I'M BACK AT THE COMMUNITY FRIDGE!

After a busy weekend with our American visitors, I wanted to go to the Community Fridge today, because we won’t be there next Monday, as it’s the funeral of our dear Queen Elizabeth.  

As soon as I walked in, a rather pungent smell assailed my nostrils - and I just knew that they had saved a particularly smelly job for me.  If you have never smelt potatoes that are “going off”, then I hope you never have to.  It is an awful smell and suffice to say that although Karen helped a little, Linda - seen in the bottom left of the collage, couldn’t hack it!  They are smiling in this photograph, but weren’t smiling earlier and Karen felt rather nauseous -  but I didn’t mind and just got on with it. I did wear gloves though as putting my fingers into a rotten potato a few minutes earlier didn’t do much for me! I must say that Karen also helped with the grotty carrots, but I did most of the potatoes.

Since supermarkets have stopped putting “Use by” dates on their produce, we have noticed we don’t have quite as much, although today we did have rather a lot of eggs.  When speaking to Karen, we said that we always did the “water” test for eggs - if they floated when put into a jug of water, then they were off and went into the bin!

I didn’t feel much like chatting to people today, so spent much of my time in the kitchen on sorting out duties, serving coffee and cake or on dishwasher duties, which suited me fine.  The top left shot is taken from upstairs on the balcony and shows Jonny and Hilary weighing and noting down the details of the food that is taken so that we can see how much doesn’t go into landfill.  I should have taken a shot of all the frozen, uncooked mince pies I was bagging up - but forgot - it was funny trying to explain to people of different nationalities exactly what a mince pie is!

When I left the Community Fridge, I went to visit Jean, a lady whose husband, Bob, died last week - I worked with Bob for many years, so whenever I visited them, we always used to have a good chat about the different people we had worked with.  It’s only in latter years I found out that Jean also worked for the same firm, but before I started there, and that was how she and Bob met.  Talk about a small world, when Jean was telling me about the funeral arrangements, she said that Ian was taking the service, who used to work at A.E. Smith & Son - but who now is a Funeral Celebrant - she was very surprised when I told her that Ian was my cousin!

“Life’s most persistent and urgent question is,
     ‘What are you doing for others?’”
Martin Luther King Jr.

P.S.  Apologies for not getting back to people yesterday - we had rather a tiring day, but thank you for all your kind comments.