In Which To Avoid The Estate Agent I Go To The Library,Keep A Promise,Avoid The Subway,And Continue Being A German Housewife

Hello there. Hope you're feeling today.

Well there has been a viewing on the house. The first as it happens for about a month and a half so the wife had been on a frenzied cleaning/tidying spree on the weekend (I was at work - though she will say I hardly do anything anyway).

Anyway it's Monday. I have the day off and I know my duties. Clean the bathroom. Tidy every room in the house. Wait for 11:15am and get out. For the appointment is at high noon.

There are things that need to be done and most would have been done earlier in the morning. The viewing though meant these had to wait to nearly lunchtime.

So Porthcawl was my first stop to change the library book. What could be the perfect book to replace the Oliver Kay one I've raved about a few posts ago? What else could it be but?

From the humour section

When taken to the desk the lady librarian looked at me and said "It's got a few chapters missing." Thus I'll claim the first ever recording of a joke made by a librarian in Wales about a former England manager. Albeit one with a 100% record. Sporting wise this book has become a notch below Lance Armstrong in your attitude to it after recent events.

The laughter begins at the cover where there is a quote from Sir Alex Ferguson . "Sam is one of the great characters of the game" You will note not "managers". But that is being a bit unfair. In a small foreword the far better manager does praise Allardyce and it is deserved. The thing about him (Warning metaphors are going to be mixed here) is that he (like Tony Pulis) has built a reputation as a Red Adair of managers. Parachuted as it were into clubs in trouble and improve them. Trouble is when that initial job is done he's then treated like the Pied Piper was once he got rid of the rats.

I've started reading it, written before he became England manager let alone after he lost it. You laugh when he says that it's a job he covets especially as a West Ham fan he's quick to attack us in the introduction. But you know what? So far it's the most badly written book of all the library football books I've read. So many "I" this and "you" that. In chapter one I even counted a sentence where he used the word I four times. Of course that's not his fault but that of his co writer Shaun Custis.

You may remember a few posts back that I had mistakenly said that there wasn't any books in the Age Cymru charity shop and that, once I'd been advised I was wrong promised to buy a book there the next time I was in Porthcawl. Well that promised has now been kept. Not only was it a book,it was also a Penguin as well.

Norman Davies - Vanished Kingdoms

This brick of  book is about European states,organisations etc that longer exist. Does seem interesting.

It only cost me 50p. Which means that the Penguin weekly book budget is currently 60p. There was no time for more books as there were more things to do.....but first food.

Now if it wasn't for the viewing the plan was going to be an attempt at antipasti Genovese as per Elizabeth David's book that I've mentioned in an earlier post. But Liz and the antipasti will have to wait. I'm out of the house,in Porthcawl and hungry. I think Subway.

However that idea is quashed when I find that the place is stuffed full with teenagers who have been rehearsing in the nearby theatre for a production of Annie. I know this because they're all wearing sweatshirts with "ANNIE" on their chests. Instead lunch is taken at the nearby Welsh Deli. It's a sausage sandwich with a cappuchino. Forty years ago a request like that would be met with silent questions about my sanity. Now the staff take it at their stride.

It took me fifteen minutes to have lunch (which was good by the way). A lot can change in fifteen minutes.

This was Porthcawl before I had lunch.

Dry but look at the clouds

And this is what it looked like when I came out of the Welsh Deli.

After the shower

Then it was time to do drive away and do some grocery shopping in away from Porthcawl at Lidls. Many years ago I remember an interview with a "retail analyst" who said that in Germany housewives would buy most of their food from Aldi/Lidl as the quality was just as good as the main supermarkets but cheaper whilst going to those other stores for particular branded goods. Well we have been a German housewife family for many years and we're not alone. In the Lidl car park I went to there were Jaguars,Mercs and 4x4 motors.

And as inflation will rise, and the cost of food will rise because of Brexit more and more people will become part of a German housewife family. It will be ironic that one of the main beneficiaries of Britain leaving the EU are be German discounters.

Until the next time.