The girls brought home a Thing.

One Thing each, to be exact, packed in a gaudy orange carrier bag, together with a magnetic weekly planner and a Letter to the Parents. The Thing turns out to be a “gruitbox”, designed especially to bring your Fruit-and-Vegetables to school. There’s been a campaign going on for a year and a half, the letter says, to make kids eat more fruit and vegetables. To that effect the Fruit and Vegetables Board or whatever has been supplying fruit and vegetables to primary schools under the name of schoolgruiten. Gruiten is a portmanteau, a very ugly one in my opinion, of groenten (vegetables) and fruit. (Warning: the site requires Flash, Konqueror couldn’t cope with it but Firefox could)

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It was St. Andrew who put me on the track, really. I was cycling (I always get ideas on the bike) through town, thinking of the saint in whose honor we were having a fish day and wondering what troparion to sing: whether it was the general one for the apostles in the third tone, or he had one of his own (I found later that he does have one of his own, but half of it matches the one for SS. Peter and Paul). That made me wander off (I always wander off when I get ideas on the bike) to think what a good exercise it is, for instance for the children’s choir, to sing the same words to different tunes or different words to the same tune.

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Advent is upon us: we ate fish, one step up from the normal Tuesday wine-and-oil, in honour of St.Matthew the Evangelist on Tuesday the 16th. Squid, to be exact, the kilo of it that I had in the freezer to eat on a Sunday. I used my own adaptation of a recipe by Jane Grigson and stewed it in red wine with onions and tomatoes as I’ve written up on my recipes page.

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