Pans and Eternity

I love things that are very well made and last forever, or threaten to. It was a blow last week when one of my much-loved Le Vrai Gourmet stainless steel pans, bought more than 20 years ago, parted from its handle. It was worse when in late spring our ancient food processor packed in. As that was an engagement/shacking up present we'd had it 29 years.

As regards the food processor design, or quality, has gone backwards, its replacement is far less solid, harder to clean, more awkward to assemble, and generally a bit annoying. Same maker though. Looks like planned obsolescence has hit the kitchen appliance market since the 1980s.

It's a lesson. Buy expensive and well made and it is cheaper than buying cheap and crappy. My late father-in-law's toolbox was full of chisels and wrenches and saws that he'd probably had since the late 1940s when he came to England. He too bought the best, but he also maintained them, oiled steel surfaces, sharpened blades, polished wood. I try to follow suit with kitchen gear like my paella pan, lovingly re-seasoned after each use.

I'm due to go to the tip today or tomorrow to get rid of rubbish that has accumulated here, including a Kodak printer that died young and unloved. I really need to transfer my thinking about kitchen stuff to my other purchases.

The Light Fantastic

We recently had a tree surgeon sort out a pine that had got far too big, and was blocking much of the light from our conservatory and two of the three floors above it. The difference that the clearer view has made is a revelation. My desk is flooded with illumination during the middle of the day, so much so a couple of times last week that I had to adjust my screen and drop a Russian blind a couple of feet to avoid being blinded by the light (bugger off Springsteen).

It makes a difference in other ways - tomatoes that seemed destined to remain green forever have suddenly ripened. Our next door neighbour is delighted that the newly renovated woodwork on his bays has a chance to remain dry. We hope that a tiny but nagging occasional damp problem in one corner of our dining room will go for the same reason.

The main difference though is in the way it makes you feel. Light is health-giving, needed in the production of vitamin D, but more than that it lifts your mood. SADS (Seasonally Affected Disorder) got a lot of publicity a couple of years back, Monty Don I seem to recall suffering in the darker months. Here in semi-tropical Preston we can hope that the threat of the winter blues is a little diminished this year.

Not a Quick Fix

We live in a culture where the immediate is if not all, then nearly so. Bands are world famous for two records, then join Lord Lucan. Politicians promise instant cures to complex problems clearly beyond them. Football managers cannot afford three losses in a row. It's good to take a step back and think about a year and more hence.

Yes, it's about wood chopping again. We had some major tree surgery done, and the wood chopped into manageable bits for me to split and stack (actually for my wife to stack in the main, she is far more careful than I). It took maybe six hours of work spread over several days, but we now have a store under cover, drying quietly for use in two years' time.There is enough for a whole winter, which is a pleasing thought, though the winter of 2015/16.

We can afford to wait that long as we dried a stock for use now two years back. There is more coming through for next year.

At 54 I rather like the idea of looking forward a couple of years. I'm at that age when it is far from a given that I will be here then - a good friend of similar age died this summer, no signs then a massive fatal heart attack. Maybe beneath the surface such actions anchoring one to the future are signs of confidence, or maybe of hope.

The care of the trees is an eco thing too. Two were lifted, the crowns now higher so more light can come through. Two had boughs removed to leave one healthy main trunk, again more light. And the big fir-tree that was shadowing our house and next door's (the tree oddly owned by both as it is in the hedge) has been lopped to bring daytime brightness to my study, which is both cheering and economic (no electric light on now as it would have been a month back). We hope the extra rays will help perk up our kitchen garden crops next year, especially the smaller fruit trees we have planted. And I hope that I will one day, preferably before my late seventies, see the walnut tree produce a sackful.

Cheaper than Physio, Better than Drugs

Every now and then I get back ache, and thus end up in a pre-emptive visit to my local physio, Martha, who is brilliant. Physio, however, is not cheap, whereas owning an allotment is. A non sequitur? No, as the more digging and weeding and picking and barrowing I do the fewer problems I have with my back. Yesterday we cleared space for optimistic late-August plantings (lettuce, endive, beet, chard, rocket...), weeded Hamburg parsley and celeriac beds, and generally tidied up at summer's end. Today I feel like a 20-year-old (something my wife would frown on).

