I don’t really need to write much here; just enough to make sure that there is something to receive when I go out and try to logon from outside.
And bang, there it is. I couldn’t be happier. Not least because I feel I have dodged several bullets.
The good news is that my new passport arrived on Monday (first in November, but worth a mention). The bad is that we’re looking at another lockdown, albeit slightly lighter, and it seems highly unlikely that I’ll need a new passport before 2021 at the earliest. But we did manage a couple of days away in Florence, soaking up some culture to last through the dark days ahead. Marketing the podcast — at least as far as buying €30 of advertising on FB goes — was a complete bust. Not one new listener that I could detect. But more people do seem to be downloading the transcripts, so that’s surely a better use of the money.
You might think, what with my interest in food and living in Italy, that I would have devoured this book when it first came out, but I didn’t, and I don’t know why. It is so glorious, in so many respects. Most importantly, it gives the lie to the idea that Italian food is a food of poverty or someho...
What kind of stupidity is “8 cups of grapes”? Squished in? Lattice packed? How big is each grape?
This was the lunacy that faced me on Saturday as I started to research homemade grape jelly. I moved rapidly along from that one, aside from lingering doubts about why it included one teaspoon of butter, and whether I should do the same. Italian recipes, for jam, not jelly, were not much more helpful, with amount of sugar ranging from 600 gm to 240 gm per kg of grapes.
Exercise really is a funny thing. I’ve tried various forms over the years, some of them more fun and longer lasting than others. For a while I was very taken with the Canadian Air Force’s 5BX plan. It seemed to have just the right amount of fiddliness to appeal to my inner nerd. That fell away, and then, just over a year ago I started doing the 7-minute stuff, high-intensity interval training. Slowly, slowly, even at my advanced age, it became easier to get through one cycle. Then two. Then the full workout, three cycles in total.
