Paperwork/Admin, Gardening, a T-bone steak and the Italian Grand Prix

The last week since the sale of 41 has been spent with a fair amount of paperwork and other bits of admin connected to the sale, but thankfully it is now more or less over. In today's world of pitiful returns on non-risky investments, it takes a while before you can find anything with a reasonable return. I also had to cancel the house insurance and the gas maintenance contract amonst a few other matters. After all that we could turn towards the garden again.

The roses are still going strong and the peppers too. Unfortunately, the village was hit by a mysterious tomato blight, which rotted the remaining fruit on the tomato plants.  Thankfully, we have already harvested 20-30 kilos earlier in the summer, so I wasn't too upset. The prolific pepper harvest was definitely the success story of the summer and as you can see they will carry on producing for a good while yet.

After nurturing the little plants of Brussel sprouts from seed, we started planting them out this last week.  Half of them were done in the place where the tomatoes were and the other half is still to be done in the place of the peas.

On Friday we revisited the Fenyves Inn where we had a lovely lunch the week before last.  This time we had to go to Tesco for the fortnightly shop and came home via the Fenyves. Roy suggested that we make it a celebratory meal for both the sale of 41 and his approaching 73rd birthday. He spotted T-bone steak on the menu last time and decided to put the chef to the test of whether he can cook a really rare steak? In other words: can he buy in good enough steak that is edible when rare?

Well, the steak was very good and after he finished it and his pint I managed to talk him into a 7 year old Havana rum, which was also well appreciated.  The only complaint received was with regard its colour, as Roy is used to good old English Navy rum, which is very dark brown.  Still, he put away the good double measure of it pretty sharpish.  I was, unfortunately, not as lucky as Roy.  I ordered the same pasta dish as last time and found that due to a different chef in the kitchen, it was not nearly as nice as the week before. Then it was made with cream, while this time the pasta was practically swimming in about half a pound of cheese, which tasted great, but was not the best for my digestive system.  Roy finished it for me and enjoyed that as well.

This week I also started my usual spending spree on Amazon, which I am in the habit of doing round  about this time of year.  Electronics, books, DVD's, toys are usually what I buy. This time I started with a new GPS, to replace my ancient over 10 year old one, which occasionally goes barmy, usually under tree cover and/or near metal objects.  It is also very slow and not sensitive enough to pick up enough satellites fast enough. The old one was a present from a friend and while browsing on Amazon I realised that there is no point in buying the most up to date version of the same GPS, as that would set me back about £300. So I went for a little e-Trex, which is perfectly adequate for my purposes, which is mostly geocaching and one of them was on offer, so that went into the basket with a protective case and some screen protectors.  Then came the books, now that is financially dangerous in our family when I start buying books.  This time I stopped after 6, but who knows there might still be some more to get.

The shopping list consisted of: Patrick Leigh Fermor's posthumous 3rd volume of his travels back in the 1930's, Artemis Cooper's book about PLF and Nick Hunt's book on retracing PLF's steps in the 21st century.  A bit later I ordered another 3 books, but these were pre-orders.  Somehow, by chance, or more likely by design, Michael Palin, Stephen Fry and John Cleese are publishing books within 2 and 4 weeks of each other. Palin on 11th September, Fry on 25th September and Cleese on 9th October.  As I love all three, I couldn't resist. Palin is bringing out the third volume of his edited diaries (I have the previous 2), Fry has produced his memoirs, called More Fool Me and Cleese has probably done something similar, we'll see.  I have never read anything from Cleese, so that's be a new experience for me.

Talking of new experiences: television provided something fascinating last week.  ITV started a 4-part police drama called Chasing Shadows. It sounded interesting and the main character was familiar from somewhere.  It took me a while to realise that the actor was Reece Shearsmith, whom I saw earlier in the year in The Widower, a real story of a multiple wife killer and he played Malcolm Webster who is still inside, hopefully for a very long time. I read some of the journalistic comment about this series and while everybody thinks that the actors are pretty good, many criticised the 21st century phenomenon of spicing up detective stories with putting high functioning sociopaths into the main roles. I quite enjoyed the first episode and will make up my mind about it after seeing a bit more of it.

Who Do You Think You Are was a real classic this week.  Sheridan Smith found out that the singing and acting talent that she has came down the generations. She came across very genuine and nice, with a lovely mum and dad and the whole thing was brilliant. Amazing, how this series, now in its 11th season, gets just better and better.

 And then today we had the Italian Grand Prix, which was probably the best race I have seen not just this year, but for several years. F1 can get very monotonous when it is just one great procession, but today at Monza the overtaking and sheer race craft exchibited by several drivers was breath taking. Obviously, I am extremely happy with Lewis Hamilton winning, but even if he didn't I would have still considered this GP one of the best I have ever seen. I am not often given to schadenfreude (joy at somebody's misfortune), but what happened to Nico Rosberg today he deserved a thousand time over. Lewis managed to pressurise him into two stupid mistakes, the first one didn't hurt him, but the second did. That was what lost him the win! Considering that Lewis won more GPs and is behind him only because 80% of mechanical and other troubles with Mercedes cars happened to poor Hamilton and not Rosberg, it was about time he had some bad luck. Lewis was awsome, how the problems with the car, which robbed him of his first place off at the start, didn't bother him and the way he fought back like a lion to win. He is definitely a superb driver and a very nice guy to boot. He is still 22 points down on Rosberg, but I will cross anything and everything for him in the remaining 7 races and hope he wins overall.

On Thursday we are going into town, which will make a change as we haven't been there for nearly 8 weeks. I hope everything is OK there, but we'll find out soon enough. We are staying for 8 days, during which I have several concerts, theatre and opera visits, have to see my doctor, get my pills etc., etc. After that comes the Hash group's visit in the village when I get my Hash name, which should be quite an event.