Our annual allotment rental is the price of two sessions of physio. Not a complaint about Martha's pricing, which is very reasonable, but a comment on how cheap even after several price rises our allotment is for what it gives in return.

There are of course several other elements to that health boost. In terms of emotional well-being the sight of beds full of delicious veg can only be good. And as regards the inner man, when your daily diet includes lettuce, fresh herbs, courgettes, sweetcorn, spuds, kohl rabi, turnip, beetroot and carrot all picked or dug that day there is no need for vitamin pills (supposedly bad for you anyway), supplements, or any resort to those disgusting penances of wholewheat pasta, brown rice or bran-flakes.

What is the London Premium?

I caught the first few minutes of a property programme a week or so ago, and before I became bored and turned it off wondered about the premium paid for living in London.

A young couple were looking for a starter home, and expecting to pay up to £300k for a flat in Peckham.  Two bedrooms, nothing special, £300k. Our house in leafy Fulwood would fetch a bit more than that, but not a huge amount. We have four bedrooms, three bathrooms, a long garden with a stream at the end, and the view from my office at the back is all trees no houses.

We probably go to the theatre as much as most in London (i.e. not very much at all), one of the arguments always put forward for paying a premium to live in the capital. The great wen is buzzing economically, but how much more do you need to be paid to afford to live there? Most city workers commute, paying a fortune to do so in vile circumstances, leaving home early, getting back late.

Austin Mitchell recently made a speech in the Commons about how the capital was sucking investment in Britain dry. Good on him. When Manchester bid for the Olympics the government provided one free pack of post-it notes by way of support; London got whatever it took. The National Football Stadium should have gone to Brum ('It's too far away' per Diane Abbot at the time), easiest for the majority of the population to get to, but no, had to stay in Wembley. The Dome anyone?

If any further proof of this ridiculous bias is needed, look at the plans for HS2, justified largely as helping 'the provinces': work is to start in London, and if it ever gets beyond Birmingham I will wear an Ipswich shirt for a day.

At some point the overcrowding, absence of lowly-paid support personnel (without the money to live within sensible commute), and presence of Boris Johnson must reach a point where they make life unbearable. Except our London-focussed MPs (Mr M an honourable exception) will not suffer in the same way as the rest, and many won't even notice.

[a few weeks after this was written I read that 89 per cent of all transport infrastructure spending scheduled in the UK is for projects in London and the Southeast. That, however, excluded HS2, which may never happen and as I wrote above is surely destined to stop long before it reaches the wilds of the North]

We Have No Budget Yet...

I wasted 20 minutes of my time the other day applying for what was presented as freelance work with an outfit called Foodtripper. The reply had a variation on the theme 'We have no budget to pay you as yet, but...'. It really is about time that the Gorkanas and Travmedias of this world made those sending such alerts come out with it upfront. Foodtripper, however, will be flooded with pitches from eager young things keen to submit pieces for nothing.

'Everyone is a writer now' is a phrase that I've seen several times about the demotic nature of the internet. But it is wrong. Some can write, and others throw rubbish together. It would be more correct to say everyone thinks they writers now.

They have good reason to feel they can emulate many of the supposed professionals. I did some subbing a while back at a Sunday paper, and was horrified at the trash that came in as copy. One piece submitted by a showbiz 'writer' was the worst of a bad lot: sentences left incomplete, without flow, without style, it was drivel punctuated with the names of soapstars. Subbing there meant a total rewrite. A big name chef (or, if I am any judge, his PA) wrote a Valentine's recipe for an intimate meal - for four people. Cue exchange of mails and another rewrite. A showbiz profile got the name of the 'actress' wrong throughout. But at least they had the back-stop of sub-editors.

