Easter lamb

The  meat part of our Easter took place on Easter Monday, our needing a day to come down from our visit to the big town, just reported.

Lunch had been largely delegated to BH, so I was able to take my morning exercise, as recorded at reference 1. Where I failed to mention that it was the day when M&S had their IT failure and there were problems with their self-checkouts, which meant that there was a short but moving queue. With hindsight, all well-managed by the M&S people at Epsom. They coped.

There was also the matter of the unsold Easter eggs. Were the shops able to return them to the manufacturer, to be melted down to go into the next chocolate festival? Does chocolate degrade with each melting down, in the way of recycled paper? Something one might ask Gemini about.

It being a special day, I thought it right & proper to crack out a special wine, a bit more special than we usual manage, a blended red , not a 'single malt', as it were, at all. From the people who gave us the fine white noticed at reference 3. A wine we had take three years previously, as noticed at reference 4. Although we liked it well enough this second time around, the verdict was not worth (to us anyway) the extra money and that we would stick to the white in future.

Ready for the off.

On the plate, with greens, beans and, for a rare change, roast rather than boiled potatoes. Very good it all was too.

Not pink inside, something that we do not manage very often. But the savoury knuckle end left went down very well cold over the next day or so.

A few days previously, pineapples had reappeared in the shops, after being absent for a while. Maybe a new shipment had come in. In any event, I had bought one against this occasion, but in the event, after this heavy meat course, the pineapple was stood down in favour of the lighter stewed apples. They did very well. We made the right choice.

Later in the day, BH beat me by a modest margin at a high scoring game of Scrabble. Perhaps I had taken a spot more wine. In any event, the score of 633 comfortably broke the 600 barrier - with a near miss having been recorded not long previously at reference 5.

PS 1: interested to read at reference 6 about tariffs promoting smuggling and organised crime at reference 6. There are plenty of precedents: just think of all the boys' stories about smuggling in the 18th century. Although I dare say, such stories have dropped down the list a bit since my day.

PS 2: and I continue to be irritated by the slowly increasing volume of unsolicited pop-ups of one sort or another on my computers. I dare say one can turn these things off, but then one has all the bother of finding out how to do that. Maybe the added bother of carrying whatever it is across software upgrades.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/04/trolley-812.html.

Reference 2: https://shop.lescaves.co.uk/lescaves-shopfront.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/03/trolley-782.html.

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/04/beef-without-backbone.html.

Reference 5: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/04/to-market.html.

Reference 6: Trump’s tariffs are a gift to the mafia: As smuggling becomes a lifeline, criminal organisations across the globe will benefit - Roberto Saviano, Financial Times - 2025.