Marriage for all

Some recommended reading: Committed by Elizabeth Gilbert. She’s done all the research on marriage that you could wish for. Nothing is new:  The story of Mr and Mrs Loving, in their day mixed marriage caused a lot of trouble!

 Tomorrow the first ever gay couple in France will officially marry. This is at the end of several months of sometimes violent protest by the anti marriage for all movement. The movement has been led by Frigide Barjot (a play on the name of Brigitte Bardot), who in my opinion often shoots herself in the foot. She said that marriage is for a man and a woman who want to make babies. Does she mean that couples who do not want children, couples who cannot have children and couples who are too old to have children, cannot marry?

Then we get on to the subject of adoption. “A child needs a Mummy and a Daddy in order to thrive properly”. In France one child in 5 is being brought up by a single parent. How do they think lone parents feel when they hear that statement? What about parents whose partener just went off. “The responsibility of a family is too much for me” (We know someone who left their wife and two children with those parting words)? Not to mention the children who end up murdered or ill treated by their step-fathers? What about the wives of Soldiers recently killed in Afghanistan and Mali; what do they make of that statement?

As I see it, any idiot can make a baby – and they often do. I’ve worked with teenagers who were well aware that they were unwanted by their parents from an early age. Only highly committed couples get the opportunity to adopt the baby or child that they really want. Children need love from consistent adults in their lives to thrive.

 I wish Vincent and Bruno all the best in their future life. If they choose to adopt, I hope that they are treated with the same fairness that any heterosexual couple could expect.

Happy Mother's Day!

At long last it's my turn. 

A bit of a quiet day for me as Rob is working and my children have all flown the nest. 

Have a lovely day - wherever you are.

Tooth-hurty

This week I went to the dentists for a checkup and one of my teeth has been aching again. The same one that hurt 7 months ago when I last went. As before; it’s not the tooth it’s the gum. I’m taking antibiotics at the moment and using mouth wash three times a day. The pharmacist advised me not to drink alcohol at all, as even a tiny amount of wine will feel like the whole bottle.

Why tooth-hurty? That was the time of my appointment. The next one in a couple of weeks will be at tooth-hurty too (oops, not 2.32 - two thirty)

Recipe for disaster

I don’t usually make pudding/desserts. There are normally plenty of pots of yoghurt and the like in the fridge. They really are the best way to control portion size in my book.

When Dom and J-M came to visit at the beginning of April, I thought that I’d give my favourite dessert, Lemon Meringue Pie, a go...

 First off; I was too lazy to look for the Royal Worcester Evesham design flan dish which would have been perfect for the job. I used a non stick cake tin instead. Unfortunately, I had to bake the pastry blind, so a high sided cake tin was not a good idea, the pastry ‘sides’ just slid down to the bottom. Before I put the pastry into the oven I’d placed a piece of greaseproof paper sprinkled with rice (no baking beans) on the base. When I came to take off the paper with the rice on it, some quite a lot of the rice got stuck to the half cooked pastry. I managed to pick most of the rice out and burnt my fingers.

The lemon part was tricky too, my grater for grating the zest from the lemons has seen better days, so there was a lot of hard work for little result. It smelt nice though. Next came the corn flour. I should have sieved it, but I thought the thing about corn flour was that it didn’t go lumpy. I ended up with a mix that looked as if it had polystyrene bits in it. It took ages to strain through a tea strainer.

 The egg whites whipped up beautifully (I know what you were thinking).

Everyone was very brave and ate some: It tasted fine, just looked a bit odd and we had a good laugh about it. For the first time ever there was a left over piece of pie – can’t think why.

Image taken from Wikipedia

My very first post

Ten years ago!  You'll see that I hadn't quite got the hang of it.  I've arrived in blog land.

Doesn't the time go quickly when you're enjoying yourself!

Weather

The weather here has been cold and wet. When we came back from the UK we needed to put the heating on again. It’s still on as I write. Hopefully this weekend we’ll be able to close it down until next winter.

 

At the beginning of the week we went for an evening walk as the sun was setting.The colour was amazing so I asked Rob to take a picture.