Still life with bottles

Snapped in the margins of the Sunday roast just past. On this occasion, roast chicken (from Sainsbury's), brown rice, chou pointu and carrots. To follow, blackberry and apple for him, (oxymoronic) pink blancmange for her. According to the packet, cornflower coloured with carmine, an important dye made from squashed insects.

Hawthorn flowers, probably from our front hedge. With the front tree now largely over, but the back tree, in a much less sunny position, shaded even, still looking well.

Green check napkin, probably from the Linen Cupboard, a old-fashioned but useful shop for housewives which used to be at 21 Great Castle Street, just north of Oxford Circus. Probably vanished either on the retirement of the proprietor or on the expiry of his lease. Maybe he couldn't afford to renew and gave way to a branch of the Japanese flavoured eatery to be found at reference 1.

Calvados from Waitrose and wine from Majestic, a substitute for one of the sauvignon blanc's I usually buy, a wine which came along with that noticed last week at reference 3. I might say that it came in a very substantial cardboard box, much more substantial than the boxes the stuff is delivered to Majestic in.

It seems that the grower of 'The King's Favour', one Brent Marris, is pleased to think that he is descended from the Mariscos, pirates of Lundy back in the 12th and 13th centuries, documented by the Landmark Trust at reference 4. People that run very handsome holiday homes converted out of various heritage buildings (third division), with even the third division being far too strong for my pension.

But can one really be sure that one's paternal line goes all that way back? Can you honestly say that there aren't any gaps or at least obscurities in the record? Did your family take keeping records that seriously?

PS: as it happens, I read earlier this morning in reference 5, of heavy seas off Lundy. Experienced by a green and novice sailor in a tramp steamer of several thousand tons, fresh out of Swansea docks. Not encouraged by a tale of a similar steamer whose cargo hatches had come adrift in similar circumstances - and gone down in short order with the loss of all hands. What chance a pirate in the sort of overgrown rowing boats that passed for ships in the 12th century? In passing, it seems that the Plimsoll lines of such steamers had been adjusted in the ship owners' favour not many years previously, adjustments which meant that steamers like this one took on a great deal more water and were more likely to come to grief. See reference 6.

Reference 1: https://kintan.uk/.

Reference 2: https://www.marisco.co.nz/. A website which comes with very tasteful photographs of the New Zealand countryside.

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/05/series-1-episode-xii.html.

Reference 4: https://www.landmarktrust.org.uk/lundyisland/discovering-lundy/history/the-mariscos1/.

Reference 5: The Sea and the Jungle - H. M. Tomlinson - 1912.

Reference 6: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=plimsoll.