Can-do Attitude

Oh, hello there! As you may know, it's not uncommon for me to start my blogposts remarking upon how time has flown, and apologising for not having posted anything for ages. And this one is no different. Somehow, it's been over a year since I last wrote, despite my best intentions at the time, and again at the start of 2020, to turn over a new leaf and post more often.


But on the other hand, this one is a bit different, because I'm not just going to blame it on a combination of being busy and lazy, as I usually do. Those are factors, naturally, but there's more to it than that. In short, I've just not been all that happy of late, or at least not quite myself. Nothing serious, I should say - no cause for concern. It mainly stems from work (though the seemingly constant stream of bad news in the world has hardly helped) - a general sense of dissatisfaction after too long in the same role, plodding along, doing the same thing year in, year out, and feeling myself getting into a bit of a rut with no sign of a route out. 

Of course, I should be grateful. At least I have a job. But what I hadn't appreciated until fairly recently is that this feeling has slowly, almost imperceptibly, been creeping into other areas of life, with the result that things like doing chores around the house, general life admin, getting myself up and out at the weekends to be active and social, and doing something creative can feel - at times - like a bit of a struggle. Which is silly really, because I know deep down that doing those sorts of things can really help lift my mood, but sometimes I just can't bring myself to do them. Certainly when I get home after a day sat staring unenthusiastically at a computer screen, writing a blog isn't the first thing I want to be doing.

That's not to say I haven't still been thinking about the blog, buying and trying tins - quite the contrary in fact. I've got a huge backlog of photos I've taken, some dating back to when I first started the blog, and (dare I say it at the moment) a very well-stocked kitchen cupboard as proof. It's just the knuckling down and writing up my tinned experiments that I've been finding difficult.

Then a few weeks back, as I realised it was getting on for a year since I had last posted, I got a bit of a shock when I went to have a look at these hundreds of photos, which having mainly been taken on my old phone, I had stored on a SD card. I put it in my laptop, and then my work computer, but neither would allow me to open up the files to look at the photos, telling me I needed to format the card first. I knew better than to do that, as it would undoubtedly delete everything, but I feared that the card was corrupted somehow and so they might be as good as lost anyway. Of course, I was foolish not to have backed them up somewhere, but I was more annoyed with myself for having dragged my feet so much and not written up my posts as I went along. A part of me thought that I might as well just forget the whole idea of the blog there and then, and I went to bed that night feeling pretty miserable about it. 

After sleeping on it though, I thought maybe it was worth a try to would see if anything could be done to save the pictures, and fortunately the extremely nice people in the IT team at work were able to help me out, finding some genius way of salvaging the files from the SD card prior to formatting it. I don't know if they looked at any of the photos as they transferred them, as they'd no doubt have thought I was a right weirdo if so - but they're too nice to say anything.

Not only did I feel a massive sense of gratitude and relief, but scrolling through my restored photos actually gave me a real boost - there was a huge amount of material there, reminding me of the some of the weird and wonderful tinned things I have tried over the years, and the creative or downright daft things I've done with them in the kitchen - and it felt a real shame just to be leaving them as photos that no-one ever sees, and which were almost lost even to me. And it made me feel really positive and excited about getting back into the blog, to start writing again, and to work my way out of the general malaise I've found myself in of late.

And then, on the back of all the news stories we'd already heard about people stockpiling out of fear of what might happen to the UK after Brexit, coronavirus started to hit the world hard. With supermarket shelves here rapidly being stripped of all long-life foods (and vast amounts of toilet roll, for some reason) by shoppers who definitely weren't panic-buying, it suddenly felt like absolutely the right time to be talking about tins again, and doing something creative to keep happy and sane in the weird situation we currently find ourselves in.

So, expect to hear a lot more from me, because the situation doesn't look like it's going to get better any time soon, and I've got a lot of tins to tell you about. Yes - 

TTC, March 2020.


Postscript: You'll probably have realised that the two photos above were made using a tin of Alphabetti spaghetti, purchased on a wave of positivity after being reunited with my many photos. I had considered writing longer messages with them, and even at one point contemplated trying to use every letter in the tin in a short story. But I gave up quite quickly on that - it's surprisingly fiddly and time-consuming fishing out the letters you need from a mass of tomato-sauce covered pasta, and then arranging them legibly on a plate. So with the rest of the tin I took inspiration from the classic Middle Eastern dish of shakshuka - essentially a rich, spicy sauce of tomato and peppers, into which you crack a couple of eggs towards the end of the cooking to poach them. So I did that... 

 ...and then served them up on toast with a bit of salad. All clearly labelled, of course - when you've got all those letters to hand, it would be a shame not to use them in some capacity at least...

UPDATE: I have just learned that the World Record for finding all the letters of the alphabet in a tin of alphabet soup (which might be less gloopy than alphabetti spaghetti and hence a bit easier) is 3 minutes 21 seconds, set by Cody Jones of Frisco in Texas, USA on 13 February 2018.