The Third Food Shopping Trip of June

Filling a blog post with shopping photos seems to have become a regular thing. That's the problem with not going very far or doing anything exciting.

So here it is ..........last week's  Aldi food shop and some things from Asda to get my £1 car park money back.

From left to right - pack of 4 nectarines £1.39;Cauliflower £1.19; Beetroot £1.39; Tin  Sardines 47p; Carrots 1Kg 69p; Potatoes £1.05; Butter £1.99; 400g Extra Mature Cheddar £2.49;  6 Eggs  £1.49. 2 Willow Spread @ 97p = £1.94; Castor sugar £2.25. Not in the photo are 1 dozen small bottles of lemonade that I keep in the car £3.58 - they will last until the end of the year or even longer.

Total £19.92

The Aldi shop came to several pence more than I wanted to spend because the calabrese that I'd planned to buy looked horribly yellow and unlikely to last long so I got a cauliflower instead (40p more). Their small 44p packs of carrots seemed to be very poor -  small  wrinkled things  - they wouldn't have kept well either and their baby potatoes (75p a few weeks ago) were only in larger packs for £1.05 - in fact their choice of potatoes and pack sizes was well down on the usual.

I'm not sure what had gone wrong at Aldi because as well as the calabrese head turning yellow and the small carrots looking old, when I started to cut into the cauliflower only a couple of days after purchase it was  going mouldy and black inside. I was only able to get one meal from it.

Usually their fruit and veg is pretty reliable - I wonder if they'd had problems with in- store temperatures. If they did last week it will be even worse this week because the extreme HOT 'Amber Alert' weather is due to land on us today. Yesterday wasn't too bad there was a bit of a breeze but  I was glad I didn't have to go far - just a 100yds up the road to get a much needed hair cut and then to the other side of the village to the pharmacy at the Health Centre. I took my bike - it was cooler than walking and it's downhill on the way home.

Stay hydrated folks - we're definitely not used to high 30's ℃

Back Tomorrow

The Summer Solstice

  I've now written about the Ogham Tree Alphabet and this book  many times on the blog. It's been very useful book for filling blog posts!

But there's one  plant mentioned in the book that I've not written about before...........The Heather.

Heather represents the Summer Solstice, which was yesterday and instead of a bright early sunrise with the heatwave there was mist hanging around and even some spots of rain just after 11.

1,920 × 1,080

Heather represents the letter U in the Ogham Alphabet and the number 18. It also means solitude.

Last September I took a photo of the glorious purple heather on the heath near Dunwich 

And picked a sprig for luck which sat on the dashboard in the car for the next month falling to pieces until I realised it would make a blog post.

Each heather plant looks like a tree in miniature, with a gnarled and twisted 'trunk' up to 18 inches tall. Bees love the nectar of heather flowers and heather honey is prized.

Back Tomorrow

Under the Weather...............

....................is, when you think about, a very strange saying . Most weather comes from above so we are always under it.

Anyway, I've been under it all week. Just feeling bleurgh...........not seasick (or any sort of sick!) like the original meaning................

The expression has maritime roots. In 19th-century sailing terminology, sailors or passengers who felt seasick or ill during rough, stormy conditions would go below deck to hide from the elements. By doing this, they were literally going "under" to escape the bad weather, which eventually transformed into the idiom we use today.

I even missed Keep Moving Group, which is complicated because at the moment I take the attendance chart, take the money and pass it to the Village Hall treasurer, buy/take the milk for coffees, find the meditation thing on the phone and lead half the exercises. I seem to be the only person who doesn't have holidays or Tuesday doctor/hospital appointments and goes regularly to the Group, so  have been lumbered with all the jobs. I took everything to the hall, apologised, and left it to everyone else to sort out and went home again!

Last weekend I mentioned hoping  the weather would be fine for the men's tennis at Queens club so it was on TV to watch  and it was fine and due to feeling grotty I was able to spend all afternoons watching it - which wasn't really as planned........................ I should be careful what I hope for!

Plenty of reading has been done too. I've now read all of the Inspector Ramsey books that Ann Cleeves wrote in the 90's before she wrote the Vera and Shetland series and read this...........

In this book the author does five walks around different areas of Suffolk and writes about the authors who've also walked/written/lived in those areas, from the C17 right up to date................

"...nor had I made allowance for the endless switchbacks and the roads reduced to single file and the mess being made of this part of Suffolk by the building of the Sizewell C nuclear power station.............the thousands of trees that have been felled............how to restore the generations of creatures that would have lived in them " Did they at least allow the archaeologists to have a look round?" I asked our taxi driver as we went past more skinned earth, more red and white tape curving in the breeze, and he said yes, they did, and very glad he was of it, the archaeologists being the only ones who drank, who needed lifts to and from the local pubs. Those building Sizewell C, he said put not a penny into the local economy:not in the shops, the pubs, or the restaurants. They sit in their block-booked holiday cottages all week then disappeared at the weekends..................."

 (it's the archaeologists who've kept YD in work and partly Son too of course! Local people have had a love/hate relationship with the Sizewell Power Stations since the 1960's. The only new shop to open in Leiston is one selling Hi Viz and work gear - while many others have closed.)

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Anyway, I'm fine again now but still doing nothing because the much, much warmer weather that had been predicted for a week arrived yesterday. Positively HOT. I got the grass cut early and then stayed inside with the doors and windows wide and curtains closed. I watched young Arthur Fery get knocked out of the tennis. If I go out over the weekend it will be early - to an Art Exhibition in Debenham Church  and car boot sales too of course. The  semis and finals of the tennis to watch and I'm looking forward to seeing some of the Wimbledon qualifying and the Eastbourne tournament on BBC red button next week .................by choice rather than necessity.