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@ Olive Grove Eggs
2024-08-23 08:17:26It's Wimbledon in the year of the Beatles. A baby boy is born to a Scottish teddy boy father and a blue-blooded English woman. The child leaves the hospital with only one nipple intact and blue hands and feet. Rumour has it the impoverished boomer parents then leave it in front of an open gas oven for hours on end. They tell concerned relatives that they need to cook and heat at the same time, to keep the bills down during one of the last Big Freezes in London. The Spartan approach works out fine and the baby grows into a strapping lad, the eldest of four siblings.
Fast forward 60 years, I'm still here, still Spartan to a degree. I've never watched a point, set or match at the home of tennis; gas is the only way to cook, and although circulation issues seem to be a thing of the past, I still have no time for snow.
After much traveling, I have settled in Spain, which to me is a brilliant mix of Europe and Africa. Ex-pat Spain probably conjures up pictures of clear blue skies and sun-baked beaches full of inebriated pink Brits and loud Germans. Not gonna lie, I dodged that bullet on day two and gravitated inland to the least populated part of Europe's most mountainous nation.
Weather-wise, rural Spain is all about the 300 days a year of bright sunlight beaming its anti-depressant energy over blanched landscapes of olives, ochre soil and sleepy villages. Temperatures can range from minus 10C and snowy to over 40C and drought. I'm writing this in a darkened room sheltering from the August sun. However for all the talk of extremes, there are plenty of months of tolerable in between.
I have had the good fortune to live among olive groves, and be part of a process to restore the ridged ochre soil between gnarly old olives to some semblance of green. A few years in, a bag of experience packed, an olive farmer is what I want to be, til I can't.
Since being a kid, I have had a soft spot for chickens with their crazy dinosaur look, busy-body attitude and resilient constitution. As a teenager I was nicknamed Chicken George after the guy in Roots! It doesn't hurt that chicken eggs are also number one on my list of all-time favourite foods. Number two was bacon, which along with eggs, I ate for breakfast every school day til I was 18.
A few years ago, I went right off meat, just one day I couldn't put the most delicious of fillet steak to my mouth. Weird. So began another journey, to plant-based, plus my eggs of course. The relationship with real bacon ended, closely followed by that vile substitute processed vegan bacon bollocks.
Learning what to eat took some adjusting to. I certainly didn't lose weight. Must have been doing something wrong! Beer anyone?! A while back I discovered goat cheese, and said goodbye to any chance of B12 or protein deficiencies! Intermittent fasting has closed the circle. Having lived both sides of the track, I feel healthier than ever with this combo. My mind's as sharp as a tack, and I can still pick olives like a champ. YMMV!
Of all the passions in life, however, the true top spot on my list of all-time favourites is my beautiful, bilingual daughter. She's working out OK!
It has been a long and varied journey to this point. I think, though, I have been well prepared for this last venture with the chicken farm, before I too am put out to pasture. But it has to be said, if it weren't for the promise of Bitcoin - fix the money, fix the world - I honestly wouldn't be as optimistic about the future as I am now. LFG, as them cyber hornets might say.
Join me on Nostr, the backbone of a genuinely positive social media platform, where I fill in a few more life-story blanks, and share news on Olive Grove Eggs. BTW, I have a mighty good deal in mind for customers who buy my eggs on Nostr!