Friday 1 March 2024

Making pesto at home

 Despite it being a poor summer for our zucchini and parsley (the jury's out on the tomatoes - the crop looks good but is sitting in a green glower at the moment) we have a zonkingly large crop of basil - more than we can eat, so last night we had pasta, peas and baby potatoes with home made pesto.

Pine nuts are almost unobtainable at the moment - I would guess sanctions as a lot are harvested in Siberia - so we did a little detective work as to alternatives.

Most commercial jar pestos use cashews as a substitute, but we thought we'd try something different.

We found a recipe at the University of Utrecht that looked good and used sunflower seeds as a more environmentally friendly substitute.

The only problem was that we were out of sunflower seeds. We used almonds, dry roasted in a pan and fed through the spice grinder as a substitute. Almonds are grown locally but are wasteful of water, something to consider when one lives on the driest inhabited continent on the planet. Walnuts - also grown locally - or macadamia nuts  would have been a better choice, and certainly something to experiment with next time.

Anyway, we followed the bouncing ball and put it together, and it was really good. Certainly we'd do it again, and for making fresh pesto out of season Utrecht suggests carrot greens as a substitute - maybe we'll try that as well, with macadamia nuts ....

Thursday 22 February 2024

The remembrance of things past

 For Proust it was tea and a madeleine that set off a train of memories, but for me it was finding a handful of  protest buttons from my student days, while looking for an old notebook...


Buttons protesting the building of Torness nuclear power plant in the seventies

Scotland already had a substantial investment in nuclear power by the 1970s, and in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis, it was decided to build an additional plant in East Lothian, not particularly far from Edinburgh. 

At the time, almost no one appreciated the implication of the discovery of substantial oil and gas reserves under the North Sea, which changed the energy profile substantially with gas powered plants which were cheaper to build replacing  older oil fired plants and lessening a dependence on coal.

I, like a lot of people, felt we should invest more in energy conservation and move away from what was then essentially a dirty polluting coal powered nineteenth century style economy.

It didn't happen, but we did move to a less polluting economy courtesy of Margaret Thatcher shutting down most of heavy industry and almost by accident, reducing the impact of acid rain on Scandinavia.

Strangely Torness is now the last remaining working nuclear power plant in Scotland and due to close in 2028.

I also used to have a classic 'Nuclear Power No Thanks' button as well as a sticker on the tailgate of my Renault 4, but both the button and photographs from then seem to have disappeared, almost certainly lost in a move.

When I moved to Wales in the 1980s it was the time of the anti US cruise missile protests, and we were more concerned about nuclear war - to be truthful I always had been, and even more so at university where you could see air force Lightnings practising for Armageddon with repeated scrambles and pretend intercepts.


Bilingual Welsh/English peace button

But of course, it was always important to maintain a sense of humour about they way things were


enough said!





Sunday 18 February 2024

Sometimes it takes a computer ...

 I'm a dual Australian/UK citizen, meaning that I can have both a UK and an Australian passport - something that in the days before Brexit made travelling in Europe slightly easier as we could go through the EU citizens queue and not the dreaded and and slow 'All other passports' queue.

It also means that I used to be able to vote in UK elections - except that the UK used to have this sensible rule that if you'd lived outside the UK for more than fifteen years you were ineligible to vote, as you probably no longer had a close connection with the UK.

Well, for reasons best known to themselves, they changed that rule at the beginning of the year, so I decided to reregister to vote - really because I wanted to badger candidates in the upcoming election about why, because I live in Australia, my UK State Pension is frozen, but if I lived in Spain, France, or another EU member state, I would get an annual increment (actually, the situation is even more insane - if you tell the slightly Orwellian sounding UK Department of Work and Pensions you're visiting the the UK or the EU, they pay you the current State Pension rate rather your normal frozen rate for the time you are visiting - go figure).

Anyway, that's my business.

I filled in my online overseas voter registration form and sent it off, and heard nothing more.

In the meantime, I'd found my old UK drivers licence which had my last UK address on it, so I wrote to the electoral registration people to tell them in case they were having difficulty tracing me.

They weren't.

The real reason was

The hold up I am afraid is with our IT department who have to do a update to our system to allow these new regulations from the recent Election Act to go ahead ...

Let's hope they manage the upgrade before an election is called ...

[Update 23 February 2024]

Well, their IT division obviously managed to carry out the upgrade, as I had an email this morning confirming my voter registration and inviting me to apply for a postal vote.

There's a validation process, but hopefully that will be straightforward - and then we have to wait and see if the combination of Royal Mail and Australia Post can actually deliver my ballot paper in a timely manner - it used to be that a letter from the UK to Australia would only take about four or five days, but in these slimmed down days I have my doubts ...

Monday 5 February 2024

Not a great fan of SUVs

 

We used to have an SUV, a fairly modest Subaru Forester.

It was a good car, and if it hadn’t developed an expensive mechanical problem, we would probably still have it.

