I wanted to make some effort to tidy up in anticipation of a wee get-together I'm hosting on Saturday. Nothing fancy - just a few mates and some food and maybe a fire, as it's Midsummer this week. Although with the weather this past few days, you'd be hard pushed to believe it! We've had the heating on, it has been so damp and dreich. Anyway, I'm going into a mild and measured frenzy trying to tidy up both house and garden in anticipation of visitors. We aren't a tidy lot, we Andrew-Barrs. My motto is clean enough to be healthy and dirty enough to be happy but I don't want people thinking we live like pigs. For a wee family of 3 people and a dog we sure have a lot of junk.
Talking of mottos, I've been thinking about those a bit. Our family motto is "if you're no' fast yer last" - a joking reference to how if there are ever any treats in the house like cakes or biscuits, they disapperar quickly. Another we have is one Gee coined many years ago when we were first together and trying to be eco-friendly and eat vegetarian food on a low-budget - "Find a level of hypocrisy you can live with". By that we meant that as far as possible we would try to stick to our ethics but sometimes you let yourself slacken the rules to fit economy or necessity. In our early days as a family this meant things like not chucking out or buying secondhand a pair of stout leather boots when "vegetarian" shoes were too dear for our budget or buying disposable nappies when we lived in a high rise flat with almost no drying facilities and not enough money to run a drier. As the years went on, we made more compromises - I went from being vegan to vegetarian because I found it was easier to tempt a growing child with meals that contained cheese than not (I'm sure there are parents out there who have managed to raise kids on a vegan diet and they have my admiration and respect)and Gee eats fish now because he likes it. We always fed our cats on a meat-based diet mainly because we accepted that cats are obligate carnivores and don't thrive on a plant-based diet. The same goes for our dog Roxie - although she pretty much eats what we eat at dinner time, we do give her dog meat as well. And I will admit it - I shop at Tesco. I know they are the evil empire but they are my local supermarket and to be brutally honest with their "everyday" range of own label items they are even cheaper than Lidl. We were in the other day and they had massively reduced a load of bakery goods - we got loaves of bread for 10p, pittas for 9p and tortilla wraps for 27p plus muffins for 16p. And I'm not going to pass that up in today's ecoonomic climate!
Growing up, my family's motto was "whatever happens stays within these 4 walls" which goes a long way to explaining why we were so f*cked up and why my brothers and I are aren't in contact with each other. I read a quote the other day -
“You’d think family would be the one sure thing in life, the gimme? Points you got just for being born? So much thick, meaty stuff bound you to these people, so many interlocking spirals of history, genetics, common cause, and struggle that it should be the most basic of all drives, that you would strive to protect and love one another, yet this bond that should be the big no-brainer was in fact the hardest thing.”
from a book called "Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk" by Ben Fountain and that is so true for me. I have said before that it was hellish, so much so that latterly, even after my mother died, encounters with my brothers always felt like a meeting of survivors of some big catastrophe - the only thing holding us together was the fact we had come through our upbringings, albeit badly damaged. So when the opportunities came for us to fall out and become estranged, it wasn't hard.
Back to mottos however. One I have is always "Onwards and Upwards" and, fingers crossed, hopefully the reverse of the Starks' one in A Agme of Thrones "SUMMER IS COMING"! x
Sunday, 17 June 2012
Sunday Thoughts
Sunday finds me in a strange mood. Yesterday felt more like a Sunday with its torrential rain and dark skies - a nothing day that seems to sap the enthusiasm out of you. As a result, today feels like a Monday with me eager to get on and do things. So far, I have made tonight's dinner (oven roasted ratatouille from Hugh Fearnley-Wittingstall's Veg book and homemade ciabbata bread) and weeded the street side of our house. The weeding was a job that I had been wanting to tackle for some time but had always put off due to my various aches and pains. Today though I set out with a trowel to cut stems and the washing basket to put the weeds in. I must have been a sight, crouching down and pulling up grass and leaves but I got it done. I then went out with a brush and shovel to sweep up all the detritus - cigarette butts, bits of broken plastic and bottletops, along with grit from when we had snow. I then went along with the secateurs and snipped stray and overhanging branches from our collection of trees and bushes - hawthorn, birch and cotoneaster. 
I wanted to make some effort to tidy up in anticipation of a wee get-together I'm hosting on Saturday. Nothing fancy - just a few mates and some food and maybe a fire, as it's Midsummer this week. Although with the weather this past few days, you'd be hard pushed to believe it! We've had the heating on, it has been so damp and dreich. Anyway, I'm going into a mild and measured frenzy trying to tidy up both house and garden in anticipation of visitors. We aren't a tidy lot, we Andrew-Barrs. My motto is clean enough to be healthy and dirty enough to be happy but I don't want people thinking we live like pigs. For a wee family of 3 people and a dog we sure have a lot of junk.