Writing is as much a craft as an art, where you learn the tricks of the trade, study how it is done, and take an interest in the tools you can use. You polish words, rework, try different things, and with sweat and luck and thought end up with something more than readable. A good writer too should read and read and read. Look at a few pieces on the sites of certain online publishers and you'll see the output of those who have bypassed the learning phase, and don't read anything except Hello, or Vogue for the real highbrows. And if they have sub-editors it doesn't show.

Grow Your Own and Then Some

If the media are to be believed then Britain is undergoing a renaissance of grow your own, and even raise your own, as back gardens fill with chicken coops. But why is this?

There are so many reasons that a list is the best option here:

• It's economic and times are tougher. I have calculated - back of the envelope style - that we save about £1000 a year by growing our own fruit and veg, and that was before we got chickens. Next year I intend from January 1st keeping a diary of what is spent on seeds, compost etc, and what the estimated price of the produce we get to eat would be, to prove the economic case.

• The fantastic variety: with what we have growing now on our allotment and in the kitchen garden here we have, depending on how you score the thing, nearly 40 different vegetables (I count things with different uses, rather than varieties, so radicchio, Catalogna chicory and sugar loaf count as three, but the eight or 10 different lettuces is one). On top of that we have more than a dozen fruits.

• That variety means we get to eat stuff that never makes it to the shops - Hamburg Parsley roots, asparagus chicory, Chinese artichokes, cima di rapa, loads of different chilies, Swiss chard, fresh borlotti beans, tiny broad beans (the shops go for biggies which are bitter and mealy) quince...

• It is great exercise. For a couple of years I had a gym membership, and loathed the tedium of machines and the narcissistic people using them. In the end my £25/month meant one reluctant visit over that period. Digging, carrying, pulling etc etc take it out of you, but with a purpose that obviates the need for posing mirrors.

• We control what we put on our plants, so can be confident that our salad has not been sprayed with noxious pesticide and stored in an unpleasant gas.

• The supermarkets choose veg for looks (so they sell) not taste, and for keeping quality. Not taste is an important thing. If you grow your own then keeping quality is secondary, as the bulk of the stuff you produce is harvested and eaten the same day or within two at most. The difference between our own new spuds and the ones bought from Sainsbury's is incredible, especially if we dig, cook and eat them within an hour.

It Was the Best of Times, It Was the Worst of Times

We are having the finest summer for six years, though given that means about one week of sunshine that's more a reflection on the vileness of the weather in previous years. The spring though was, in Britain at least, the coldest for half a century.

Combine those two phenomena and it is making gardening a bit of a bugger, which for those of us who enjoy eating food we grow is beyond annoying. We are at least three weeks further back in the growing year than we would normally be, and now the ground is exceptionally dry so to prevent everything running to seed or dying off watering is needed.

In a spare moment the other day I calculated we had 44 different fruits and vegetables on our allotment (and you can add to that another two or three like fennel grown in the garden but not the plot). That isn't counting different varieties of the same thing either. So in spite of the conditions we can hope for some plenty to come, which is probably one definition of the allotment gardener.

Lettuces for Less

Not sure if this should go in the Austerity Cook blog or here, but given it is about growing food rather than cooking, and concerns saving money, here it shall be.

We have a friend to thank for this tip. Thanks Louise.

Supermarkets sell cartons of 'living salad' for (in the case of Sainsbury's at least) £1. Buy one, harden the plants off with a few days outside and nights inside, then separate and plant them. We got 19 plants from one such container, all of which have proven healthy, and about half of which have been eaten already - they give you a quick start while your own seed-grown stuff is still on the way.

Another money saver that some gardeners won't be aware of: when you harvest a lettuce like this, leave a few of the outer leaves on the root, water it, and with luck you'll get a second plant in a few weeks.

Lettuce forms the basis of so many great things other than salads, so it's one of the must-haves in the garden. Cook peas fresh or frozen with a few leaves of green lettuce, some butter, and scraps of bacon fried till crisp and you have an approximation of petit pois a la francaise, a vegetable course in itself. They braise well in the oven too, again with a bit of bacon plus some stock to moisten things.

When you pay £1 a piece for decent lettuces in store such things can seem a bit extravagant; but when you have effectively paid about 5p for the growing salad jobbies they're a bargain. And if they are grown from seed we're talking a lot less than 1p each. Get growing.

