My main mission of the morning was to take a huge builders' bag of plastic waste to the nearest council recycling centre at Blackstock Road, Gleadless. In refuse collection there has been an ongoing industrial dispute for months now - the upshot being that there is nowhere to deposit one's soft plastic waste apart from at one of the city's five recycling centres. By the way, we used to call them "dumps".
Late morning I arrived at Blackstock Road and the queue was not too bad. Ten minutes later with our waste plastic conscientiously deposited I was away. The ridiculousness of having to burn petrol (American: gas) to get to and from the recycling centre struck me as just another of life's absurdities.
Back home, Shirley had taken Phoebe by bus to a pop up fun park in the city centre. I made a mug of peppermint and liquorice tea to drink while I sat at our outdoor table consuming another two chapters of "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" by Anne Bronte. In my youth, I would have struggled with the sometimes turgid language of this early Victorian novel but now I breeze through it. More than that, I bring a better sense of time and history to the reading. I am greatly enjoying it - partly because I was very much in the mood to take on a well-known novel from that era.
Over the telephone, I renewed my drug prescription for hypertension and those various pills will be ready for me at our local pharmacy tomorrow afternoon - free of charge because of our NHS. The oedema I was experiencing has almost disappeared since I have been off the amlodipine pills.
Early this evening I prepared a family meal of Lincolnshire sausages, jacket potatoes, fried onions and garden peas - followed by a bramble pie that I baked myself using brambles picked from the bottom of our garden. It was served with vegan ice cream.
There's a new series of the addictive "Mandy" by Diane Morgan on the BBC right now and this evening, after putting Phoebe to bed, Shirley and I watched two episodes, Both of us laughed several times. However, I am not sure how well this comedy programme would go down with an American audience. They would probably sit stony-faced in their dens wondering what the hell was going on.
There's always tomorrow and our Friday weather forecast is good. When Phoebe is gone I might well venture out somewhere for another long walk. But where? This question is usually fraught with dissatisfaction when you have walked just about every path within a twenty mile radius of home.
from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/Ra85ZyS
