Yet another junket...

My dear Mum used to make this stuff regularly.

Somehow, because of the expectation of something sweeter than the chocolate drops I'd buy by the hundred-weight from the local shop on a Saturday afternoon when I was about ten; my lovely sister and I would go 'Woooooh' and scoop it down without a murmer.

While nurturing GD today, she sat in her high chair, (Grand Daughter, not Mrs S...), and proceeded to spit out another similar delicacy from the Scrobs' formative years - egg custard!

The subsequent discussion ended in confusion, GD looking slightly bilious, and JRT rushing round the floor, hoovering up anything which had been dropped! We both wondered why we used to eat junket, or egg custard, and have decided that it was a delicacy which will always remain in some infantile fantasy, something which was so special because our Mothers had decided it was, and we'd better sit down and enjoy it - or else, but, it will never actually get a mention on a McDonalds menu.

More's the pity, I learned that egg custard had nutmeg sprayed all over it, and also what rennet actually did to milk all those years ago.

Fat lot of good that did...

One too many mornings...

Yesterday, I caught a radio snippet of an obit on Suze Rotolo, whose picture graced many a schoolboy's study wall in the nineteen sixties.

The commentator mentioned that Joan Baez, after she had become Bob Dylan's squeeze, popped a few songs into her covers of Dylan's songs.

It might have been a bit thoughtless for Joan to sing a love song which Bob had written for Suze, but there you go...

Does anyone know what this bit does...

One of my business partners has given me a printer. It is a good printer, and because he is a photographer par excellence in his spare time, he makes sure that his pictures are top quality. So when a new printer is put on the market, he is generous to a fault about what to do with the one he is replacing, which is an honourable state of affairs, and one for which I am eternally grateful, because our printer packed up recently, and I'm using a pencil.

So today, all three of us in Scrobs Inc. had one of our regular get-togethers, with another old chum who seems to know where the money is, and from whom we have had some spiriting advice and assistance as well as a lot of friendly banter.

BP brought the previous printer with him to pass on to me and I was drooling at the switches, lights, etc, which these state-of-the-art machines seem to sport these days, and I was commencing to dream of being able to write pompous letters to 'The Times' and do other pursuits like scan old pics etc.

That was right up to the moment that the said printer was being tranferred from the boot of his car to the clutches of your very own Scrobs. We'd covered the printer with a plastic bin bag because it was raining, and BP was busily collecting the various items for me, while I said 'cheerio' to our guest and friend.

There was suddenly a resounding crash, and pieces of Epson were heard hitting the tarmac with quite a lot of anguish, and plenty of noise.

There was a deathly hush; I eventually regained the skin out of which I had jumped in terror, and BP was understandably very upset that the rain had made the plastic very slippery, and the printer had gone extremely south.

There was no need to remonstrate, you just don't need to do that because we are friends, and so I took the bag containing the bits of printer home and Mrs S and I examined the damage.

The lid was broken off, and several pieces of important plastic were rattling around in the bag, but, after several false starts, it all seems to be back in one piece, after a little glue here and there, and a choice version of various curse words everywhere, such that JRT has vanished clutching her ears with her front paws.

So tomorrow, when all has dried, I'll see if it works, but I'm puzzled by just one item (above) which doesn't seem to have a home, and I'd be delighted if anyone can recognise it and tell me where it goes!

I thank you!

Reevers' reminder of Scrobs' Big Idiot Card...

When Scrobs was a younger bloke, and just finding out a few things, he joined several friends and went on a couple of holidays in Spain and Italy, for a little water skiing, several drinks each lunchtime and evening and a multitude of Three Castles tipped...

It was a grand couple of weeks on each occasion, and among all the general festivities being enjoyed by our throng (about fifteen of us), there was community singing in the bar each evening, with Scrobs on a very basic, but much loved guitar.

As Reevers has prompted me to reminisce, we used to have several party pieces which crept into the repertoire after certain levels of tinctured jollity, and 'The Three Bells' was a late entry into the finales of each evening, much to the chagrin of most of the other residents, and sometimes a few of the hangers-on as well...

