Noel Harrison, MyT Blogging, Circles and Spirals

This is a song that has been going round my head over the last few days. It was strange to look it up on YouTube and see Noel Harrison who I remember as being a heart throb of my older cousins. Innocent times. Mind, it was, I think, part of the soundtrack of the original Thomas Crowne Affair with Steve McQueen and Fay Dunaway, a film that did much to make up for the lack of adequate sex education at school. The film was a lesson in attraction, desire and seduction; a world away from the diagrams of rabbits we had to copy and the Latin names for body parts that seemed a world away from our pre-pubescent selves.

It’s probably a sign of age that the song has not been summoned to memory because of a new or prospective lover, but for reasons of cuisine and technology.

Long, long ago, I had my first blog on My.Telegraph. Some of the people I follow here I first met there. OK, the Torygraph didn’t exactly reflect my political views despite its cracking crosswords, and that should have sounded big warning bells, but I was so pleased to find a blogging site where I could see how you interacted with other bloggers and it didn’t feel like a windowless white room, that that seemed a minor concern. I shan’t go into all the drama, the Sturm and Drang of MyT; at times it was exhilarating, at times it was fun and the best place to be; but there were a lot of very angry people being angry and the site was taken down and our posts transferred to a new site hosted by WordPress. But it was all a bit of a mess, and then was when several of us cut loose and like little fledglings tried to navigate our way around WP. I still have a link to my old blog on my blogroll, but I realised quite quickly that pictures had gone missing, and it wasn’t very satisfactory.

Anyway. It was only rarely that I returned, though I did reblog some early posts on this site. The other week, I had an email saying that MyT was being taken down again. I gather from the grapevine, aka Twitter, that some of the usual suspects who loved to troll and hurl abuse had made continuing the site untenable. Writing that, I am rather wishing I had been there recently to read some of the Trump and Brexit posts. Basically it was a much smaller pond that WP, and some of the pond’s habitants were aspiring crocodiles.

I duly exported my blog to this one. It was supposed to arrive complete with the pics (well, obviously a problem there) tags and all the other bells and whistles. It didn’t. Between working I have exchanging emails with WP, only to get a message today saying they couldn’t help and I needed to conatct My Telegraph, whose contact page seems to have been taken down.

OK. It’s only a blog. But those early posts of mine were when I was adapting to Mother’s dementia, learning about having das Boot, and Cat was accompanying me on both these journeys, so this was a pretty important time of my life, and the support of other bloggers, who seemed to put their anger aside, was invaluable.

I’ll get over it. But if you look back through my archive and find posts with titles and no content, no tags and comments, you’ll know why.

Back to Noel Harrison.

Round,
Like a circle in a spiral
Like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning
On an ever-spinning reel

Had he been writing the song today, maybe he would have include a reference to a spiraliser. I waxed so eloquent about my little spiraliser that Octavia took pictures of me. This post is already too long, so I my spiraliser odyssey will wait for another day. And maybe it will contain pictures, because, oh those lovely little ringlets of carrot! If anyone can explain why spiralised courgette tastes so good, please spill!

So, early last week, armed with a beetroot, I made some spirals and popped them in the fridge. A couple of days later, time was short and I had work to crack on with. Hmm. Button mushrooms quartered and cooked in olive oil; frozen spinach zapped in the microwave and added to the spinach; spiralised beetroot similarly zapped; all mixed together, topped with black pepper and parmesan; result – heaven.

This was the meal I was describing to Octavia. I promised to make it for one of our shared meals. Tonight, I tried it again, in case my tastebuds had been having a funny moment, and it was just as good if not better. I called Octavia, catching her during the break in orchestra practice. Obviously my waxing was again persuasive and lyrical as our conversation then turned to how we could achieve the shared meal with our various commitments and amusements this week.

We have settled on a very early supper on Wednesday.

I hope she likes it.

Watch this space.

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