Personal Blogs

Today a pheasant visited my garden.

I caught a glimpse a day or so back, but today she was there for a while and I was able to get this snap.

Not many people know this but I was for a short time in the Japanese police force. An unusual incident that sticks in my mind is interviewing a martial arts expert about his unruly cat. I had to see a Dan about a mog.

Here you see my Shopska Salad, tonight’s supper.

One of my top favourite starters. (Really there should be some grated cheese on top, but I didn’t have any suitable, and it was fine without.)

I was taught how to make it in Northern Greece, by friends whose parents or grandparents were ethnic Greeks who moved to Greece from Bulgaria in the mass exchange of populations after WW1. I also met the dish in Bulgaria.

From this I assumed it was a) Bulgarian and b) traditional.

Turns out the answer to a) is Yes but as for b) not really; according to Wikipedia it was invented in 1955 by the Bulgarian state tourism association. It’s been a runaway success though. Give it a try. I always put a bit of chilli pepper in mine as well as the other vegetables, but that is probably unusual.

Here’s a Mondegreen I heard last night.

A. My daughter thinks I’m a taxidermist.

B. What like stuffed animals?

A. No, a taxi service.

The sweet miraculous power of a Robin

Turning birdseed into song.

Anon 

You’ve heard of the silver cigarette case that stopped a bullet.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-derbyshire-50302592

In a modern twist on this, a local tradesman fell off a ladder, but luckily his iPhone fell out of his shirt pocket and reached the ground first. He landed with his head on the phone rather than the concrete, and was spared from head injury.

Rather a nice story I think. I haven’t made it up.

I turned up my nose.

Now I’ve turned up my toes.

A besom is what we think of as a witch’s broom, a bundle of twigs lashed to a handle. The word is from the Old English besema which was once the common word for a broom.

However the twigs often came from the shrub called broom and over time the name of the plant was transferred to the long-handled brush, which is now usually called a broom rather than a besom.

Broom is cognate with bramble and comes from a root that originally seems to have meant any kind of thorny bush.