Wisdom by Hindsight
I can totally relate to the message in this image. There are some hyperactive friends of mine who keep wondering how I can be such a couch potato and this blog post is for them. Not that I expect them to understand but, this is my explanation for their puzzlement.
I must however add that I am not much into snacking but instead, into solving crossword puzzles and reading.
How about you dear reader?
I got this cartoon strip earlier today which triggered off a long forgotten memory of detective fiction.
I don’t know how many of my regular readers will remember a character called Mike Hammer. He was a detective in novels written by Mickey Spillane. I think that I have read all Mickey Spillane’s novels as during those days, there was no television or diversions other than cinema and willy nilly one read. Since I was also travelling a lot, I used to buy books in railway station book stalls and was quite well known in some of them.
There were other writers too but, this particular opening that Snoopy uses is a classic Mike Hammer one if my memory serves me right.
It is a pity that he stopped with just a few stories of that particular genre. He was very entertaining and easy to read.
Have you read Mickey Spillane? Do you think that the criticism that he got from the regular literati was justified?
My daughter in love went shopping for vegetables yesterday and saw freshly arrived ground nuts, called peanuts by the Americans, and knowing my weakness for it, bought a pile of it.
I got it steamed in a pressure cooker and sat down to shell them.
That is when nostalgia kicked in taking me back to my childhood when my mother used to ask the four of us siblings to shell the nuts. We used to call that a picnic as, while shelling for storage, we used to keep popping some as we went along. I did not pop any while I shelled because I am still recovering from a tooth extraction but, am looking forward to doing so soon enough from the shelled and refrigerated stock.
Apart from the picnic nostalgia another memory of a late friend kept coming up. That of VB, a dear friend who used to get the snacks for our parties. He used to specially get these boiled groundnuts for me and inevitably say, “Nuts for a nut from a nut!” It has been a long time since I remembered him.
Here is a stock photograph from Alamy showing Indian village children having a picnic like we used to have in our childhood.
How do you like your ground/peanuts?
Our lady of the house, Chutki has taken ill and has been hospitalised the last two nights. Her absence is most felt by me as she tails me around wherever I go and likes to keep an eye on me. I was told by a dog mind reader that it was her maternal instinct and she considers me as her child.
On the other hand, the same person told me that when she was with my son and daughter in love, she thought that she was their baby and that she was human.
What a split personality. Despite all that, I miss her and hope that she will get well soon and return home and to me.
The comic strip ‘Peanuts’ has been a favourite of mine for decades. I can’t remember even one which I did not enjoy reading and savouring.
The latest to come way is a link to a blog on the philosophy of the late Charles Schultz, the creator of Peanuts, this blog post which I am sharing with my readers with the hope that they will enjoy it as much as I did.