Sunday, 10 March 2024

 

10th March 2024

 

Dear All,

Monday began with a swim as usual and the pool was fairly crowded again but tolerable. Just Vegetating week 8 was “Minor Vegetables – part 1” featuring 22 crops starting with Scorzonera, Salsify and Hamburg Parsley. Kate cooked Salsify, Spinach & Ricotta roll up lasagne and Cucumber crunch salad. One member of the class is a professional illustrator and sent me some of the veg paintings this week:

 


 Red Onion

 


 
Globe Artichoke

 

 

Tomato

  

Squash

 

French History covered the 19th century post Napoleon and was headed “Monarchy, Republic & Empire”. We covered several kings, a few revolutions and Louis Bonaparte becoming Emperor.

 


Liberty Leading the People by Eugene Delacroix

 

We were pleased to welcome Esther & Emma for the day on Wednesday. Only a few jobs and a little cleaning this visit and we had lunch at the Willingham Auction House café.

That morning, we had our boiler serviced and ironically it was working before the service and would not work afterwards. The engineer suggested a new part which was not available locally so we shivered for 36 hours. Next day Kate took a call from the boss man suggesting that we reset the timer and relight the boiler. This she did and it worked – why the first chap could not do this is a mystery but Kate is now setting up as a consultant heating engineer!

Hosannah, we had a Thursday walk with no rain! There was still a little mud and we had to revise the route to avoid the University Rifle Range as they were blasting away again. The walk was partly one we recced two weeks ago starting at Barton and taking in Grantchester but this time we did not go into Coton.

 

 


Sticky Stretch

 

 


Horses Paddling near Grantchester

 


 River Cam at Grantchester

 

 


River Cam closer to Cambridge

 

Biographies this week was a double header Tom Stoppard and Nevil Shute. The Stoppard talk was by a rather vague lady who asked me to prepare a PowerPoint for her. This involved 13 emails 35 pictures of varying quality from poor to awful presented upside down and back to front. 10 proved to be duplicates and no indication of an order.

Our leader did a short presentation on Nevil Shute concentrating on his aviation experience working on balloons and airships,

 

 


Tom Stoppard

 

 


Nevil Shute

 

I managed to plant lettuce and Broad beans in the garden this week as well as cut the grass again. In the greenhouse I sowed some Skirret an ancient root vegetable that was popular in Tudor times.

 


Skirret

One of my CEEM colleagues managed to collect 20 used firemen’s uniforms from Brighton on Friday which is the first step in sending them to Moldova.

I watched Over Res 1 v 0 Histon Res yesterday while the 1st team won 5 v 0 at Cherry Hinton.

Regards

 

Mike & Kate

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