Talking of mottos, I've been thinking about those a bit. Our family motto is "if you're no' fast yer last" - a joking reference to how if there are ever any treats in the house like cakes or biscuits, they disapperar quickly. Another we have is one Gee coined many years ago when we were first together and trying to be eco-friendly and eat vegetarian food on a low-budget - "Find a level of hypocrisy you can live with". By that we meant that as far as possible we would try to stick to our ethics but sometimes you let yourself slacken the rules to fit economy or necessity. In our early days as a family this meant things like not chucking out or buying secondhand a pair of stout leather boots when "vegetarian" shoes were too dear for our budget or buying disposable nappies when we lived in a high rise flat with almost no drying facilities and not enough money to run a drier. As the years went on, we made more compromises - I went from being vegan to vegetarian because I found it was easier to tempt a growing child with meals that contained cheese than not (I'm sure there are parents out there who have managed to raise kids on a vegan diet and they have my admiration and respect)and Gee eats fish now because he likes it. We always fed our cats on a meat-based diet mainly because we accepted that cats are obligate carnivores and don't thrive on a plant-based diet. The same goes for our dog Roxie - although she pretty much eats what we eat at dinner time, we do give her dog meat as well. And I will admit it - I shop at Tesco. I know they are the evil empire but they are my local supermarket and to be brutally honest with their "everyday" range of own label items they are even cheaper than Lidl. We were in the other day and they had massively reduced a load of bakery goods - we got loaves of bread for 10p, pittas for 9p and tortilla wraps for 27p plus muffins for 16p. And I'm not going to pass that up in today's ecoonomic climate!
Growing up, my family's motto was "whatever happens stays within these 4 walls" which goes a long way to explaining why we were so f*cked up and why my brothers and I are aren't in contact with each other. I read a quote the other day -
“You’d think family would be the one sure thing in life, the gimme? Points you got just for being born? So much thick, meaty stuff bound you to these people, so many interlocking spirals of history, genetics, common cause, and struggle that it should be the most basic of all drives, that you would strive to protect and love one another, yet this bond that should be the big no-brainer was in fact the hardest thing.”
from a book called "Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk" by Ben Fountain and that is so true for me. I have said before that it was hellish, so much so that latterly, even after my mother died, encounters with my brothers always felt like a meeting of survivors of some big catastrophe - the only thing holding us together was the fact we had come through our upbringings, albeit badly damaged. So when the opportunities came for us to fall out and become estranged, it wasn't hard.
Back to mottos however. One I have is always "Onwards and Upwards" and, fingers crossed, hopefully the reverse of the Starks' one in A Agme of Thrones "SUMMER IS COMING"! x
I wanted to make some effort to tidy up in anticipation of a wee get-together I'm hosting on Saturday. Nothing fancy - just a few mates and some food and maybe a fire, as it's Midsummer this week. Although with the weather this past few days, you'd be hard pushed to believe it! We've had the heating on, it has been so damp and dreich. Anyway, I'm going into a mild and measured frenzy trying to tidy up both house and garden in anticipation of visitors. We aren't a tidy lot, we Andrew-Barrs. My motto is clean enough to be healthy and dirty enough to be happy but I don't want people thinking we live like pigs. For a wee family of 3 people and a dog we sure have a lot of junk.
Talking of mottos, I've been thinking about those a bit. Our family motto is "if you're no' fast yer last" - a joking reference to how if there are ever any treats in the house like cakes or biscuits, they disapperar quickly. Another we have is one Gee coined many years ago when we were first together and trying to be eco-friendly and eat vegetarian food on a low-budget - "Find a level of hypocrisy you can live with". By that we meant that as far as possible we would try to stick to our ethics but sometimes you let yourself slacken the rules to fit economy or necessity. In our early days as a family this meant things like not chucking out or buying secondhand a pair of stout leather boots when "vegetarian" shoes were too dear for our budget or buying disposable nappies when we lived in a high rise flat with almost no drying facilities and not enough money to run a drier. As the years went on, we made more compromises - I went from being vegan to vegetarian because I found it was easier to tempt a growing child with meals that contained cheese than not (I'm sure there are parents out there who have managed to raise kids on a vegan diet and they have my admiration and respect)and Gee eats fish now because he likes it. We always fed our cats on a meat-based diet mainly because we accepted that cats are obligate carnivores and don't thrive on a plant-based diet. The same goes for our dog Roxie - although she pretty much eats what we eat at dinner time, we do give her dog meat as well. And I will admit it - I shop at Tesco. I know they are the evil empire but they are my local supermarket and to be brutally honest with their "everyday" range of own label items they are even cheaper than Lidl. We were in the other day and they had massively reduced a load of bakery goods - we got loaves of bread for 10p, pittas for 9p and tortilla wraps for 27p plus muffins for 16p. And I'm not going to pass that up in today's ecoonomic climate!
Growing up, my family's motto was "whatever happens stays within these 4 walls" which goes a long way to explaining why we were so f*cked up and why my brothers and I are aren't in contact with each other. I read a quote the other day -
“You’d think family would be the one sure thing in life, the gimme? Points you got just for being born? So much thick, meaty stuff bound you to these people, so many interlocking spirals of history, genetics, common cause, and struggle that it should be the most basic of all drives, that you would strive to protect and love one another, yet this bond that should be the big no-brainer was in fact the hardest thing.”
from a book called "Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk" by Ben Fountain and that is so true for me. I have said before that it was hellish, so much so that latterly, even after my mother died, encounters with my brothers always felt like a meeting of survivors of some big catastrophe - the only thing holding us together was the fact we had come through our upbringings, albeit badly damaged. So when the opportunities came for us to fall out and become estranged, it wasn't hard.
Back to mottos however. One I have is always "Onwards and Upwards" and, fingers crossed, hopefully the reverse of the Starks' one in A Agme of Thrones "SUMMER IS COMING"! x
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment