Sadly, there’s no such word as ‘boildy’. Be that as it may, it’s Sunday and therefore it’s ‘boildy’ eggs for breakfast. This also means the great debate about soldiers, whether to have them toasted and buttered or simply cut from bread and butter. We’ve got a Hovis loaf in so we’ve gone for the bread and butter option, so that’s two slices, buttered then put together and chopped into six soldiers.
It’s funny how, thanks to lockdown, so many run-of-the-mill, everyday things suddenly start to reveal their patterns. The eggs only ever come from Barkisland Post Office. They in turn get them from a local farmer. We’ve been buying them from there almost every week for twenty years. They even got rationed at one point at the beginning of the first national lockdown.
They’re free-range eggs and come in extra-large size. The yolks are almost orange they’re that rich. We used to call at the Post Office every Saturday morning to buy them and take a box to Jeanie’s. She in turn would save the empty boxes and these would then go back to the Post Office for recycling. Crikey, that’s more than 23,000 eggs over the past twenty years!
Back to the subject of rationing. During the Second World War eggs were rationed and the allowance was just one egg per adult per week. Unless of course you lived in the country, in which case the local farmer would make sure there was plenty more to go around. I wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest if rationing comes back post Brexit. We’re already well practiced in queuing for food, thanks to Covid, so what’s one more backwards step?
I never did find Mum’s old egg timer. I can still see her using it at the old house in Poynton and remember being fascinated by the tiny grains of sand pouring through the narrow neck in the middle of the glass. Nowadays I use a little gizmo that sits in the boiling water with the eggs and changes colour to show when they’re done. Boildy egg perfection, every time.
And so, breakfast over, it’s time for some heavy lifting. Carol wants the Christmas decorations down from the loft. When I say heavy, I mean seriously heavy man! I really don’t know how tinsel and baubles can possibly weigh so much, or how it’s even possible to have four vintage suitcases full of decorations, however, joking aside, as Dickens would have noted, she certainly “Keeps Christmas well!”
Happy Sunday one and all.
TTFN
Loading contexts...
