Last Remnants of Summer

I’ve been out of the country again this week.

Here in Poland the summer has definitely finished and the evenings have started to slowly draw in. During the day it is still relatively hot and sunny, but in the evenings the arrival of people wearing coats has signalled the slow process of descent into Autumn.

Travelling hasn’t got any better yet and the planes are still packed on every flight I take. But now that the kids are back at school, the overall noise levels have died down and the number of Senior Citizen passengers has significantly increased.

It is interesting to travel as much as I do and see how the seasons vary things. I often use Easyjet and Ryan Air to reach my destination, both of whom offer a priority service for passengers who pay a bit more to avoid queues and board first.

In the summer, this puts me at the front of the queue and allows me to avoid the families with several kids. But now that the planes are full of Senior Citizens without kids, most people pay the priority boarding charge and therefore the priority queue can actually be longer than the other queue. The scrap to get onto the bus or the rush to board the stairs can become quite interesting to watch as people try to get the extra value they have paid for priority treatment, when in reality they are just part of a different crush.

Often the most Senior Citizens don’t appear to understand that they have paid for the priority queue but so has everyone else and therefore march right to the front assuming something must be wrong with the system as there are lots of passengers in the way. This has a strange effect on the people at the front of the queue who can often be quite rude. I imagine this is because they believe the Senior Citizens can’t hear them.

People become quite abusive. The worst I’ve heard was – “Are you blind or just stupid?”, said by a business man to an elderly lady standing just a couple of feet in front of him, who had joined the Speedy Boarding queue at the front. Thankfully for her, I think she was pretty hard of hearing or very good at pretending as she gave him a fabulous smile as she ran her cabin case over his feet.

Sunflowers

Last Saturday was a lovely day, and I decided to take the last opportunity this year to use our BBQ. I bought some good steaks, a few lamb chops and some large-ish king prawns.

Having spent all day in the garden, I had built up and appetite and set expectations of grandeur with my better half. She is not a big fan of BBQs but is prepared to bear with me when I try to cook her a BBQ dinner.

I hadn’t used the BBQ for several months and therefore it took some time to set it all up and clean the meat rack. I then set about lighting the coals to create some heat.

Firstly, I built the usual pyramid of coals from a new bag and filled in the gaps with fire-lighters.  A quick match and it was all alight. 20 mins later I came back to find the fire had gone out. All the fire-lighters had burned but the coals were still black and cold.  

I went into the house and this time came out with more coals and a bottle of fire lighter fuel. I squirted a load of fuel onto the coals and lit them again.

Once again 20 mins later, I checked the fire and all the fuel had burned but no coals were alight.

I went into the house and grabbed a pile of wood and a large gas weed burner. I put the wood into the coals and blasted it with the gas burner. I soon had a fire raging in the BBQ. Surely this would work!

20 mins later, I looked in. A couple of coals were smouldering but no real heat. In desperation I put a couple of prawn kebabs over the two coals that were warm. Two prawns on each kebab were vaguely cooked after 15 mins and so I had to resort to putting the rest of them under the grill.

Not to be defeated I put the succulent lamb chops on the BBQ. “We will get to that later”, I thought.

I made the rest of the dinner in the kitchen, grilled the steaks and took out a bottle of red wine to drown my sorrows. It was now 2 hours later and we hadn’t really eaten anything of consequence. We tucked in to the varied delights of un-BBQed food.

As we finished eating, some 2 and ½ hours after starting, I looked at the lamb that I had left under the cover. As I lifted the lid, the smell of beautiful BBQed lamb filled my nostrils and the sight of a perfect set of coals put a smile on my face. It had only taken all night to catch and we were both now mostly full, after already eating well.

But the taste of BBQed lamb is quite superb, and it is surprising what you can eat when it smells that good. So we managed to consume the lot – with some support from our hairy friends who have a particular fancy for lamb! They sneak around surreptitiously, trying to be nonchalant but secretly longing for a nice strip of lamb.

Buoyed by the success with the lamb, I put whole corn cobs in their husks on the BBQ, thinking they would cook perfectly overnight. The next morning, I extracted two new charcoals from atop the meat rack and threw them into the bin. I could have saved my self the time shopping and cooking the cobs and just put a couple of pound coins in the bin on Saturday morning.

Does anyone want a BBQ?  - Only one careful owner.

Me and My Mate

There are an incredible number of butterflies around at the moment. We usually get plenty of Red Admirals for a few weeks in summer, but because it has been so dry for so long we have seen many, many, more butterflies of all varieties than normal.

Last year we planted four purple verbena plants, which I have pictured on this blog recently. These have now swarmed around the garden and filled many spaces that previously had no plants in. The butterflies really love verbenas and spend hours and hours collecting nectar from it.

The picture below features three butterflies in one photo. Not only are these butterflies fairly rare, but three in picture is most unusual.

There is something quite special about watching the butterflies collecting. It brings back childhood memories of a time when butterflies were everywhere when the grass on the common wasn’t cut regularly. These days most people cut their grass and manicure their garden so butterflies seem to struggle to survive. It just goes to show the right plant in the right conditions will attract the right visitors.

Our Resident Badger

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that we were having to kill off a nest of hornets that had made their home in the roof above our porch.

The Zap man seemed to have got rid of them, until last weekend when I was alerted to their reappearance.

Each evening at about 9pm the light comes on in the front garden. Usually this is triggered by our cats.  Sometimes it signifies the appearance of our resident badger or three, digging around in the front lawn. This time it was indeed the badger, see the picture below.

He was intent on digging up the garden and rather than frighten him away I thought I would get a picture or two. As I stood in the front porch taking pictures through the door, I became aware of something knocking on the outside of the door. Intrigued I watched for a few seconds before I saw two huge hornets flying repeatedly into the door trying to get in.

With each thump against the glass they got more and more frenzied. As the frenzy increased their noise increased. By now they sounded like two drones flying into the window. It felt like they were desperate to get their own back on behalf of the nest. I am sure they were just being friendly!

Then I realised what they were really after was the pile of apples that we have been storing in the porch out of the sun. The smell of the apples was attracting them from far and wide. As I stood in the safety of the glass looking out at the badger on the lawn I imagined the hornets flying back to their next for reinforcements. I went to bed.

Needless to say, I cooked all the stored apples the next day to get rid of the attractive smell.

Summer Flair

The other evening having come home from work, I decided to sit on the garden bench and have a drink before dinner. I was sitting chatting to my better half when I heard an alarm sound coming from the house.

I wondered around the outside of the house listening to where it could be coming from. At first, it sounded like it was potentially coming from the roof.  “But we don’t have an alarm in the roof”, I thought.

As I continued to investigate, it now sounded like it was coming from the garden. But the noise wasn’t continuous, it just peeped a few times and then stopped.

“How can there be an electrical alarm in the garden?”

I hunted further. Still no luck in finding the cause, I strayed around the back of the house to the back kitchen door. I listened intently and finally the noise came again. It was coming from the rubbish bag on the back steps that my better half had left there.

I opened the bag and pawed through the very smelly collection of leftovers and tissues. There it was. She had thrown away an old smoke alarm but left the battery in it. It was now running low and letting us know. Thank god it was there. If it had been hidden in the bin it could have driven us mad for a week or more.

Easing the battery out, the appliance tried one last time to raise the alarm and then died abruptly.

I’ve been with some clients this week and a few consultants that are helping us deliver a project. These consultants are good fun and the song below reminds me of their endeavour.

I hope you like this song too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MhOZt5-Jl8

 Have a great weekend!

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