I love reading other blogs on Macmillan. They are less frenetic than the various groups where comments and a form of conversation is the norm. It feels like we have the right to pontificate as well as share our journey on a different level.
I said au revoir (but not good-bye, please note) to both the lung cancer and bereaved spouse groups, but that has not stopped me from popping in from time to time to have my say. I feel less pressure to have to comment as well in this environment. Sometimes I have a flurry of excitement and activity when I see others' blogs and other days there has been comment enough or anything I could say would be superfluous. Somehow, we have adopted a different way of thinking and writing to create our blogs, neither expecting nor demanding a response. A quiet sigh from our reader or an unseen rolling of the eyes is satisfaction enough.
Today I find myself needing to respond to a fellow blogger, Margaret853, in the form of my own blog since, and this is how I view the response, I have taken up something from her initial blog and am running with it in a different direction.
It all began when I read "I’m managing to sip drinks and eat things like ice cream, yogurt and alphabetti spaghetti, but I’m a long way off eating a proper meal." My immediate response, and Laing would have smirked along with me, we were a pair of puerile pests, was "I hope you aren't trying to make up rude words as you eat the alphabetti spaghetti."
This enforced soft food diet of Margaret853 as well as an earlier remark about her tonsillectomy took me back to to my tonsillectomy eons ago, which meant I had to eat, among other things, loads of ice cream in winter. That was fantastic. To be spoiled rotten as a child. Nowadays, I would be looking for something different instead of Walls from the freezer. I never got round this year to making an interesting vegan coconut ice cream I found while looking for non dairy alternatives. As ever with American recipes there seems to be just a bit too much sweetness in it for my taste. I'm sure I found a better one than this, but as I never book marked it ...
I always prefer the list of ingredients to be shorter than the instructions in a recipe, I put that down to the edition of Mrs. Beeton my mother gave me when Laing and I moved into the house. I like my food to be simple. Laing and I ate out a lot in the 80s when we weren't getting drunk (boy, could we put it away in those days!) and we saw and tasted food fads come and go. One of the best meals I've had in recent times in a restaurant was a cassoulet I could hardly finish. It wasn't large, but comes under the heading of hearty. It also tasted peasanty, like some very delicious meals I've had in France.
Nowadays, my diet tends more to Italy, though I need to find less fattening alternatives to pasta to bulk up the meal, and again, vegan recipes come to the fore, especially "raw" vegan. Courgettes, or I should say zucchini stand in for pasta. With different gadgets you can make either ribbons or ropes. I've not yet found a way to make a penne replacement! The Gods knew what they are doing when they gave us fruit and veg.
So from reading about the ups and downs Margaret853 is experiencing, and feeling any comment I would make would be merely plain old fashioned unnecessary shoving in of one's oar, to planting a seed of an idea of my own was a natural progression. How and why and where all the thoughts come together to create such a blog is part and parcel of what make us who we are. Words spark off thoughts in our brains which go back to our life experiences which then after some rapid computing produced the above.
So from the nature of blogging, to food, to the concept of what is thought is a simple, logical progression, and all of that is reminding me that my stomach is empty as I have been sitting at the ruddy computer since I woke up and I need to feed myself to break my fast. And the joy of words and their origin is another fascinating concept that I or another may pick up and run with at another time in a different blog. I am sure it was all the listening in my formative years to "My Word" that is the root of my interest. There's another thought for a topic, in the old days the Home Service, where clever, not clever-dick quiz shows in the early evening, provided education, information and education in a simple half hour format. Where did the BBC go wrong?
I am starving, so forgive me if I run off now!
