“I dunno mate. It gets worse and worse. Look at these scraps.”
“Know exactly what you mean, Bob. You just can’t get the humans these days. Must be global warming or summat.”
“Well, let’s see what we can get out of it before that twat over there decides to muscle in.”
In Donegal one sometimes feels one has gone back in time. Definitely, the tourist facilities need to catch up a little. Our B & B was kind of rustic, as you can see.
I’m only joking. Actually this was a scene in one of the reproduced historic Irish cottages in the Glencolumbkille Folk Centre. This village, out on the west coast of the world (well, Europe anyway), thereby becomes the 400th different named location to feature on the blog. (See the stats page if you really want the full list.)
It’s nice when interests coincide. Behind one goal at Atherton Laburnum Rovers’ Crilly Park stadium, there was growing today a whole run of plump, ripe blackberries, of which this was just a small part. Luckily for me I had a collection vessel, which was definitely filled before I settled in to watch the game.
You might have noticed that a nice round number approaches, in terms of the number of days I have been doing this. But that’s for tomorrow.
This is not the sort of thing you see in every pub visited. But The Griffin, in Amersham, certainly takes its food preparation seriously. The ray in the back of this drying cabinet was enormous. However, I hold back from recommending this establishment thanks to its charging me £7 for a pint, which even for the Home Counties is outrageous.
Summer fruits and rosemary. All picked from the garden just before this picture was taken: and all eaten, one way or another, within an hour afterwards. Most enjoyable.
The English summer weekend. We cook and eat our food outside despite it only being about 13ºC. And there is some obligation for middle-age men to be the ones cooking it: Pete (brother-in-law) started it off, but I braved the flames (below centre) to do the last quarter, or so.
Year on year, some photogenic subjects come round: foxgloves make a regular appearance around this time of year for instance. Baby plums or apples. And here, the year’s first wild stawberries, a June staple. Enough for a bowl in the evening, with cream and sugar. Nicer than the watery cultivated version, in my opinion.
Life becomes increasingly homogenised, and every egg you buy from the shop now seems to be brown. But Clare gets eggs from someone she works with, who has a farm in Calderdale, one of those where you risk running over truly free-range chickens if you drive past, and she doesn’t add dye to their feed to get the desired level of brownness. I love the gentle blue colour of this one, and pure white is also often seen. (And brown too, as you see with the other one.)
Treated myself, and my PhD student Steve (well, we split the bill) to a rarity for me, a working lunch, courtesy of the huge Tai Wu restaurant that sits just next door to the campus. And the dim sum were very fine. I’m still glad it’s Friday, though.
It’s early yet, but the world turns, and we have to start getting things ready to put into the soil. These potatoes will then sit in there for 10 months or so and, usually, we just dig up about the same number as we put in, of about the same size. So maybe we should just eat them now. But who knows, maybe this is the year they will run riot.
Being 42 