Breakfast for the worker

For some reason I did not empty the brick compost bin last year, perhaps because I thought we would get away with it. Which we have, with the bin have only just filled up.

But yesterday, a little late in the new season, I made a start and the bin is now half empty, with the yet-to-rot stuff bottom left having been scraped off top right, leaving the right hand side ready for removal to the back of flower beds.

Along the way I came across quite a lot of bones from fore ribs of beef and rather fewer from necks of lamb, both favourite dishes in days gone by - and a relic of the days when we allowed animal waste in the compost bin - which made for good compost and a lot more worms than we have now, but which attracted the attentions of foxes and rats. And one of our teaspoons, taking the count of teaspoons back up to nine, from the dozen bought from Heals forty years ago. Being stainless steel, no damage at all and now lost in the drawer of same. Plus a more recent plastic bag fastener, a small contraption about the size of a small clothes peg. Rather more bother to clean that one.

It was also an opportunity to bury some old books, once family treasures, now surplus to requirements, and which I prefer to bury rather than have sculling around some charity shop. Buried in decent privacy and after about a year underground there is not much left. From where I associate to the frequent thought that it must be odd for a model who poses half naked for the Sun to come across her ragged image rotting in some gutter. I don't think I would like it at all - but I suppose that if you want to do that sort of modeling you just have to put up with it.

Last but not least, also a rare opportunity to take a real worker's breakfast. That is to say cup of tea on rising, couple of hours' work on a more or less empty stomach, then breakfast proper. A time known to the farm of my youth as docky time. A memory confirmed at reference 1.

Note the trusty army flavoured clasp knife, spike exposed. A spike which we used to be told was to do with taking stones out of horses' hooves, but which I find much for useful for undoing knots in rope, for example that visible just to its left.

PS: interestingly, I had been worried about my back, which has been playing up a bit. But as it turned out, the change of diet seems to have done it some good, rather than making things worse, as I had feared. I have noticed something of the sort before, when the actions involved in picking blackberries from the Horton Lane hedgerows achieved the same end.

Reference 1: http://www.peevish.co.uk/slang/d.htm.

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