Single figure temperatures ...

Well I suppose it had to happen ... the weather, which has been very wet, is drying up and the forecast is for evening temperatures to be in single figures. In fact on Friday of this week the temperature will fall to 2°C. It is reported that snow in the Troodos is 79 cm deep. Brrr!

I saw a lovely “meme” on Facebook which said that Christmas was now over and I’m ready for summer. Well it’s not quite the same for us. Of course we get fed up when it rains and the temperature drops, but know that months and months of blue skies and sunshine is only a few weeks away. But we wouldn’t be British if we didn’t talk about the weather.

I’ve been watching the South Africa v England test matches on television and it is a perverse pleasure watching cricket under blue skies whilst we have the log burner on. And to make matters even more confusing the Six Nations’ Rugby Championship starts in February. We have often commented that it is not always clear what day of the week it is (and that isn’t the early stages of dementia) but that it really doesn’t matter what day it is, unless you want to go to the bank (which we don’t).

We are still without an oven (and that is a long, long story) but hope that it will return in full working order this week. We have become expert in creating food in the slow cooker, aided by a number of cookery books we have acquired recently. Ann, in particular, has produced some marvellous dishes with the help of Jamie Oliver’s “Veg” cookbook. If you want to cut down on eating meat (which I suspect everyone does from time to time) then this book is highly recommended. We were initially put off as Amazon wanted to charge us as much for shipping as the cost of the book itself. But a kind member of our expat forum ordered it to be delivered free to his address in the UK (as he was going back there) and then brought it back to Cyprus with him. We had a clandestine meeting outside of Lidl in Paphos where the goods were exchanged for cash. The goods were, as you might expect, in a plain brown paper bag.