Sublime and Ridiculous

The last few days have provided me with personal examples of the worst sort of product of the consumer society, and not far off the best.

To begin with the worst: I bought a belt at Sainsbury's on May 17th. It looked smart but casual, something to wear with jeans. Today, May 29th, I returned it just before it had time to break. The backing had peeled off, and it was nearly worn through. At the customer service desk there was no argument, just immediate repayment. It left a bad taste nevertheless, this was a waste of effort, something so temporary and so poorly done.

The best by way of contrast is a pair of fairly smart brown boots (the sort you can just about wear with a suit if needs be) that I bought I think before my now sixth-former son was born. They have finally worn through at the sole. I am tempted to have them repaired, but as I bought a second pair at the time (oxblood rather than brown) that I have worn far less, perhaps not.

Those boots were not expensive - if memory serves a pair cost £15, reduced drastically at I think Clark. Doubtless they were not stylish enough. But they lasted maybe 20 years.

If all shoes lasted 20 years would shoe shops go bust? Not necessarily, I have bought other pairs meanwhile.  But carry such workmanship over to other things and we would be depleting world resources at a far slower, maybe even sustainable rate.

Dry - or it Could Be Wet

Five or six years ago every gardening section of the Sundays and every green-fingered programme on TV here would feature ways to prepare your patch for drought. Experts would suggest plants that needed little water, come up with methods of saving the few drops that fell from the skies, and visit sun-drenched lands for insights into dealing with dryness.

Since then it has poured down every bloody summer. Much of the rest of the year too.

It is not just the domestic gardener who is suffering of course, commercial growers have had poor yields: wheat crops too wet to cut; drowned fields of cabbages and carrots; orchards whose blossom and the hope of a harvest has washed away.

The upshot for us is that we're wondering about a polytunnel again. Not for the allotment, as sadly they offer too tempting a target for vandals who think slashing the plastic while nobody is around is the height of daring. They are not things of beauty, but we love growing our own food, and maybe could camouflage it to avoid it being seen from the house, our garden being helpfully long.

It is the second half of May, and we already worry that this year's harvest will be poor. Nature has a way of fighting back, but if the cold weather - we lit a fire yesterday and it was very welcome - and the daily rain continue then potatoes and strawberries will rot again, courgettes struggle to get started, and salads look bruised and battered.

British weather is seeing higher peaks and lower troughs, the extreme weather events of newsroom cliche. Given the choice I'd prefer dry to drown though.

Legally Required

My son has started to look at universities and university courses. Cue parental comments on time passing so quickly - though certain things have not changed: every prospectus must apparently have a picture of students sitting/lying on the grass, just as they did in the late 18th century when I was a nervous sixth-former.

Which led me to think of other such tropes and covert legal requirements. A related item is the newspaper image on A level results day of three pretty girls jumping in the air.

One from my business-travel days is odder: every international flight I ever went on had a nun or a priest as a passenger. These days I wonder if they were air marshals in disguise.

And on the roads it is apparently illegal for BMWs to drive in the inside lane of any motorway.

Bees and Cod

Today and other programmes are abuzz, as it were, with discussion of the danger posed to bees by a certain type of pesticide. It is clear that the bee population is suffering, though how much of that is down to the several years of wet weather we have (not) enjoyed is unclear. But on the precautionary principal alone I cannot see how we are willing to take the risk that these chemicals can continue to be used.

Except I can - it is the power of lobbying by a narrow interest group with a lot to lose, in this case the chemical suppliers. Years ago governments in North America took no notice of the obvious decline of the cod population on the Grand Banks. Fishery companies stated that it was a natural fluctuation; a blip; small measures would be enough to address the situation. Eventually when even pork-barrel politicians could not ignore the numbers a full ban on fishing there was imposed, but too late as the stocks have never returned to anything like their former glories. 

