Wednesday 18 November 2009

Went for a lovely dinner with Kate and Steve on Friday at The Crown at Playhatch, a local gastropub-type establishment. To start, Ruth and I shared the king tiger prawns wrapped in crispy potato strings, which were certainly artistic although slight risk of firing shards of crispy potato string into fellow diners’ eyes. The slices of rare¹ duck breast I had for a main course were very nice although I’m not sure what ‘pommes fur’ are.

Have been on something of a roll this week with Freecycling. Advertised an old IKEA double bed frame at around 2pm on Saturday and by 3pm had had seven replies from interested parties. A young lad duly came round on Sunday and loaded it all into his car. Wonderful notion that people will just come to your house and take away your old junk.

Jurys, Birmingham

Late in the day, Harley has proved himself a chewer. I had been rejoicing in the fact that Harley and Lola seem much less inclined than the late Jake to chew books/paper/clothing, which had led me rashly to store a pile of books on a low shelf in the dining room. This week I came home to find several with nibbles out of the spines. Rabbits apparently do need to chew constantly in order to keep their teeth worn down, so chewing is to be applauded, but they are provided with a plentiful supply of hay for this purpose. Lola enjoys hay but Harley appears to spurn it in favour of, this week at least, Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway and the International Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs.

Spent Tuesday evening and Wednesday of this week at the Lifelong Learning Networks’ National Conference at the Jurys Inn, Birmingham. The conference was enjoyable enough and the hotel was nice on the whole – in my experience Jurys tend to have nice rooms but indifferent food, which was pretty much borne out. Am permanently amazed though as to why mass catering is so often so mediocre. At the conference dinner on Tuesday night, the main course was advertised as ‘medallions of fillet steak’ – to which I thought OK, sounds quite nice. The steak duly turned up – overdone, but that’s par for the course, but my suspicions were aroused when a dish of well done boiled vegetables then appeared at my elbow. The worst was confirmed when roast potatoes and gravy appeared a minute later. I mean WHAT IS THE POINT of serving fillet steak if you’re going to then turn it into a roast dinner? Personally I like steak with pommes frites and either béarnaise or peppercorn sauce, or mustard. Not BLOODY ROAST POTATOES AND GRAVY. I mean. Honestly.

¹ By 'rare' I mean pink, obviously. I don’t know what type of duck it was but hopefully not an endangered species.

Fireworks; Jacksons; slow cookery

Park House

After work on Thursday went up to Park House for the Senior Common Room’s annual firework display. Had to fight for a seat in the bar beforehand for our pre-fireworks drink (Batemans 'Miss Luscious'¹ for me; some appley concoction (Olde English) for Ruth) and dinner – I partook of an uninspiring chicken korma, rebranded for the evening as ‘Fireworks Chicken Curry’. The fireworks were punctuated by the traditional ‘ooohs’ and ‘aaahs’ and, as a sign of the times, were preceded by announcements about first aiders, fire blankets, buckets of water, standing well back etc etc. Then went home and watched yet more fireworks out of the living room window.

Ruth and I spent several hours in town on Saturday that included paying a rare visit to Jacksons, a prominent Reading department store that against all the odds, has resisted modernisation and is now a true museum piece – uneven floors, menswear departments staffed by doddery looking elderly gentlemen with tape measures round their neck and a peculiar system of dispensing change that means that if change is required it has to come down a tube from several floors above (one visualises a little old lady sitting in a dusty room on an upper floor – this site has a bit about the system; intriguing). Ruth bought a couple of hunting-themed Christmas presents for her family and had to wait some minutes after handing over a note before change appeared. God knows what would happen if you tried to pay with a credit card.

In the evening we had dinner afloat – Ray had been hopeful that his gas supply would be fitted by that time, but ‘twas not to be (the latest piece of advice he has been given is to look out someone at the marina site called ‘Bill the Pipe’). Instead, we had a slow-cooked stew that had a lovely flavour, but contained potatoes that had resolutely refused to cook despite having apparently been on for around 10 hours. I received a phone call the following morning to say that both the leftover stew and the slow cooker had been thrown out.

We gave Ray a gift of a canal-goer’s log book and a salt and pepper shaker painted in a traditional canal-boat design. His delight at receiving the latter can be seen in this heartwarming photo (I blame the motion of the boat, rather than the claret, for the lack of focus).

¹Actually I didn’t like the ML all that much, but the only other choice was Brakspear Bitter which is over-bitter for my palate – am not yet enough of a hardened real-ale drinker.

Neo-pagan dabblings; Cerridwen; twigs

On Saturday, I participated in a day of neo-pagan revivalism by attending a Goddess Workshop at The Crystal Dragon in Caversham (annoyingly amateurish website – get that background), a local business comprising a New Age shop selling crystals, tarot cards etc and a number of rooms out back that are used for a variety of alternative therapies including Crystal Light Bed Healing. Saturday’s workshop was titled ‘Dark Lady: Journey to Meet Cerridwen of the Cauldron’ and was timed to coincide with the festival of Samhain.

The workshop was led by Vicky, an apparently full-time ‘Priestess of Avalon’ who trained at the Isle of Avalon Foundation near Glastonbury (Vicky’s website is here). I was quite impressed with Vicky and at least two out of the four other women attending seemed quite normal. The day started with welcoming Cerridwen into the circle and went on to include making our own goddesses out of twigs bound together and scraps of material, and a dabble with scrying, which apparently involves staring intently at an object of your choice (crystal ball, bowl of water e.g.) and seeing what words/images emerge from your subconscious mind. I must have been doing something wrong as I didn’t find that anything much emerged, but the other women seemed to manage to find things to say although I cynically suspected that they might have been making it up. My goddess [pictured] turned out to be a somewhat abstract figure with a certain amount of difficulty in standing upright.

The only downside of the day was that it involved sitting on a thin cushion on a laminate floor for several hours. I could barely walk on Sunday.

After the workshop, Ruth and I had a nice dinner on Saturday evening with Claire and Helen - my autumnal pear tart was a reasonable success despite an initial pastry crisis. I had attempted, as I usually do, to make a bit of a seasonal display with autumn leaves and a pumpkin - as happened last year, I had barely arranged the leaves in the fireplace before cunning rabbity ears detected them and the munching began. Here's Lola really getting stuck in to the display. Disrespectful mare. Briefly considered sacrificing her to Cerridwen but then relented.