Saturday discussion post: small pleasures (51/365)

[white_hart]

I really like pain au raisin, but T doesn't like raisins, and supermarket pain au raisin only come in packs of two and I don't necessarily want two at once, so although we often have pastries for breakfasts at weekends I hadn't had a pain au raisin since before lockdown started*. I mentioned this in a chat with my swimming friends and it turned out that L had exactly the same issue, so she brought pain au raisin for a post-swim snack today.



It may have been only a supermarket pastry, eaten out of the packet while sitting on the muddy bank of a lake in a public park** but it was so lovely to have something I haven't been able to have for nearly a year.

What small things have been making your life a bit better lately?

*I can't remember exactly when I had my last one. I do remember trying to buy one in Gail's on the Friday morning after my last swim in the pool, when I'd picked up some shopping and was heading to the office to collect my chair before going home to work, but they didn't have any and I had to have a cinnamon bun which was nice, but not the same.

**And it was probably a bit closer to an illegal picnic than my normal Tunnocks caramel wafer

Comments

[cosmolinguist]

My new bedroom has a reading light and when I moved in a month ago I noticed the bulb had burnt out on it. I only last night got around to getting the help I needed to order a new one, and it'll arrive with the rest of the shopping any minute now. I'm lookin forward to being more easily able to read in bed.

[white_hart]

Yay! I definitely couldn't manage without my bedside lamp.

[cmcmck]

Although as we know after the Derbyshire police episode, the 'illegal picnic' stuff is a load of hooey!

Fwiw,the pain au raisin will freeze so you could get two and keep one for later. :o).

[nineveh_uk]

+ 1 on freezing. Or you can buy the frozen ones and heat them up. they're not as good as fresh, but they are pretty decent.

I am so, so happy that the winter sports season has, with some inevitable hiccups, been able to run this year. I think I'd have been a lot more fed up this winter had I been without it.

[white_hart]

The trouble with freezing things for later is that our freezer is already very full, and I tend to forget what's in there. (These two problems may in fact be connected...)

I'm glad you're getting to watch the winter sports!

[strange_complex]

Aw, that is such a happy pic! I am really pleased you got your pain au raisin, and that you have such a thoughtful friend who made sure it happened.

My recent happy thing is a new laundry rack. I had never really thought of them as things you could 'upgrade', but after c. 20 years my old one was shedding large chunks of paint. It also turned out the painted coating was necessary to make two of the side-bars large enough to support its arms, so they kept collapsing. I now have a new one which is both lighter and sturdier, and does not shed paint or collapse, all of which is very pleasing.

[white_hart]

We had a similarly old laundry rack which gave up the ghost a while ago so we had to replace it, and the new one is very nice!

[(Anonymous)]

Lidl sell them individually, if you have one of those near you.

[mrs_redboots]

Sorry, that was me - didn't realise I had been logged out.

[white_hart]

Thanks! We don't have a Lidl anywhere near us, and have been avoiding the big Sainsbury's apart from a couple of click and collect orders to get things that aren't available in the smaller shops, so almost all of our supermarket shopping is done at the local Tesco Metro, which has everything we usually need but not a very wide range.

[mrs_redboots]

We have a plethora of small Sainsbury's (and two normal-sized ones), which are far more expensive than anywhere else, but no Tesco Metro locally. But with Lidl within 50 metres, Tescos within 150, and the two Sainsbury's less than a kilometre in different directions, we don't really need one. Last time I went to a Tesco Metro I was on the hunt for streaky bacon for my mother to put on a chicken, and they had none and were horrendously arsey when I enquired, as though nobody in their right minds would ever want to buy streaky! We had to go to her local superstore!

[white_hart]

I guess that's the difference between living in an urban area and a suburban village! The Tesco (and a Co-op that used to be a decent size but has shrunk down to convenience-store size) are about half a mile away in the centre of the village, the big Sainsbury's is just over a mile and there's nothing else until you get to Summertown which is about three and a half miles.

[callmemadam]

A nice, happy pic! I admire what I assume are your hand-knitted hat and long mitts.
Birthday flowers are still cheering me up.

[white_hart]

They are hand-knitted, though what looks like long mitts is actually a pair of fingerless mitts (worn over flip-top mitts) tucked into the sleeves of a gradient cardigan!

[mountainkiss]

Slightly stretching the definition of "small thing" in both the literal and metaphorical senses, but today due to a fiendishly complicated plan I can have a legal walk with WEEZIE.

[girlyswot]

Hooray!

[mountainkiss]

First time seeing her in person since 31/8 when I was pretty distracted by Simon C appt

[white_hart]

Hurrah!

[danieldwilliam]

That's lovely.

[mountainkiss]

It was, except that she has an extraordinary self-administered lockdown mullet.