If we do that with bees, we lose a major pollinator and so we will lose commercial production of many fruits and vegetables - a few enthusiasts may pollinate by hand, but economically it is hard to imagine that working on farms here. I have read of parts of China where the bee population has been destroyed by pesticides, and the farmers told to hand-pollinate their trees. The lesson surely is not that there is an alternative way of pollinating, but rather  not to wipe out the bees in the first place. But today in London and Brussels MPs, MEPs and ministers will be wined and dined by lobbyists repeating their mantras - the scientific evidence is not yet, as it probably never can be, 100 per cent conclusive.  

Eco Tech

Yesterday I went to Brockholes, a nature reserve on the edge of Preston (the entrance yards from M6 junction 31 aka the Tickled Trout junction). It was developed from the ruins of a quarry, so has a series of ponds/lakes/meres now used by a wide variety of birds. The interesting bit though was the buildings, floating on one of those expanses of water. They are now blending into the landscape, the wood graying with time. A nice bit of eco-technology all round, though they do need to do some planting.

What was more interesting for me, however, was another sign of the age. In the restaurant there were a couple of old gents I'd guess in their mid-seventies. Last of the Summer Wine and all that. But one of them had a touch-screen phone out and was flicking through messages or numbers, totally at ease with it. I worry about my father's isolation, his friends dying off, and his health (and natural inclination) keeping him indoors. This chap was clearly the opposite, in touch and licking the bowl of life clean, technology helping him do so, and good on him for that.

Circular Chickens

It is not the chickens which are circular - though I'd pay good money to see that - but what they are involved with, namely being living bins for our waste vegetable matter. I made some vegetable stock yesterday, the onion, carrots, celery etc simmered to soggy mush by the end. Not appetizing for us, but with a bit of grain mixed in it made a treat for the hens.

I thought of this listening to Drive on 5-Live today, where people are complaining about recycling - not about doing it, but the stupidity of separating everything out then the council putting it all in one munching truck. Recycling and reuse are economic and sensible, but we don't get it right often enough. A lot of the glass from recycling is, so I have been told, used as cullet, one of the layers in building up a road. that is use of course, but it isn't the best use surely, as recycled it could go round and round. Circular glass in fact.

We like the idea of a pig to take this one stage further, but as a) our neighbours might not be so keen; and b) our Victorian house's deeds state in terms we have to have a 12 foot wall if we want to keep pigs, it isn't practical. Which is a pity, as with a lifelong love of Wodehouse and Blandings (I recently declared myself Life President of the Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe Defence League) I'd love to raise a fat pig like the Empress. Who (not which for such a character) was indeed circular.

Back to the Allotment Blues

For an all too brief time (like Norwich's lead over Arsenal this afternoon) we had what felt like the first day of summer today. Unless I missed it we missed out spring this year. We dashed to the allotment to plant our spuds, far later than in any of the seven previous years on the plot. Or rather the first lot of spuds, we have two more to do.

Not just spuds. A few beans went in, which like second marriages shows the triumph of hope over experience. It was a clearing up from last year day too, so a load of leeks, purple sprouting broccoli and Brussels sprouts were harvested. All of which changes my thoughts about the weekend's food, but then bounty like that is not to be wasted.

The tidying up included chopping down the last six feet of the pear tree we had lopped a few months back. I was busy with a handsaw for ten minutes, then a kind neighbour came over with his petrol-driven jobbie and had the thing down in about ten seconds. But I did saw up some of the trunk into smaller sections to dry off and bring home for the burner - and the new smoker. I collected a bag of the apple logs and logettes that had been drying in the shed over the winter with an eye to making some wood chips for the new toy.

Then it rained and ended both our plans to use the smoker - smoking food in the damp is apparently a waste of time - and the fleeting flash of summer.

With true male logic having a smoker means we need to do more fishing trips, to catch things to smoke, especially mackerel. They'll have to be local, as mackerel don't keep at all well. At the supermarket yesterday I had a look for the fish in case they had some good ones I could experiment on, but their stock had the dead eyes and skin tone of a heroin user.

What Are You Smoking?

