. So I was pleased to find that the Croydon branch of HSBC had such a machine, which appeared to credit coin to your account without charge. Stick your plastic in the hole provided, shovel the coin into the tray and Bob's your uncle. Bit slow if you had the takings from a fete to deal with, but quite good enough for my annual emptying of the piggy bank, in my case a cardboard replica of a rather fat tin of Newky Brown. Only down side was the litter strewn state of the bank. Not upto Epsom standards at all.

Now start to ponder 'Bob's your uncle'. Wikipedia not very helpful on origins. So the phrase joins 'stone the crows' in the common exclamations of unknown origins pot. And so onto 'I've got a bone to pick with you', a phrase my mother was fond of and meant she want to have a pop at you about something. This came up when BIL was picking a beef bone the other day. Altogether a rather pleasant activity, not fitting the phrase at all. But then I got to think of dogs squabbling over a bone. Probably where it came from, but with a rather curious shift along the way. One dog does not offer another dog a bone in order to have a fight about it.

Steak and kidney for lunch today, following the steak and kidney of chip shop pie standard a couple of weeks ago. Wednesday 2 September, although unable to find it using the Blogger search button. This is getting to be a pain. That aside, today a variation. No ox kidney at Cheam, so had to settle for eight lamb's kidneys. That taken with the dripping from more than one animal, meant that at least 8 animals went into the making of the steak and kidney, including at least one cow, one sheep and one pig. All seemed rather improper, although one eats mixed shell fish without thinking anything of it. But steak and kidney very good. The lamb's kidney seemed to generate a thicker gravy that ox kidney, so I thickened with a handful of red lentils rather than corn flour. So nothing much like fish and chip shop steak and kidney pie without the crust, but very good all the same. The floury version can be a bit heavy going when one gets to the third helping. Served with mash and a whiteish cabbage. That is to say something which looked like a white cabbage but was actually a pale green. Very good it was too.