I'm Not Convinced

As a general rule most of the bon mots one sees on Facebook and in shop windows, indeed just about everywhere these days, are truisms or thoughts we all have or things we all know expressed in one way or another.  In fact there are so many appearing everywhere now that I suspect we take very little notice of them.  So when we were in Byers Road and passed the Oxfam Bookshop I hardly gave the writing on the blackboard in the window a second glance.  When I did, however, I suddenly thought that if that was a universal truth then it certainly didn't apply to me.

Frankly the more I get into life the less sense it makes: on just about any level.

Ullapool

is a busy little place.  It's the town on the Scottish mainland from where the ferry for Lewis departs.  It's an important tourist town but, in addition to the ferry, there is an inshore fishing fleet and lots of leisure boats. I was in the town for an evening recently when I got the midnight ferry (which left at 2am) and managed a few photos.  The last photo is looking back up Loch Broom into the Highlands towards the capital of the Highlands: Inverness 60 miles away.

Fat = Flavour!

At lunchtime I had a cheese salad.  Salad at lunchtime is not unusual for me.  Cheese at any time is quite the norm.  I love cheese of all sorts.  My salad cheese though is usually a seriously strong cheddar.  Now I know that many of my friends are very sniffy about British cheese and Cheddar in particular.  Well I'm not - so long as it is really tasty and some of the bog standard supermarket Cheddars are just that: including Pilgrims' choice Seriously Strong which I occasionally buy.  So today when I tasted my cheese I was very surprised to find that it had virtually no flavour that my palate could discern.  Then I looked at the packet and remembered that I'd bought it because its description was 'Wonderfully Strong and Punchy Extra Mature' but with 30% less fat.  And therein lies the problem.  As any chef will tell you, two of the most important flavour enhancers are fat and salt.  So 30% less fat meant 100% less taste as far as I was concerned.  I won't be buying that again.

Thankful Thursday: Dreams....Again

I've blogged quite a few times on the subject of dreams.  I've 'suffered' from the problem for as many years as I can remember although sometimes I seem to go for periods without any.  I  know that I posted in 2008 that I had got to the stage of classifying my night escapades as dreams (ok, perhaps even pleasant but I'd rather just sleep), night ponies (I'd rather have had a dream and, in any case I don't usually remember them), night mares (not very pleasant at all but usually forgotten within a day or so) and, worst of all, night stallions (which cause me to wake in a fearful sweat, which often remain with me for weeks and which come back again and again both when I'm asleep and awake).

Anyway I've been having a lot of dreams and mild night ponies recently and I woke up this morning to one bordering on being a night mare and the first thing I said to myself was just how thankful I was that it wasn't a full-blown nightmare.  Then I realised that it was Thursday and my Thankful Thursday post was already written for me.

I'm very thankful for a relatively 'quiet' period in my dreaming life.