It's been mentioned here that this particular song has a great history with the Scrobs dynasty, and so it seems, with the Clan Reevers as well!

So, at the risk of repeating myself, saying everything for a second time, and reiterating past posts and comments, I can safely say that when we used to sing this song, we could always forget the order of the verses, and also the order of each of the lines - even the words in each line or verse as well! After much happiness and laughter, the song would echo into the rafters with a giggle and a chuckle and a "where are my my smokes", or "who's shout is it..."! Yates would always say 'What key are we in' and he was tone deaf!

One year, we all went to a party which was intended to be a post-holiday re-enactment of all the fun we'd had at these various gatherings. When the evening was going full swing, our host (an osteopath of some renown) called the meeting to order, handed Scrobs his concert guitar, and ordered everyone to sit up and listen. He the proceeded to unfurl a huge roll of paper on which he'd written the correct words to the song for us all to sing - probably for the first time ever, and it worked like a dream!

Magical moments like this last a lifetime.

That lucky old sun...

I have a sneaky suspicion that the Scrobs frame and brain has been interspersed with a teragram of Vitamin D!

Why, yesterday, the sleeves of the 'Twickenham/Hard Winter/stop being a prat and light the bloody fire' jersey were nearly rolled up, and today, I forgot to take a scarf when we walked JRT!

This must be a sign of 'Globule Worming', and I claim my five splonders...

R.I.P. Ron Hickman - Workmate inventor...

Ron Hickman was a proper inventor.

This obit says far too little about all the work which has been spawned by such an amazing piece of kit. I inherited two Workmates, and always use the original one, (I gave the later one to my BIL). Mine is made of the distinctive blue painted alloy struts, and is one of the very first ever made in the sixties. I love it, because it has made work at home so much easier! They really were a godsend when they first came out.

Mine (in fact technically ours, as it once belonged to Mrs S's dad), has had all sorts of things done on it, and before anyone asks, the answer is 'no' as it's the wrong height...

We've used it as scaffolding (plastering and painting ceilings), a vice of course, in every position imaginable (again - 'NO'), very recently as a frame to hold the 'Scrobs White-Finger Saw', a BBQ table (it comes out every year), and it probably gets a run out every week of the year on some job or other! It really has emerged as an iconic piece of machinery, and has endured all sorts of abuse for over forty years!

I even tried to make my own version when we were first married, and couldn't get to the price, which was - I think, about £36.00 back then...

And, to cap it all, this man designed the Lotus Elan, a car which has always been a fantasy buy for Scrobs, which must be a whole story in itself!

'Bye Ron! I'll be out in the shed using that special bit of kit today and will think of you for a while. I'll also raise a tincture in your memory, just a nano-second before I walk round one of the extended lower legs, and trip headlong, as I've done on over three million occasions...

Couch potato...

As the search for more of 'The Good Life' continues unabated, the new plot we've taken on in the village (actually, by pure coincidence, the very same one we gave up 22 years ago, when we moved to 'The Turrets') has handed us a huge restoration job and this bleeding piece of earth is getting a right blasted 'seeing to'.

Because it is in dire need of some TLC, we're giving the plot some institutional reformation, because we're digging out the couch grass by hand.

The diggable area is about 30' by 30' - 100 square yards, and it's taken us way over 45 hours of hard slog to clean it properly. There are about 12 square yards left to dig and clean, and the couch grass will be a thing of the past, but it has been a right sod so far...

That 45 hours has yielded about forty wheelbarrows of the dreaded weed, and somehow, I find the work very therapeutic, being able to dig a few spits with the sod flicker and from there on in, by applying a flurry of clops with a clod breaker, (fashioned from a WW2 Land Army cultivator, and a piece of yew from the tree behind 'The Turrets'), which makes the poor old soil sit up and await some TLC from the gentle hands of Mrs S...

Update - Just found this, which explains why Scrobs walks tall and without a hump...