The excitement of life, including porridge.

Yes, with the years passing, robust health for the aged goes out of all proportions. I had a scare when playing croquet a few days ago and had to be helped off the greens. Fellow players reckoned it was due to dehydration. The elderly simply don’t drink enough water and the dehydration made me almost faint. Having low blood pressure as well, I discovered that eating bananas are not good because of the b p lowering potassium. I did not know that fact. A banana was the first thing that I would greet and eat each morning.
I am now having acute banana withdrawal symptoms which I was advised to counter with morning porridge. I try and remain excited about life.

My first porridge.

Memories of porridge go back decades and I can still see my mother making the porridge each morning in a large heavy enameled saucepan, green in colour and with two handles. At one stage this saucepan sprung a leak but, in those day a man on a bicycle would go around fixing leaking enameled saucepans of any size or colour. I think a little metal plate would be hammered into the leak and it worked!

Our milk was delivered daily, and the milkman had a one litre scoop which he would dip into a large container and deposit it into our enameled bucket. Again, from memory, we ordered roughly 4 litres daily or perhaps it was once every two days. Anyway, enameled kitchenware was to last decades and became part of our furniture, living equipment and my memory.

But going back to the porridge, my first effort in cooking it was yesterday but it failed and even though I ate some of it, it needed improving, I asked my kind neighbour for advice, and she gave me the proportion of rolled oats in relation to liquid. This morning I reheated yesterday’s failed mixture but added some water to make it at a bit more viscous. Even my dog Bentley walked away!

The reader must realize how porridge had been embedded in my life in those early years. They are somber being tainted with war and dreadful hunger. Porridge in mornings cooked by mother on a kerosine cooker in winter’s darkness with dad assisting in giving light. Bombed Rotterdam had no power nor running gas, but dad did have a bicycle with a dynamo fixed to the back wheel which would give light from the front wheel when pedaled on its stand. The porridge was fantastic and often our only meal of the day. And now some eighty years onwards I have to really not be fussy and eat my daily porridge irrespective of its viscosity or lumpiness.

I owe it to my memory.

Tags: Porridge, Rotterdam