Thursday 20 November 2025: Snow!

I’ve got out of the habit of writing today’s blog post during the previous day and scheduling it to post at 8am. I suppose the obvious reason for this is because my entire routine has been turned on its head in recent weeks. I’m getting there, though. I’m planning interruptions and shorter bursts of work time, and while the editing job is dragging on a bit, I’m still getting stuff done in between that perhaps I might not have got around to yet.

After a disturbed night, I struggled to get out of bed. The poet had gone off early again, this time up north, where he’d driven through several snow showers and past fields that were white over with snow. We knew the snow was coming. They’d been forecasting it for about a week. But as usual, where we live was in a narrow corridor that wasn’t likely to get very much.

We did have some in the very early hours, but that was almost gone by the time I got up. Other places around the country reported several inches, and where the poet was the roads were just 2 tracks made by the wheels of cars and lorries. I was a bit disappointed, but I did enjoy the pictures other people were sharing.

I fed the birds, played with the dogs, and had a bit of a tidy up as I was expecting company at around midday. The dogs carried on playing indoors and I was able to share a few short videos of them together. It’s so nice when they play. At first the spaniel got a bit boisterous. He wasn’t rough on purpose, he just didn’t know his own size and strength. He does now, though, and the puppy knows when the spaniel’s had enough.

Once at my desk, I updated my food allergies diary and wrote and published yesterday’s blog post before settling down to the editing.

My visitors stayed for an hour and a half. It was nice to see them, and I did know they were coming. Plus one of them took the dogs out to play for a while, so that helped as well. It was a 90-minute chunk out of my working day, but I knew about it so that was fine. After they went I had something to eat and then it was back to the editing.

There’s a lot of noise at the moment about ultra processed food, with scientists predicting a ‘seismic’ threat to people’s health around the world. They’re saying that UPF is causing major harm to every organ in the human body. And there are now hundreds of these independent reports. 

I’d just like to point out that I was banging on about ultra processed foods more than a year ago, probably 2 to 3 years ago. Or more! We’ve certainly cut down a lot on lots of processed foods and we (aka the poet!) cook a lot of our meals from scratch. We get pieces of meat from the butcher, sausages made by the butcher, mince that’s been made from whole steaks by the butcher. And I’m very conscious of food miles in particular.

Now it’s suddenly on trend, people are acting as though it’s only just been discovered and they’re leading the way in educating everyone else. I was, however, surprised to see that even ice cream is made with ingredients that make it travel far better than real ice cream has any right to travel. The cheap stuff you get in a supermarket, that some people can’t even afford these days either, is made of a foam that withstands fluctuating temperatures.

This kind of thing should be made illegal, and good, wholesome, healthy, natural food should be much more affordable than it is, preferably via better wages for workers so they don’t have to do 3 jobs just to live.

However, we *do* find that food is much cheaper when made with the natural, raw ingredients. Our grocery bill went down by something like £40 a week (apx. $52) when we stopped buying as many processed foods. (There are only 2 of us, remember.) This more than makes up for the increase in energy prices to actually cook the food. But then there’s the chicken and egg scenario.

So anyway, I bought the book everyone is raving about, and it is really, really good. And I’ve been reading that in between the writing course books.

I can’t find a lot else to write about when I’m working on the same job all day, so that’s it for this one. Today, it’s more editing…(sigh!)