pumpkinstrokemarrow

Following the soups mentioned yesterday, back on the case with a fish soup for Wednesday lunch. Simmer some white potatoes. When half done add some onions, cut like one opens an orange, segment wise. Skin a piece of smoked haddock (something which I have not done for a very long time and was rather easier than I was expecting. Presumably helped along by smoking amounting to half cooking) and chop coarsely. Add to the mix and simmer for a further ten minute. Serve.

Will probably follow up with a mixed smoked haddock and fresh cod version this evening.

However, yesterday, fortified by the haddock soup, had a very good session on puzzle 17, so good that I was able to finish it before breakfast this morning. A Waddingtons Deluxe 500 piecer of Willow Cottage, Norfolk - a rather grander version of the cottage that we stayed in the other week. And rather grander than the surprisingly large number of Willow Cottages that Mr. Google turns up in Norfolk. But a rather unsporting previous owner who had seen fit to pack the edges pieces separate from the rest. Being a sporting sort of chap I mixed them back up again.

Started with the edge, as usual. The two chimneys. Then moved onto the white walls and the windows - the white being easy to pick out and the windows being easy to fit together. Do the post on the left. Take the wall up to the first course of the thatch. Do the thatch-sky boundary. Then the strip of lawn. Then the sky, which being not more than three courses at most thick was a lot easier than usual.

Then moved onto the flowers, which slowed things right down. Eventually the action boiled down to pushing out from the big flower clumps. Picking out the colours and shapes worked without needing to sort. Had an wet accident at this point when I found out how easily the rather thin picture bit will come off the cardboard backing bit if a piece gets wet, but luckily, I had a glue stick near to hand to repair the damage.

This just left the interior of the thatch. Having done the top and bottom courses, the interior, like the sky, was three courses at most thick, and was knocked off in very short order. All done and dusted before breakfast, so off to the newsagent for, this being a day of luxury, both the DT and the Guardian - in which last I was rather put out to find coverage of the Olympics which would have done the Sun or the Daily Mail proud. Pages and pages of the stuff. There might even have been a pull out supplement. Hardly a pompous article about bog standards in sight. Then I remembered how Wetherspoons fell from a state of entertainment free grace and installed large televisions in all their pubs because they were losing too much business when the footer was on.

Then there was a rather irritating piece about how some property developer is going to spend hundreds of millions of pounds building stuff around the shell of Battersea Power Station. Why on earth can we not just knock the thing down and develop the site decently? There is always Bankside for aficionados of electricity company brickwork. Not to mention giant underground caverns filled with all  the latest arty junk at which the Arts Council has seen fit to throw our money.

On the other hand, the Economist had some sport explaining how the Olympic Games are a very bad thing for the host city but a very good thing for advertisers, contractors and the fat cats of the International Olympic Committee, which last ought to be up there with the bankers on our hate lists.

PS: I am not alone. The two older ladies running the second hand book stall attached to Bourne Hall Library Museum are clearly fully paid up Olympics haters. They thought the money might have been better spent on houses or something like that. But allowed that my notion of giving them a permanent home on Mount Olympus had its points - the Greek one that is, not the Cypriot one.