I just bought a ready-made home smoker, wimping out of making the design I had in my head for a garden incinerator topped with a dustbin (both new of course) fitted with rods and racks. One motive is simply wanting to give it a go, another something of a V-sign to the food fascists, eating more than a single slice of bacon every six months apparently risking Death's instant scythe.

The third is my fascination, or is it obsession, with the wood for free from our garden and allotment. I have a stack of pear logs in the allotment shed, and in the front-garden wood-store a similar stash of apple wood. They were cut with the intention of burning them in our stove, but from all accounts they smell divine when alight and we would miss that if the wood-burner's door is closed as it should be.

Sadly the weather has turned damp and drizzly, not it seems the ideal for smoking food. But watch this space (if anyone is reading this at all) for reports on progress once it brightens again, and I have laid in a stock of salt and salmon.

FYI the smoker is a telescopic thing, supposedly good for cold- as well as hot-smoking, 29cm wide and when extended 92cm tall (if memory serves), complete with a rack, hooks and drip tray, not cheap at just shy of £100 but it is well-made. They provided a starter-pack of sawdust, which will be added to with our own hardwood stuff as and when, plus I intend splitting pear and apple logs down to the thinnest possible slivers and cutting those into chips, ideally not covered in blood from my fingers. A man can dream.

The Decline of the British Pub Quiz

An addendum to the post on why pubs close. Our Thursday visit coincided with the pub's quiz. We were there to chat, so didn't bother (though I love trivia, with which my mind overflows), but couldn't help hearing some of the questions. Two repeated here I think verbatim were:

"Name something you can do in a lift."

"Give a different name for an American policeman."

I am reasonably sure the quiz-master was not an absurdist comedian. The alternative explanation is obvious.

The Decline of the British Pub

Every other time you read a newspaper there's a story about pubs closing, the angle invariably and unimaginatively that this reflects terrible economic times.

I have an alternative thesis. Too many pubs and the British 'craft' beers they sell are rubbish. A couple of mates and I go for the occasional pint, and I estimate that three of five we purchase are below mediocre, one in five undrinkable. On Thursday our last local in reasonable distance was a case in point. They are having their spring beer festival. Three of eight beers were left on, one a stout, another a Scottish 'heavy', and the third a golden ale. We chose the last. It was tasteless but not complaint material. I opted for well-made lager for round two. My mate's 'same again' was not possible as by then it too was off.

Someone we talked to had to wait 90 minutes for a curry. There were just two experienced people behind the bar, plus one lad of about 12, so you had to wait for a good 10 - 15 minutes to be served. Why bother.

In my writing job I regularly speak to brewers. One medium-sized firm has set up a centre to teach bar-staff how to keep and pull a pint, as they recognize what the problem is.

Many artisan brewers who've appeared over the last two decades brew vile beer. Most of the bad ones disappear, happily, but before they do they have spoiled evenings at pubs daft enough to buy their slops for new drinkers keen to try real ale. Some will switch back to factory-made cider, which at least will be refreshing, others to vodka shots. Many will reason they can buy excellent bottled beers to enjoy at home, below £2 for a characterful pint in front of the TV, no designated driver or taxi.

There are good artisan brewers. A few months back I enjoyed a pint made by Frodsham Brewery, nice hoppy flavour, and well kept. That is the exception. Especially the well kept bit. Eventually drinkers reason that £3.10 or above for a pint of cloudy vinegary flat greyness is a price not worth paying. And pubs close.

Government Energy Policy - Cross Our Fingers

The recent cold weather has highlighted the fragility of Britain's energy supplies. Sellafield went into controlled shutdown because of the dangers posed to the workforce by snow; for whatever reason the gas pipe into Bacton, one of the three that keeps the country going, conked out briefly the other day. And our train system that feeds fuel to the major power stations in West Yorkshire is not as robust as it could be - the wrong sort of snow and all that. Add the strains on the system from increased demand because of bad weather here and over the other side of the Channel and it's worrying.

