Big biscuits...

Just recently, I've started - or revisited a passion for, these delicacies! They're not cheap, at around twenty pence a pop, but they have a fabulous flavour, texture etc, and do make cheese so much better than a normal cream cracker, or a digestive biscuit.

I did actually get a large store in just before panic-buying stopped any bread arriving, and together with some Ryvita, they are still on the shelf, but diminishing rapidly...

Many years ago, I was in the CCF at school, and we would go on annual camps to places like Sennybridge near Brecon or Inys Gaint, an island in The Menai Straits. It was all jolly fun, and the night exercise enabled twenty Gold Leaf and a few cans of cider to slip down without anyone noticing! The Duke of Edinburgh's Awards were the same, with nights out somewhere, and on all these occasions, we'd be issued with army rations like a tin of stew ('a nutritious and satisfying dinner', it said somewhere), and a tin of marge, with a tin of biscuits! They were as hard as nails, but strangely acceptable, especially with the tin of jam which was also in the pack! 

But I liked them, and as all this happened back in the early nineteen-sixties, I've forgotten the solidity of those tins of biscuits, and can now relive the pleasure with the delightful Bath Olivers! The chocolate ones are to die for too...

Foul press...

Why are the people in the press so nasty these days?

Is it because the dead-tree paper business will die out soon, and people will just get their news when and where they like, from their PCs, phones, Ipads etc?

Makes sense to me - I read the news online, I can easily ignore the dross about royalty and the unpleasant, ugly, tattooed slebs and foobollers. I rather like to see some 'journos' getting hot under the collar, but wonder if they're really up to their jobs, especially most of the BBC people, so all I have to do when I get disinterested, is go...


...click!

Musings from outside a bolted door...

One issue Scrobs has with 'lockdown', is that meetings with good friends like Elias and Gloriette Sagtrouser have been suspended.

For two months, the normally open doors of 'The Bells' have been firmly shut and bolted, although the lovely people who run the place are doing takeaways of enormous proportions at weekends, and we try and support them on our meagre pensions (?), as much as we can, the various pints of Sheps' 'Spring Ale - 8.7abv' and the large Anno and Fevertrees are just not apparent at the moment!

So there's a sad dearth of seeing the trilby hat, sloping to the rear of the noble head, with a twenty pound note swaying in the breeze from a gnarled mitt, and the tiny feet, tiny hands, and huge - gins of the lovely lady, and things just don't seem right somehow.

Elias has been working hard though, keeping his business going, and I guess Gloriette has been working just as hard, doing the books, taking the orders over the phone etc, because I have been gladdened to notice, only last week, that after several weeks of the muck-away boys trundling past The Turrets with loads of subsoil, the Sagtrouser trucks are arriving with a variety of heavy building materials to a site down the road, where we believe another ornamental fishing lake is being constructed.

Life goes on I suppose, but discussions with hard-working chums still at it in the building industry have indicated that the good builders are getting to grips with the situation, and finding ways to keep working, which is what they always do, rather than be paid by the state to sit around and do very little.

These guys and gals are still the people who are providing the taxes to pay for the lockdown, and all the public services who are on full pay, pensions, soft hours and lots of excuses, especially from the 'management' end, but thankfully, the real money is going to the front line worker bees.

Pics from Scrobs' Little Red Book...

h/t David and Theo Spark.

Big front drive in North Kent...

Back in the seventies, Scrobs was flogging concrete drainage blocks to anyone who wanted to have a huge car-park.

Naturally, the supermarkets got excited as Tesco, Sainsbury, et al were just getting their buildings beyond a few thousand ft super, and wanted customers to load up their Ford Escorts and Skodas.

One of my best customers was a small firm, probably insignificant by today's standards, but run by a man who had the knack of getting into the car import business, and he started to build car-parks wherever he could. Sheerness, maybe a sorry little town at the time - possibly today, - I haven't been back for years, but worthy of being a flourishing port with plenty of good local labour, had loads of spare space, and my civils man really pulled out all the stops!

We carted literally thousands of the blocks to the sites, night and day, and the lines of cars he stored just grew and grew! It was a fabulous enterprise, and very lucrative for my company as well!

So, who would have thought, that after all this time, those very same car-parks would be a signal of a depression...

Hope it doesn't stay that way.

It wasn't the Northumbrian pipes, it was the Uilleann pipes...

We were talking about the pipes a day or so go, so here's the one I was thinking about, one and all!

I just love this and somehow, the sentiments of the words are pretty-well spot on at the moment!

D'you know what I mean...

The other day, Scrobs was upstairs in a spare room, doing a bit of this and that, and waiting for something to dry, and while thinking of not much, the old Yamaha guitar appeared from nowhere, so a quick strum was necessary.

It's an easy guitar to play, although the electrics are seized up, well, that doesn't really matter, as I don't have an amplifier now anyway, but I do like to hear a sort of quiet hum every now and then.

It's tuned to the normal EADGBE, and apart from a few changes years ago, I've tended to stick with it for better or worse!

Anyone who has one of these bits of kit may know, that the first few seconds of any session, from just putting the thing on a knee or winding the strap around the neck, are exquisite. It seems that in a fleeting moment, a whole magical, musical enterprise will bound forth and amaze everyone...

Well, there was only me to hear all that, and the first strings I held down were the B and the top F#, which is a quaint little chord, and requires some fiddly bits with the other fingers. I'd actually forgotten about it...

When Mrs O'Blene and I were first married, we were living in a flat in Hastings, which was enough for the two of us, and of course, there was only entertainment from a Radio Rentals TV, or a record player. There was also a reel-to-reel tape recorder.

As we didn't go out that much, we reserved one evening a week for a few tinctures in a great place (The Two Sawyers) we knew well, having spent a fortune there in the past! If we won a few bob on the fruit machine, (it was a club back then, and you won real money in sixpences), we'd buy a bottle of Onzerust sherry to take home (I don't think you can get it now, but my old boss in Ashford used to swear by it, so that was that), and consume a glass or two while we got supper ready. I'd put on a record.

A few weeks before all this, I'd been in Hastings mooching around in the famous 'Disc Jockey Plus 2' record shop in Queens Road, and seen a superb album, 'The Music People', which was a three disc collection of some really decent rock music. It had cost £1.50p...

One of the tracks was this one...

And guess why I remembered it after all these years...