… was just as good as last Friday’s.
And for the same reason too. I’d been for a walk down into the supermarket in town and they had more of the fresh broccoli on special offer.
So once again I chose the head with the thickest stalk and made a broccoli stalk soup.
Not that it did me much good though because we had something of s struggle throughout the day
Once again, I wasn’t up before the alarm went off. Its raucous rattle awoke me at 07:00 while I was deep in the arms of Morpheus and it was a struggle to leave my stinking pit.
But leave it I did, and before the second alarm too.
After the medication and checking the mails and messages I carried on with Canada 2017.
At the moment I’m on Day Three – happily wandering around my favourite building in Montreal, the abandoned Gare Viger GARE VIGER of the Canadian Pacific Railway which I think is the most beautiful building in the city.
It was a lovely day out and I certainly put the miles on Montreal’s public transport system and then a wander around the docks on my way to my hotel for an evening meal and bed.
But by the looks of things, during my time in Montréal I didn’t go to my favourite Indian café out at the Cote Vertu. I really must be slipping.
So with Day Three not yet finished – out of a total of 60 that I spent in North America that year, you can see that this is going to be a very loooooooooooong project.
But there is one thing, and that is that I’m beginning to understand why I wasn’t in a rush to finish things off once I became ill. And that’s because right now I’m having huge pangs of nostalgia and I can’t wait to be on a plane again for Montreal
However, although I know that being in Montreal on crutches is totally impractical, it doesn’t make much of a difference.
There was a break in the proceedings for my trip into town this morning. And walking down the hill I fell in with one of my neighbours and we had a good chinwag for quite some considerable time.
However, a little further on my right leg gave way again. Luckily I was leaning on a crutch at the time otherwise I would have ended up in an undignified heap, and I’ve ended up in more than a few of those in the old days with some of the cars that I owned.
At the Carrefour I bought the broccoli, some mushrooms, some more peppers for freezing (making sure that they weren’t too big for the air fryer) some peaches that were on special offer and another crusty bit of bread. I’ve I’m going to have broccoli stalk soup, I’m going to have it in unashamed luxury.
The walk back up the hill onto my rock from town finished me off as it usually does, but I blanched the broccoli and set it to drain while I made the soup.
Half an onion cut into small pieces and fried on a very hot heat with cumin and coriander, and then garlic, diced broccoli and a couple of diced small potatoes and left to simmer in the water in which I had blanched the broccoli.
After 20 minutes I went and whizzed it up, realising as I type these notes that I had forgotten to add a stock cube. Nevertheless, it was extremely nice with my crusty bread.
There was some stuff on the dictaphone from the night too. I’d been out somewhere in Caliburn. There was a bad tyre on him. I had some wheels in the back of the van so I bought a new tyre and had it fitted on the wheel. I drove to where I was going and then took out my tools to change the wheel. Everyone looked at my enormous power bar. You could see that they were impressed and about to say something about it but I changed the tyre anyway. Then I noticed that Caliburn’s Controle technique was about to expire. I phoned the garage but they said that there was nothing at all that they could do for 6 weeks. I thought “well, I’ll have to take that, won’t I? And trust to luck for a few weeks driving around without one. Then he said that he could fit it in on Saturday morning. However I wasn’t going to be here on Saturday morning. I’d still be in Leuven. I wasn’t sure at all what I could do. I didn’t want to miss the opportunity having made a fuss, otherwise I’d have to wait 6 weeks and it wouldn’t show me in any good light having made such a fuss and then turning down the appointment
Later on I was at a football match and we were in the dying seconds of the game. The ball went out for a throw-in. The team wanted to restart it really quickly. A few players including their goalkeeper ran to take it. Someone else from the other team took the throw-in and threw it really quickly while the goalkeeper was out of position so one of the other players tried to stop him advancing. He threw a punch. There was a huge melee after that. The referee had to pull everyone apart and had to find a megaphone to announce to the crowd what had happened, what he’d seen and what he would do.
Finally, a plane had gone down in the sea. While they reached the plane and were able to rescue it they couldn’t find any of the people who had been in it when it had hit the water. I don’t know where it went after that
So no Harry Potter, no family, no cats and no Castor, TOTGA or Zero.
What there was though was that I crashed out for some of the afternoon. It seems that walking down into town and back again is too much for me in my state of health.
But is it going to stop me? It reminds me of that sticker that I saw on the back of an old Renault a few years ago – “Nothing is going to stop me! Not even my brakes!”
Tea was the last of those small breaded quornburgers that had been in the freezer since the Dawn of Time. They went down well with another vegan salad and the remaining small potatoes cubed and fried in the air fryer.
Tomorrow I’ll be shopping and there’s quite a list of things that are running low again. I had to use my cherry tomatoes on the salad this evening and the cucumber had gone the Way of the West.
And then there’s some radio work to be done of course. I have to push on with that of course.
No football though. There’s a match here but I haven’t been at all this season to watch any game, never mind one in the French Fourth Division at the Stade Louis Dior. I’m having to content myself with internet highlights. I watched Partick Thistle v Ross County just now.
Nnot because I really wanted to but, as the old saying goes, “it’s the only game in town right now”.