Why we haven't legislated to make a couple of solar panels compulsory on all new build houses is beyond me. Likewise some ration of panel to roof area for offices and other commercial property. Not a solution, but a contribution to one. It was not reassuring yesterday to hear a politician from the department of energy say that there was little chance of gas running out. Little, which translated from message-speak means it is a distinct possibility. There was a frightening headline, albeit tucked away on a back page, in Saturday's Telegraph: Gas to Run out in Two Weeks.

We have an open fire and a wood-burner as back-up. With memories of sitting in the dark in the seventies in my head I added 100 tea lights to my shopping on Friday, and called in for a few packs of compressed sawdust heat-bricks to fuel the stove. Wood chopping in the winter now seems all the more worthwhile, the greenhouse holding a dozen or more bags of firewood.

It is not just heat generation of course, but retention, so this weekend I have been round the house with a sealant gun fixing the little gaps that develop around windows. Small measures but effective and cheap. As would be solar panels if their own dogma (and lobbying by carbon fuel suppliers) allowed our political masters to push them properly. Instead of which we are promised a new nuclear power station in god knows how many years, something announced with much fanfare while the closure of five other conventional units merited not so much a press release as a press escape.

So the government policy is to keep fingers crossed for a bit and hope we're ok. With the fall-back position of blaming it on the previous government, as the previous government when it becomes the next government will also do. Which surely makes us all feel warm inside. Just as well as we could end up facing freezing temperatures without power at some points in the not too distant.

Prescott on Rhetoric and Other Very Wrong Books

This morning a happy coincidence set me on a train of thought that kept my little mind amused for a good ten minutes.

On the BBC website I noticed a section where Ranulph Fiennes was giving tips on staying warm in the cold. Given our greatest living twit seemingly returns from every ridiculous stuntspedition with shorter fingers than he started out with, this struck me as singularly inappropriate.

Then for reasons of my own I was checking out Ed Reardon's Week, that very wonderful radio sitcom, and within seconds had tears of laughter streaming as I read that one of his coffee table books was Nigel Mansell's Love Poetry. If you know Mr Mansell and don't smile when you see that, check your pulse.

I was thus led to think about books that would be as wrong as the above, or Sir R(s) advising on avoiding frostbite. These were a few of the resulting titles:


Prescott on Rhetoric

Gordon Brown's Big Book of Team-building

Jeremy Clarkson's History of the Family Car

A Life of Struggle, by David Cameron

Ed Miliband's Guide to the World of Work

David Miliband: Time to Make a Stand

Kerry Katona's Relationship Guide

Building Consensus, by Michael Gove (with a foreword by Margaret Thatcher)

An Introduction to Socialism, by Tony Blair

Paul Gascoigne's Ten Tips on Career Change



If anyone is reading this (one wonders) and has their own suggestions for similar titles (non-libelous please) feel free to communicate them.

Fishing Pond

As I wrote already today on my other blog, I am fascinated by the idea of having a pond for fish and for fishing. My son and I are keen and not very good fishermen, and far more interested in sea fishing than coarse, but the idea is an appealing one.

Reading Parson Woodforde's diary (highly recommended, a fantastic insight into real life in the 18th century, and in a strange way a compelling soap opera avant la lettre) I was taken with his own obsession for a time with stocking, filling, and generally taking care of his own fishing pool or pools. Tench featured regularly on his menus, as did eels (best not to promote the eating of them at present given they are in decline), and if memory serves carp. I cooked carp once, bought on Bury Market as a Christmas Eve treat for my late Polish father-in-law. It tasted muddy and very unexciting, but I think in his grumpy way he appreciated the effort.

We do have an ornamental pond in our garden, and have managed to keep goldfish alive for several years in there, plus a few tiny perch (I think). Recent visits by a heron (can't help thinking about the instructions in Hannah Glasse about how to dress one of these birds) have almost certainly emptied the pond of fish, so perhaps in the warmer months we'll restock with something edible.

Given the weather the last few years has been wet, wet wet, thus parts of the garden are sodden after the merest drizzle now, it could be a good idea to expand the pond, or dig a much larger one designed for the purpose. I guess my wife will have her say on that. As we have lots of trees which drop leaves aplenty it may not be truly practical here. The fun of raising tench, perch and whatever other species are compatible and obtainable, is another aspect to this, and so of course is dropping a hook and line in to catch one for tea.

