This is a shot looking into a small building in the grounds of Sanssouci, an absolutely delightful palace and gardens in Potsdam that we visited as a day trip from Berlin a few years ago. I like the composition and the way the light from the stained glass window falls across the stairs. I think I was poking my lens through the bars across a window from outside at the time.
Another quick photo from my trip to Waddesdon Manor. This is the Rubber Tree, constructed entirely from old rubber tyres. Nice concept!
We went to meet some friends for lunch and a wander at Waddesdon Manor, a National Trust property near Aylesbury, about halfway between us in St Albans and them in Birmingham. We're all NT members so it's completely free to park and get in!
It's a bit of a strange place in that it's one of the most opulent and well looked after NT houses I've been to. Perhaps there is some private money in play too – courtesy of the Rothschild's – that web link above is not a National Trust website, though they have their own page on the place as well. Strange.
We didn't explore that much of it this time (we've been there once before) since we had our friends' giggling young one in tow. But we did see the front garden (driveway, grass, trees, sadly dry fountain) and the back (mountainous flower-beds and pleasant water features overlooking distant countryside – see pictures) and the inside (no photos allowed) and the Stables for lunch.
Last time we visited, we ate in the fancy kitchen restaurant and I had the most wonderful duck ever, along with a cracking glass of red. This time we went for the family option in the Stables restaurant and though the service was a bit slipshod and the glasses dirty, the food was really surprisingly good.
Right from the start I’ll point out that God Lager is Swedish for good lager, though the rear label makes plenty of hints that this is in fact a divine beverage. I bought it from Waitrose purely because it looked a little unorthodox on the shelf and seemed to promise something that it could surely never live up to.
And frankly it didn’t. This is a fairly straightforward lager in pretty much every sense, though it has a very fine bubble (in fact it almost seemed flat) that gives it a somewhat classy feel, but only just. Maybe it only achieves perfection in being the perfect example of average, unassuming lager? Even if it is, I need something with a bit more flavour to get excited about. Still – credit to the Nils Oscar Company’s marketing department for a good gimmick.
We went to Whipsnade Zoo at the weekend, because it's fairly close by (surprisingly so – only took 25 mins from St Albans) and we've been meaning to for a while. A two-for-one voucher from a cereal box was the clincher, saving us £17 on the entry price. We did exactly the same for London Zoo a couple of months back. With Whipsnade being run by ZSL it's a sort of outpost of London Zoo and so we couldn't help but compare and contrast the two.
We played Scrabble this evening and I beat my wife. I should hastily point out that those are not two unconnected statements! I mean to say I won. But it was a struggle since I had the Q right from the start and she was hoarding Us in the hope of finding that Q. It ended how you see it below with our two remaining tiles never to be united. Sob.
Taken in Dorset near Lulworth Cove when we went down for a long weekend last summer. I love the way the seagull is camouflaged against the rock.
I picked up a paperback copy of this book from the River Cottage open day a couple of months back. We queued for a good long while to get my wife’s big new Hugh cookery book signed, but I didn’t trouble him with my less significant purchase. I later discovered that it was signed inside the front cover anyway. Obviously he was taking no chances!
I also discovered that it wasn’t quite what I thought it was. Not for the first time, I had failed to notice that this is a collection of previous scribblings by the floppy haired foodie, from various Sunday supplements and trendy lifestyle magazines. Jeremy Clarkson pulled the same trick on me a couple of years back. Thing is, they don’t go out of their way to make it clear just what you’re buying, choosing the words on the cover oh so cleverly, to be accurate but not quite clue you in if you didn’t already know. I find this ironic since a lot of the book consists of Hugh pouring forth with righteous indignation about all the commercial dishonesty out there in the food business.
The first chapter is actually a bit wearing as Hugh lays it on extremely thick, making and re-making the same simple points over and over again about McDonalds and their ilk. It got a bit tiresome and I very nearly gave up entirely. However I persevered and it got better from there on, though the whole volume is still preachy and sometimes patronising. That said, yesterday I bought Waitrose’ organic cheddar even though it was 10p per kilo more expensive that the normal stuff, which is no doubt made out of cigarette butts and arsenic, with old AA membership cards ground up and added for colour. Actually I bet it’s exactly the same bar the packaging. So Hugh’s taught me two things there: to search out decent ingredients with good provenance; and to maintain an unhealthy level of cynicism and suspicion at all times.
Overall it’s a good book that I’d recommend for anyone that likes Hugh to start with and just likes good food writing. The best bits of the book are the gastronomic exotica that the cover promises and Hugh’s excellent style, full of wit and anecdote and very giving of himself. He does go on about brains a lot though.
The missus had the brilliant idea of going to see England play at Wembley, so we did just that yesterday! It's quite a slick operation, as you'd hope, with the tube and the venue doing an impressive job of getting 90,000 fans to and from the game. In fact the Jubilee line tube we left on was only half-full as the old bridges at the station just can't deliver people to the platform fast enough. Still, it only took about 30 mins to get from our seat into a tube.
