Slow Saturdays in Radiator Springs
I'm not entirely sure that I've woken up yet, which feels like a ridiculous thing to write, because it's after 4pm. It doesn't help that I was up until 2am messing around with an old computer.
It feels like I've done nothing all day – and of course that's not true at all. I was up an hour before my other half, doing the various chores. I took our eldest out to buy food for lunch, came back and made everybody something to eat, then washed up afterwards. This evening I raced into town on an emergency mission for baking supplies – which ended up taking me all over town, because the supermarkets are universally rubbish.
Maybe we have a subject for this post after all.
While wandering around town in search of the ingredients on my list, It struck me that I could have found any ready-meal I wanted, from a variety of shops – but as soon as I wanted to buy raw ingredients, it was a different matter entirely. The biggest supermarket in town had no icing sugar, no gluten free flour, and no unsalted butter. The trendy up-market supermarket a few hundred yards away had most of the ingredients I needed, but not all. While searching for my items, I noticed I was the only person in the aisle – the other aisles were a hive of activity.
I'm wondering if the skew in nearby supermarkets towards ready prepared food is a reflection on the local demographic – people who earn a lot of money, where both partners work. These people (that I have a huge chip on my shoulder about) either go out to eat every night, or buy ready meals. The hard working families either drive five miles up the road to a half-decent grocery store, or put up with the little they can find in the nearby stores – stores that are artificially reduced in size because they are all housed in listed buildings.
The entire town I live in is pretty ridiculous really. I'm going to give it away now without even naming it – because a 44 ton heavy goods vehicle drove over it's historic bridge a month ago, essentially turning the entire place into Radiator Springs (go watch Cars to have any clue what I'm talking about). What the NIMBY brigade haven't realised (Not In My Back Yard, if you were wondering), is that they have already destroyed the town. When I first moved here, 15 years ago, there was a huge outcry about an old industrial site being turned into a shopping mall, containing cinemas, cafes, a bowling alley, and so on. It didn't happen. Instead, the entire site was turned into apartments that nobody in the town could afford to rent or buy. It's a common story around here.
Anway. I got most of the ingredients to continue the baking disaster going on in the kitchen, and had to clean up the devestation after dinner. Apparently it will all happen again tomorrow while I'm out, so guess what I'll be doing tomorrow evening... fun times.
At least tomorrow morning I'll get to escape for a while – I'm going clothes shopping in a nearby town with our eldest daughter. I need new work clothes, and she needs underwear. I have agreed that we will go our separate ways when we reach the shops, because she really doesn't want her Dad tagging along behind as she looks through the lingerie sections of the department stores. Of course she'll want me to pay though...
p.s. it isn't lost on me, and it shouldn't be lost on you that this post took over 4 hours to write, in-between everything else. I have no idea how I'm going to devote the required hours to write 50,000 words over the next month...