The five year old and I made potato scones today.
I like them better than she does as a food. It was fun to make them together, she kneaded the dough and added the flour and cut the dough around the plate edge (after we rolled the dough flat we set a plate upside down on top to get the shape I wanted) and cut them into triangles. I’d made more dough than I had expected, she got tired after the first batch so I finished the rest. They turned out nice and then I ate too many of them.There’s a bit in a James Kelman novel, I think, about someone getting a burger on a bun with a potato scone (“tattie scawn”) on top of the burger, inside the bun as part of the filling. I’ve been intrigued since I read it. I made a veggie burger tonight and had one - bread, no bun. Tasted great, lovely mix of textures and carbs-on-top-of-carbs satisfaction. Started the day with a full english breakfast as well. Not a day’s eating to make habitual, but nice as an occasional thing.
I like the food and partly I like the associations with place. My time living in the UK was very happy, at least as I remember it, and I consume a lot of UK music and TV, and some fiction (a lot of the fiction I read, and I don’t read much fiction, must remedy that!).
Today I finished a Faroe Islands crime show called Trom, an enjoyable experience, one I was put onto from watching UK crime shows. All of them have in common a relatively remote rural setting and lots of nature shots. It’s entertaining TV - and is part of what set me on a sweater buying binge over the summer, wearing one of those lovely warm wooly guys right now actually - and I think part of the appeal is in the setting, the natural beauty and also the fantasy of rural life in a far away and foreign but comprehensible place. I was joking for a bit with my family this summer that we should move to an island in Scotland and become crofters.
This is all very silly because I don’t want to farm and grew up in a rural area that I was delighted to leave. I’ve lived my adult life all in cities and I wouldn’t trade that, don’t regret it. I think the rural far away fantasy appeals right now because of the pandemic and because I imagine escaping my job, or at least the parts that feel like a hassle.
I think I wrote about this yesterday - I climbed upside down on the monkeybars yesterday. I was very tired and a little sore from that today. That’s very satisfying, good reason to keep it up and to be sure to keep the pace sustainable.
