1672 Seeing what is there

I am enjoying being seventy more than I was being sixty. This is to do more with the respective circumstances of my life than the physical being.

The celebratory mood continued over the weekend with some good meals although overall I am sticking to the new regime of mere exercise and nutritional and healthy food. I resisted a cooked grill or fried breakfast at Morrison’s before my car journey was fully underway, having called at the garage for petrol and a necessary tyre pressure check, and settled for a low fat and calorie sandwich and home made coffee sitting in the car in the brilliant early morning sunshine somewhere in the North Yorkshire countryside. It was a great day to be alive. I appreciate it is always a great day to be.

I was able to arrive at my destination in time for a country pub lunch but this was a different experience from the previous, involving a long wait and misunderstanding about the orders. Everyone was out and about because of the unusually warm and sunny Spring weather, more like an ideal summer’s day in midsummer so they were unusually busy. My dish was a make up from the menu with two giant mushrooms on a bed of spinach with a sauce which I forgot to note its composition but which involved garlic and also a grilled tomato. It should have been in a hamburger type bun with chips, but I abandoned the bread and changed salad for the chips. It was expensive for what it was, but enjoyable and the ambience was good, and afterwards there was an exceptionally pleasant walk by a river with geese flying when disturbed by the occasional passing boat or because they wanted to join others in a nearby field. Some of the riverside properties were worth a few bob as they say. Later there was time before a show for a pasta salad and an apple turnover. It was another glorious all day and above average warm for the time of the year and a still wind. Oh for a summer like this.

I was staying at a Travel Lodge in a new location and the following morning I woke early to find the sun streaming in from a gap in the curtaining and another good day to mark the spring although there was a lot of cloud with the hint of rain as evening approached. My attention at ten minuets past seven was immediately focussed on the Tesco direct across the car park where the first customers were entering and leaving. Later I went on an explore to find it well stocked and although on the edge of town the Sunday trading laws were presumably by passed because it was acting like a motorway or garage forecourt, except that there was no garage and it was exceptionally well stocked although in addition to a newsagents news agents it was licensed to sell alcohol as well as a bakery, grocers, butchers, and the rest from 7am until 11pm seven days a week. Later I had cause to visit the main Tesco so a comparison of prices confirmed that there was premium for the special hours of service but worth paying, unlike the second Travel Lodge stay where there was a machine selling cold drinks with bottled water £1.20 compared with 45 pence at the supermarket.

On my previous visit I explained the difficulty of find my way into the Travel Lodge site from the road bridge across the motorway into adjacent village and had to travel up the motorway to the next turning into a village by a garage and which enabled to return on the right side of the road into the service area which first comprises a little chef eaterie, then the set back Travel Lodge and parking and then a petrol and diesel supplying garage before the slip road back onto the motorway. Usually as one exits the mind is concentrating on the traffic flow and judging the speed at exiting to quickly fit into the traffic stream. In this instance I suddenly saw the no entry sign fixed on either side of an open gate post in front me and a narrow road running parallel to the motorway the to other side of the hard shoulder for the fifty yards before the turn into village which is necessary to get to the road bridge to the other side. The entrance to this road is at sharp at the entrance to the village but unmarked and appears to be an exit from the farmhouse. It is obvious why it has been designed so and is not marked because it would be tempting to be used by lorries and other vehicles calling at the garage to get across the motorway without first joining in the traffic flow and then entering the village causing an accident as the roadway is only wide enough for one private car in one direction. Those using the route to enter the Travel Lodge site have to take great care because they will meet vehicle leaving the garage with their minds set on joining the motorway traffic flow. As I will talk about later it is all about the nature of perception and we sometimes do not see what is there because we are not prepared, attuned, focussed, although we can also see what is not there is we are similarly attuned, focussed and prepared.

