Wednesday, September 23, 2009

nuts

Mini-B's been here the last few days helping BB with the slating - sporadically anyway, when he's not been summoned to remove his cows from someone's front garden or disappeared to exchange sackfuls of wild mushrooms for tractor tyres. Today they put up the first chimney and as BB stood back to admire their handiwork, I came along and said, "it's squint". This happens all the time and the script goes like this:

BC: That [chimney/window/door/beam/shelf] is squint.

BB: (long steely silence with much flaring of nostrils) Well it's too late to do anything about it!

BC: What do you mean it's too late? You've just this second put it [up/in/on].

BB: Well I'm not changing it!

BC: Ok. We'll just be known as the foreigners who live in the crooked house.

That works every time and he spent the next hour (huffing and puffing) trying to budge the chimney a couple of centimetres.

When I was out running earlier I thought I'd stumbled across a family of baby hedgehogs, these sweet chestnuts were so big. They were as big as tennis balls but you wouldn't want to slip one of these in your pocket for your second serve. Which brings me nicely on to bulls' testicles. Poire is just back from holiday in Alsace where rognons blancs featured on the menu in a restaurant they went to. I'll just file those with tĂȘte de veau I think.

2 comments:

Kathie said...

I'm reminded of a long-ago autumn when our neighborhood's bully of a grey tiger-striped tomcat beat up our sweet neutered male black-and-white long-haired glamor-puss -- although a rescued farm cat, probably part Maine Coon Cat in ancestry, but drop-dead gorgeous and highly personable -- in a knock-down, drag-out match 'neath the shade of another neighbor's Chinese chestnut tree.

Poor kitty eventually limped home, his normally luxuriant long silky thick plush coat matted into oblivion with chestnut hulls we couldn't remove with a brush or comb, and that he couldn't groom out himself owing to the pain their spinyness would cause his mouth.

Our only recourse was to snip out the hulls with scissors (all the way down to bare skin in places), leaving the cat a bit cold as well as with a humiliating punkish hairdo that required a few months to grow back to its former glory and warmth.

Are you "At Flores in the Azores" yet? If you didn't already know, the little harbor up at Ponta Delgada das Flores is where "Sir Richard Grenville lay." Am looking forward to reports of your visit, including foraging for wild watercress and the recipes you try with it!

le moulin said...

Kathie, Yes I am in the Azores and will post soon. It's very nice to be back here with my chums!