Category Archives: Heartwarming

food, Heartwarming, lifestyle

Proper Shops

We can’t all live in the country.

Life in town is eased by local heroes… Like Mark, this Kettering butcher.

That’s not Mark. Here he is (same pinny}:

He doesn’t display a mission statement, which is a relief, but if he did it would be about nourishing and innovating and educating — all of which he does and more, quietly in Hawthorn Road.

He’s corrected my pork crackling so that it crunches without risking our teeth. He’s taught me the secret of slow cooked beef ribs that melt in the mouth — add dental health to his mission! He saves the tails of fillet steak for our pensioner’s Beef Stroganoff! He has genuine Brixworth pate, smokes his own chicken breasts and has the best parmigiano reggiano in the eastern counties.

He provides employment and opportunity for a whole gang of skilled and experienced ladies to exercise their alchemy. To create pies and quiches and magical scotch eggs, cooked, ready (still warm, crisp on outside and moist and delicious on the inside) to collect on my way home from swimming.

There’s my reflection, drooling, clutching my rucksack of precious traditional Cumberland Scotch Eggs!

Literary Note:

Mark also, like any good butcher, swaps books and shares recipes and novels. Good taste across many arts. I’ve been reading Andrea Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano novels about crime and food, humble but ethereal, in Sicily — which brings me back to the just-cooked Scotch Egg! Italians don’t have a monopoly on ambrosia.

Here’s to family butchers the world over!

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Communication, Heartwarming

Heart-warming tale of kindness and cunning.

Most of us elderly folk are suspicious of the internet with its scams and plots to defraud us feckless incompetents.

Z Smagala (@Walls by Squidge) The Yard, Kettering

But that is not always the case!

Last week-end my friend lost his wallet in Llanidloes, in Mid-Wales — his real wallet, not a digital one. We rushed about the town telling everyone but in our panic not leaving any address. He cancelled his bank cards and the following day we drove to his home in Kettering, East Midlands.

On arrival his son from Stevenage phoned to say his wallet had been found in Llanidloes Co-Op.

“But?..” My friend hadn’t told his family. What was going on?

Sophie, the kind and conscientious lady at Llanidloes Co-Op, had received the wallet from an eagle-eyed shopper with a well developed sense of right and wrong, and then set about tracing him, from his driving license, on Social Media, which he doesn’t use. But in true Llani tradition (pop 2000), which was odd in Kettering (pop 70,000), his son’s mother-in-law’s friend spotted the Co-Op lady’s post on a Kettering community website. The rest, as they say, is history.

But it’s not — the following day — yes, the very next day, the postman rang the door bell. He proffered a parcel from the Co-Op, “I very much suspect that this parcel contains your wallet!” said the postie with consummate glee — seems he keeps his eye on the local website too.

“The posties know everything that goes on in this town!” say the Kettering ladies at my aqua-robics class.

Community is not dead — it is now electronically enhanced!

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