[danieldwilliam]

She cut her own hair?

[mountainkiss]

I think Char later intervened but by then the damage was done.

[danieldwilliam]

Well, it will grow out I suppose and either she will be a little embarrased when the pictures surface at here 21st birthday and wedding or she'll be incredibly proud of them when she's a mid-21st Century Toyah Willcox.

I once cut my brother's hair with a pair of plastic safety scissors. That got out of hand quickly. The fraternal tonsure lead very quickly to a parental censure.

[mountainkiss]

I'm surprised it hasn't already grown out TBH. Maybe she likes it that way.

[danieldwilliam]

Every generation needs a Toyah.

[jinty]

That’s a good size pain au raisin, looks lovely! I am fond of them too but we have been buying frozen packs of mini-pastries from Waitrose and so we can satisfy the different tastes of the household when we get a W order. (We’ve been alternating between a Tesco order one week and a Waitrose one the next.)

[white_hart]

We sometimes get mini-pastries from Tesco but they don't have pain au raisin, alas. And our shopping is mostly Tesco with the occasional Sainsbury's click and collect.

[girlyswot]

I chopped my hair off yesterday and that has made me very happy.

[white_hart]

Yay! I have to say, finding that I *can* cut my own hair has been something of a revelation to me.

[girlyswot]

I have been cutting mine on and off for years. It’s not perfect but it is good enough. Yours always looks lovely.

[white_hart]

I think close up it's definitely "not perfect but good enough", with a side of smugness from the fact that I'm saving £50 every six weeks compared to when I used to go to a hairdresser.

[girlyswot]

I would only ever go once every six months, but £50 is still £50!

[white_hart]

The only downside of short hair is that it does need cutting a lot of it stops being short.

[ankaret]

My discovery this year that Tunnocks now do dark chocolate caramel bars has been doing a lot to lift my mood.

As far as clothes airers go I have two large three-level Brabantias but one is getting close to needing to be replaced, due to its position between a chest of drawers and a large cupboard which means it regularly gets leapt on by fast moving cats playing The Floor Is Lava.

[white_hart]

We have been getting the dark chocolate ones for a while. I suspect we first found them while on holiday in Scotland and realised that they make perfect walking snacks (and now post-swimming snacks).

I can see that cat acrobatics are not necessarily conducive to the longevity of clothes airers!

[clanwilliam]

G and I discovered Tunnocks Dark Chocolate Caramel Wafers in a Dumfries supermarket years ago. There was only one pack and we provided some quiet entertainment when a woman coughed, pointed behind us and we had a hobbit-like reaction to an entire SHELF full of them!

[perennialanna]

Dark chocolate caramel wafers were a school packed lunch snack, which is 26 year or more ago...

Wilko seem to be good for Tunnocks obscurities. Caramel Logs and Wafer Creams in my small local one, as well as both colours of Caramel Wafer.

[sartorias]

I made chocolate chip cookies the other day, and ate them hot. Yum!

[white_hart]

That sounds wonderful!

[sfred]

Oh, hurray for pain au raisin! My domestic partner doesn't like them either so I haven't had one for a long time.

[white_hart]

Clearly there is a widespread problem of households where only one person likes pain au raisin!

[sfred]

If only we were near enough to share a packet.

[el_staplador]

chocolateboxcomm! I have been feeling fannish again and it's so nice.

ETA: pains aux raisins are great, but I haven't had one for yonks - probably not since the last time I went into the office, and maybe not then.

[white_hart]

I used to buy them for breakfast after swimming on a Monday, or on the days when I decided to treat myself and go out for breakfast, so they always feel like a bit of a treat.

[danieldwilliam]

I'm struggling to think of anything - so what I'm going to do (because I'm months over due a post) is think of ten small things that have made my life better in the last year and ten things that I can do to make a small improvement.

[white_hart]

I do find that sometimes it's helpful to remember that at least there are the small joys, even if the world at large is a trashfire.

[danieldwilliam]

The world at large has its challenges and the UK in particular at the moment but I take great heart from the rapidly lowering poverty rates in Africa and the rapidly lowering cost of solar PV - if ever I am worried about the future state of the world.

[crinolinerobot]

I think for me it was a latte. I don't like coffee much, so only drink it a few times of year, but I had to go into Bath to go to the dentist and the little cafe nearby was doing takeaways. It was a cold day so I got a latte with hazelnut syrup to walk back to the train station with, and it was BLISS.

I think we're all going to notice small things a lot more when all this is over.

[white_hart]

I also don't drink coffee much, but I do miss buying the occasional flat white. And chai lattes - I used to buy one as a Friday-afternoon treat when the cafe in our building was open (which was only during term).