Fish and chips

What’s your go-to comfort food?

I couldn’t find a photo of a battered fish and chips but this was the best I could get off WordPress free photo library.

If its comfort food you want I don’t think there is anything better. The fish needs to be fried in thin batter, the chips soft on the inside crispy but not hard on the outside. Not too oily. Lashings (did I really write that? ) of salt and vinegar. Wrapped in greaseproof paper then newspaper for preference.

Why? It was a treat when I was a child. The chips and batter used to be orange coloured because they used food colouring where I came from. If you couldn’t afford fish you had “crispy bits” which were bits of batter that had come loose off the fish and were floating seperatly in the frying fat. In those days I think they used lard or beef fat to cook in.

So that’s my comfort food, my go to meal. I don’t have it very often, but when I do I really enjoy it.

I wish I could talk to her

I wish I could speak to my mother, my sister, but they are gone. If there was a phone line, a way to communicate. Just to say hello. To get some comfort. To just say a few words and get some response. It’s hard to lose people, it leaves such an empty space. Even when I’m busy I think of them. I thought I would learn to cope, and I have to some extent, but the older you get it seems the more the regret grows (at least for me). Sadness, regret, pain, loss, mourning, they all crowd in on me sometimes.

Old oil painting

Old oil painting of my cat leaping between gate posts. She was really clever and if I tapped the gatepost opposite where she was sitting she would leap across the gap. She would also come to me when I whistled for her. This was taken from a photo using a 35mm olympus camera. It took a few shots to get the image to paint from.

I used to paint in oils when I was in college and just afterwards but eventually started using acrylics when I found how quick and easy they were to paint with.

Sorry for the blurry photo but it’s high up on a wall and I would have to stand on a, step ladder to get close enough for a good photo.

Chess

What’s your favorite game (card, board, video, etc.)? Why?

I don’t really have a favourite game, but chess has become a way of socialising with a friend.

We only just started playing this week, but I found I enjoyed the challenge, and after ten years of not playing it, it made my brain work overtime! My friend is quite good and I was surprised how evenly matched we are.

I’d like to get better at it, but I don’t have the ability to think several moves ahead, I’m more of an artist, looking for patterns in the next move or so. It also means I can make random moves that surprise ‘real’ players. Is that an advantage? Maybe.

I used to like Scrabble, but the one friend we played against used to make up rules. For instance he would add words to another word to make a sentence! He insisted this was OK and would argue and lose his temper when we disagreed. So those games stopped (he would also sneakily swap tiles if he didn’t have good letters).

The final game I used to play was Monopoly with my sisters, that was very competitive. We used to squabble a lot over who was winning. It got too argumentative at Christmas when we used to play, so I was glad when we stopped playing it. X

Patterned

Artrage drawing played with in Incollage and Instagram. You can do all sorts of things by playing with a digital image, you can make interesting patterns and skew and tilt images if you try. I have often done things like this quite frequently, but it’s a while since I’ve created something like this.

The yard

Very leafy, I need to pot some small flowering plants on but not while my arm is shaking and sore. I’ll try and use some pain killers to stop it hurting so much. Hubby has dumped a big bag of compost in the way and I need to get it moved so I can get further up the yard. Some of these plants survived the winter, they are very leafy, to be honest I could move them into the main garden but I don’t have the energy and there are some dodgy steps as you walk round the back. I must get hubby to get some sand and cement to replace some loose bricks.