Wet and windy

Adding this thought for today… someone sent it to me, and I thought it should be forwarded on to share with everyone, complete with air hugs and pats on the back!  Jerry is in the other room at the moment, although he had a good nap on my lap, and sulked through some phone calls and a bit of internet browsing.  He stuck his nose in the camera and then tried to push the phone out of my hand to interrupt the call… 😞  Such a dictator!!  Don was watching true crime (again) and I told him that I’ll just leave a note for the RCMP if I disappear unexpectedly.  Then he fell asleep in the middle of one, so I switched to cozy mysteries instead… I’m waiting to see his reaction when he realizes that the murder isn’t particularly gory!

I have a support worker today for 2 hours!  Just as I was about to call to ask if anyone was coming today (my regular person doesn’t work on Saturdays with me) she called to set a time.  😅  I’m catching up on my sleep, and I slept through the night last night for a solid 5 hours, then drifted back off again.  I had some of the Chinese food that my sister had brought for me on her last visit (it was happily in the freezer) so I had a pretty decent lunch.  It is a sign that my appetite is returning that I couldn’t find anything on any delivery app that appealed to me, and I have been browsing through one of my favourite cookbooks and getting inspired.

I don’t remember if I mentioned it before, but I’d bought a new cookbook a while back called “A century of British cooking” by Marguerite Patten, who authored many books from the 1930s onwards.  One of my favourite books by her is called “Step by Step Cookery” from the 1960s, and it’s the first “grown up” cookbook I ever used; it belonged to my late aunt Margaret, who indulged and encouraged my love of books.  But reading the new book, I’m fascinated by the changes in diet and taste over the 20th century. Skipping over the years of World War II, when things changed dramatically, food tastes have undergone a huge democratization since Queen Victoria.  At the start of the 1900s (and carrying forward, I imagine from the preceding years) the food eaten by the wealthy and the poor was diametrically opposite… the wealthy would eat French-inspired cuisine, with expensive and luxurious ingredients, while the poor lived on what they grew themselves, or else on the cheapest (and nutritionally worst) foods available.  The meals for the poor who lived in towns and cities often comprised gruel, or “drippings” (the fat from a roast, spread on bread to last as long as possible) and other such stuff that barely kept many from starvation.  Those who lived in the country could and did supplement with whatever they could grow, so they tended to have slightly better diets.  I also learned that train stations would have publicly accessible gardens, where vegetables were grown for the use of people in the community — isn’t that a fantastic idea?  Homes in the village would provide help with maintenance, and anyone who wanted or needed vegetables (or fruit; they’d grow berries, sometimes apples) would help themselves.  Now, there are community gardens in my neighbourhood, but they’re more like allotments where people who live in high rise buildings can grow plants somewhere other than our balconies.  What’s grown in a patch is for the use of the person who planted, not the general community.

I’ve interpreted from that that we’ve gone through some phases in society where we swing from being community-minded to highly individualistic, and there are different areas where we’ll be more concerned with one or the other.  I mean, society went from community gardens to overpriced “organic” supermarkets, while simultaneously improving the health of the vast majority through improved access to nutritional food.  Although we’ve got the conundrum of fresh/frozen fruits and vegetables being priced out of the range of lower income earners, while highly processed, high-salt, low nutritionally dense foods are much cheaper and more accessible.  Somewhere there’s a happy medium where food is available, accessible and affordable so nobody needs to starve.  Perhaps, although this is my fantasy, the celebrities and ‘influencers’ will be silenced with their money-stealing schemes of ‘detoxes’ and ‘fast weight loss’ and so on!

OK, my support worker is finishing making my supper — shrimp scampi and spaghetti— so I’m going to eat something.  Oh, it’s so good to have someone to help today!  Good night.