And yes, tench, perch etc are fine to eat. Perch is a treat in Switzerland, where I have eaten it. My memory is that the flesh was quite sweet, a bit like dab. They need a good sauce, but then so do quite a few more frequently eaten fishes.

Big Freeze and Chickens

As ever with any threat of cold weather the media are predicting death and terror. Here on the west side of the country we tend to avoid major snowfalls, but when we do get them it makes life a bit tougher for the chickens, and along with the duty to look after them there is what happens to the egg yield to consider.

Ours are bright enough (a relative term as regards hens) to spend more time in their house when it gets really cold, but if there is a frost it still affects them - they can't for instance figure out what to do with frozen grass, the non-frozen variety being a big source of food for them when they roam the garden. That grass is supposed to help with the yellowness of the yolk, so I'll supplement the diet with scraps of our greens to balance it out. And if they are using loads of energy to fight the cold they lay fewer eggs (ours are intelligent enough not to lay less eggs), so I up their feed (not that they are ever without anyway) and include some cheap (cheep? I hate myself) porridge oats, said to be the best thing for them in the cold.

Anyone reading this and thinking about keeping chickens? A few pointers:

1: It's easy. Get a very basic book and read up before buying.
2: Make sure you fox-proof their home as far as that's possible.
3: Go for the bog-standard brown hens, not the fancier breeds. They are healthy and lay more frequently.
4: It's kind, and economic, to give them plenty of time ranging free. If you have a garden they can make a bit of a mess, but they fertilize it and make inroads into snails and slugs and other nasties, especially near fruit trees.
5: We had a rat problem briefly, as the hen-house was then far too near a hedge - good cover for the vermin - and probably because we were sloppy with the odds-and-sods we fed our hens. Make sure the hen-house is in the open.

Austerity Banking

On a blog followed by a blogger I follow came across the idea of Sealed Pot Sunday. Why Sunday I have yet to figure out, perhaps the alliteration was too tempting. The basic idea is just that of a kid's piggy bank, saving money for about a year (for some reason December 3rd the date to open the pots) and then splurging what is found in the pot on Christmas or perhaps travel. The money is meant to be loose change, any coins found on the street etc, and for some the money saved with special deals or selling stuff. We decided to give it a go.

It struck me that this campaign or trend says something about our continuing distrust of banks, and certainly of Christmas savings schemes (I have never been tempted by those, partly because every year you hear of someone absconding with the dosh, or of a firm going bust - yet to understand how that can happen).

I put my loose change in a pot previously, banking the money when a certain coin reached the £1 or whatever mark specified on bank coin bags, so today transferred the contents of that to the new bigger pot. It will take some work to sort all the coins collected over a year, bag them and bank them, but maybe it will be worth it - the plan is to use the dosh for a break, whether that be a night in a hotel, a few days in a cottage, or something more exotic.

What we will not be doing is using the coin counting machines you see in supermarkets. I'm not sure if they are all the same, but I had a look at one some time back and noticed it took 25% for doing the sorting and giving you a voucher. When I saw that I alerted a guy about to tip in a massive bag of coppers, but he either thought I was a loony, or didn't understand the idea of 25% being lost, or was so flush he didn't care as he went ahead anyway.  

Waste Not

I just spent a happy half hour digging three barrowfuls of compost out of our kitchen-waste compost bin. The main driver for this was there being so little room at the top that something had to come out of the bottom.

Some of the goodness has doubtless leached out in the several months the stuff had to rot down, but it looks good and smells ok - I love the way gardeners talk about how good compost smells 'sweet'. It was dumped on one of the raised beds in which we grow (in the main) salad stuff, heavier duty crops being reserved for the allotment.

There is something immensely pleasing about how the bits of veg peelings, fruit skins, and the odd dose of chicken poo (great accelerator) can turn into such useful and free material for future crops. It was full of worms too, some of them now being turned into eggs in the innards of our hens who were out when I was doing this.