We took it skiing, put it on the train from Brisbane to Cairns, drove it all the way back from the north of Queensland to Canberra, took it to Kangaroo Island and the outback of South Australia, as well as dashes to the coast from Canberra, where we lived at the time.

However, from the first day we got it and I tried easing it into a parking bay in the National Gallery underground car park, we found it was just that little too big.

This was in the days before reversing cameras and proximity beepers were the norm, and having the base model we had nothing in the way of aids – parking was almost but not quite a contact sport.

Previous to the Forester we’d had an Impreza wagon – in fact I still have it, it’s done over 300,000km, and still runs well – and an old battered Hyundai Excel that you could leave in any car park with impunity as no one would ever want to steal it – despite the fact it drove well and was amazingly comfortable.

Like the Forester we used the Impreza for skiing and bushwalking trips and long drives across the interior of NSW.

Mistakenly we thought a bigger car would aid our active outdoorsy lifestyle, allow us to take more adventurous back country trips, etc, so we cascaded the Hyundai and bought the Forester.

When the Forester died we bought ourselves a second hand Impreza to replace it really because the local Subaru dealer offered us a reasonable deal on the Forester after the problems came back after it was supposedly fixed, and being in the middle of renovating our house we weren’t exactly flush with cash.

Immediately we found it was easier to park, and actually, as more and more of the backroads have been sealed, we found we didn’t really need off road capability, especially as being older, we no longer went skiing. And our weekly fuel bill dropped a bit as well.

We’ve taken it on long road trips to Queensland and the mid North coast of NSW, and somehow we’ve always been able to fit our bags, bushwalking gear and J’s painting kit in without too much difficulty – in short a car the size of a standard family hatch does the job and is a hell of a lot easier to park.

Of course, parking has become more fun over the last few years, especially in underground car parks where monster trucks and SUVs somehow don’t quite fit into standard bays making parking in a way you can comfortably open the doors a challenge on occasions.

However the Forester taught us an important lesson. There are definite advantages to an SUV, but really, unless you are an active outdoors person, you don’t really need one ...

Sunday 4 February 2024

Finally we have zucchini...

 If you've been following along at home, you'll be aware that our vegetable garden has been destroyed by possums this year.

I was forced to build a basic vegetable cage for the zucchini and tomatoes and a couple of days ago we had the first zucchini of the season


the tomatoes are ripening nicely and we should have some by next week, and our one surviving pumpkin plant is flowering but has not yet produced any pumpkins.

I did get a single capsicum early in January but so far no chillies. Eggplants have been a complete non starter and the logan berries and raspberries were smashed by the rain in early December so I ended up leaving them for the birds.

All in all it's not been the best year but I plan to build some more elaborate vegetable cages over winter in the hope of doing better next year ...


Thursday 1 February 2024

Back on my bike

 Way back in December, I blogged that I'd started my summer regime of early morning bike rides.

Well, I blogged too soon.

Bad weather, the end of year holiday season, not to mention my sclerotherapy last month, all meant that my December bike ride was a  one off, or rather it was until this morning.

Up at six thirty, fed the cats and off for my morning circuit up Church Street, down past the Shell station to Mellish Street remembering to avoid the missing cover on a water cock at the bottom of the hill, up to the rail trail, past the old station and then out to Kibbell Lane, before turning back and riding back via Balaclava Road and the Cemetery.

Timing myself on my fitbit, I was four or five minutes slower than normal, and I did feel tireder than I expected, but my leg held up and walking about afterwards I feel fine.

I'm healing...

Saturday 13 January 2024

Sclerotherapy

 You might recall that back in August last year I wrote about how I'd managed to get my digitised medical records from a hospital in England to give to a specialist in Australia.

Well, I don't normally post highly personal material, but I had a couple of nice emails hoping everything turned out well, so here's the second part of the story.

I took my printed copies of my English records along to my vascular specialist here in Victoria, and they were mildly impressed that I'd been able to get them out of the NHS, as it gave them a point of departure.

The good news was that I didn't need surgery (yay!) and that the problem could probably be resolved by sclerotherapy.

Inevitably there was a wait time of a few months, and I ended up having the treatment a few days ago. The procedure only took about forty minutes, I didn't even need a local anaesthetic, and I was able to walk afterwards.

I felt a little odd and wobbly afterwards and I had J drive me home, and I spent the afternoon after my treatment with my leg up lying on the couch.

However, it's amazing how quickly you recover, and I'm now hobbling around with a compression stocking on one leg which, combined with shorts probably makes me look more peculiar than usual.

My leg felt a bit painful for the first day or two, and I must have peed about 93 times the day of the treatment as my body got rid of surplus material.

With the compression stocking on it feels almost normal, but it does tend to ache after an hour or so in the mornings when I don't have it on, but instead am wandering around making tea, feeding cats and having a shower - all the morning activities - lying flat reading the news on my tablet it's fine.

Bottom line, if you have a problem like mine, and your specialist suggests sclerotherapy as an alternative to surgery, go for it.

It's not the most pleasant experience, but it's a lot less invasive than surgery ...