I had brought my own salad box for the trip and on Sunday enjoyed half with a large piece of smoked mackerel, also half a vacuum pack, followed by a fruit salad of melon with grapes. Later there were two lamb chops and mixed vegetables and a sorbet with more fruit salad. My serious nutritional change does not commence until the beginning of April so breakfast on Sunday and again Monday comprised a large chocolate croissant. The rest of the made up boxed salad with the rest of smoked mackerel was enjoyed for lunch and this evening I made a 250 gram stir fry from half a 500 box of crunchy vegetables with bean sprouts and sweet peppers to with I added some Thai spices and half a portion of a stir fry sauce which I eat alongside a pork chop. At £1 for the box this is an excellent buy a new line for Morrison’s which will I look out for again on visits to Sunderland and Empire Cinema on Tuesday when there is the reduce priced every seat day, on Tuesdays. Morrison’s have also introduced two new lines which I have not noticed before. The first is a cuppa soup under the brand Eat Smart, now there is a name, and the second is a range of over/microwave ready meals 400 grams for £1 each with no more than 3% fat content which I assume is good and where the chicken Tikka dish has only 1% and even better. These are also Eat Smart. I also obtained the 500 gram carton of stir crunchy vegetables, bean shoots and peppers previously mentioned. They are obviously joining in the sell chickens cheaply contest with Azda and Tesco offering two medium size birds for £6 which I also acquired to freeze and eat in April along with a pack of five large pork chops at less than £1 each. There is a change in the price differential of meats with chicken extraordinarily cheap and lamb extraordinarily expensive and pork catching up beef, or so it seems to me.

The journey home on Monday was not enjoyable as there was a sharp cold and gale force blustery wind which has enveloped these islands together with showers including one brief torrential downpour as I was travelling through Yorkshire. Having said that, there were no traffic hold ups and the traffic was sensible with one exception when a young man driving an expensive car suddenly appeared on my tail in a two lane highway as I was overtaking a lorry at 70mph and then disappeared after I quickly moved back over when past the lorry, suggesting he was travelling at 100 mph or more. There was no good news re the National and Euro Lotteries while I was away so no new fancy transport for me. The National Lottery have a new web site which is awful and where I could not print out information.

There was also gloom on the regional radio as all three teams lost over the weekend and the Boro and Newcastle are in the bottom three and Sunderland are just 3 points clear of them. It is going to be a nail biting end to the season with goal differences and last game panics all round. Manchester United are also having the wobbles losing for the second time. Alas this does not omen well for their visit to Sunderland which I have elected to attend at Easter.

I arrived at my over night stay in time to see the first of the new Lewis Oxford police detective series (who do you think you are Kevin Whatley) and this story had an amusing twist as the main murder victim was an academic authority and author fantasy novels on C S Lewis and the Inklings which included Tolkien and his Lord of the Rings. One of the problems as the series progresses following on Morse is rather like John Nettles and Midsummer murders, everybody seems to killings everybody within a small area, everyone has lots of unspeakable skeletons and no one has an ordinary routine and boring life. The programme was very enjoyable and I did not work out who had done it until just before everyone else was told. One of the suspects, James Fox, is only a couple of months younger than me he has a stage, acting, film and TV career going back to 1950 while still at school. I am looking forward to having a few hours in the city this year during the summer.

I was given a book several months ago called Don’t Sleep, there are Snakes by Daniel Everett and although I have only managed 25 of its 383 pages, (a previous BBC Book of the week published by Profile books) I immediately understood why it had been chosen. Daniel is a Christian Missionary and Linguist academic who commenced to live with his wife and three children with an isolated and “primitive tribe in Brazilian rain forest. The adventure commenced thirty years ago. I hope he will say more about his amazing wife and mother who was the child of missionaries and lived as child in the jungle with her parents and local inhabitants. Without this background it would be surprising if any woman would migrate their young family from civilization for six months a year into such dangerous and potential hostile environment. On an early night he found a giant tarantula had hoped onto his lap which he pushed off and clubbed to the surprise of the locally who explained they did not kill such creatures because they eat the cockroaches.

“The primitive” tribe, I have put in the parenthesis because I suspect they will be found not to be primitive in the sense of human qualities, community spirit and capacity to live together peacefully, but are just markedly different. The Pirahas, there is a inflexion over the second a, have a language which is not derived from any other and remains unaffected by the languages of those who have made contact. The language is said to have only three vowels a, i and o and eight consonants p, t, h, s, b and g, the glottal stop and k so words almost sounding similar have different meeting. It is about the tone and accent. The other difference is that of perception. In the prologue the author describes a situation where all the Pirahas became excited with an appearance on the beach of something which the author can not see and which confirms my understanding that if we believe something strongly enough a reality perception can occur which can be shared unlike the perception of dreams and which does not rely on conjuring tricks or the use of magic .

The book title is taken from the explanation provided by the Pirahas why they sleep as little as possible, because there are real dangers and they need to be on the constant alert and because sleeping is wasteful time to them. I look forward to the rest of the book and will make the time.

I wondered what the Pirahas would have made of the civilized young people flooding the centre of a town in their special tribal costumes as they made way at ten pm Saturday to the night spots. Perhaps they would find them so alien they would not see them.