Among friends

I had a very nice time with friends at the SoH gig on Saturday night - while I'm used to going to things on my own, it's really nice not to have to do it!

Anyway, it was another lovely friendly day: today it was Rosie's birthday, and her husband Graham treated her, me and Manda to lunch at the Rice Boat, and it was lovely - I hadn't been there before and the food was extremely good. I had the Syrian Christian Stew which was coconutty and flavouresome, and the best paratha ever...

Here are Graham, Rosie and Manda at the millpond; and they're looking at the mill-race, which is a little bit mad. The Cam is just about to flood at the moment - there's water well over the rollers between the Grantchester stretch and the millpond, which we skipped daintily through...

We started and finished at the GradPad, which had its usual slightly mad but very friendly bar-people working... and it was a lovely day. Thanks, Rosie!

Food meme

Carrying on from yesterday's tale of foodie delights, here's a food meme nicked from nhw - I've changed the formatting slightly because Blogger doesn't seem to offer "strike through" as an option.

Bold type shows foods I've eaten, normal type things I haven't but would consider, italics foods I'd never eat, and those items which are asterisked are foods I've eaten but probably wouldn't bother with again or would actively avoid!

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea*
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari*
12. Pho
13. Peanut butter and jelly sandwich*
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn or head cheese*
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche in ice cream
28. Oysters*
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut*
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin (but only as in "kaolin and morphine"...)
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho*
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail*
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

Two days' worth

This is going to sound like "the dog ate my homework..."; I did blog yesterday, but Blogger seems to have completely eaten the post! No draft, no finished post, no Bloglines entry... Weird. It was just about another very lovely I Knit evening, but Yvonne has posted one of the pics I took of her in her unfeasibly quickly completed jacket...

While at I Knit we hatched a Plan. We'd originally intended to take the afternoon, do lunch and go to Borough Market, but I double-booked myself and could only get away at 3. So Yvonne and I met up at 3:30 anyway, did the market (I have a haul of poussins, pomegranate molasses, some extremely fine sweet-pickled gherkins, a couple of things which are presents, some tiny baby peppers (think about 1.5" high), red endives and strawberries). Delicious. It really is a stunning market - it's been a while since I went there, and I only went once and right at the end of the day. When I was living in London, Dalston Market was my nearest one and that was very fine, but Borough is something else...

After the market, Yvonne introduced me to the delights of the shop and tranquility of the refectory of Southwark Cathedral (where that last photo was taken), and some knitting was done.

Then we went on a wander towards Waterloo, taking in the sights of the Golden Hinde, Vinopolis, the Globe (another very nice gift shop), various bits of the South Bank including Tate Modern and the Millennium Bridge, the OXO building, where we looked longingly through the window of Annie Sherburne's shop, which thankfully wasn't open at the time, and on to Gabriel's Wharf, which was fabulous. Near Blackfriars Bridge there were these pillars jutting out of the water - you can't see all the seagulls perched on them in this picture... We wondered briefly what they were for...

and then found the answer: the London, Chatham and Dover Railway bridge...

Increasingly aware of the weight of our shopping and the distance we'd wandered at the end of a hard week, we staggered on through the Southbank Centre, where this colourful crowd was preparing to set off on a Free Tibet cycle ride to the Chinese Embassy near Regent's Park,

and on to Waterloo and the train home.

Thanks, Yvonne, for showing me your patch of London, and I'll definitely be back to many of the places! It really felt like a holiday despite only leaving work an hour early...

Holiday at home: Norwich

I've been here this week, generally getting things sorted out for work and so on...


Funny sort of day on Monday. I decided to try Marks and Spencer for work-clothes. Checked their website, verified which stores had a Plus department, decided on Norwich (I'd been to Peterborough earlier in the summer)... Got there after an hour and a half on the train and half an hour's walk up the hill - no Plus department. None anywhere, apparently, now! I'm not going to have a rant here - I've channelled my energies into a stinking complaint letter with attached rail ticket for refund, which should have got to them today. We'll see whether it brings any results. But evidently the M&S website is pretty out of date, so don't trust it for any other details either!

Given that I'd drawn a blank there, I made the best of the rest of the day which was sunny and warm. Country and Eastern, one of my favourite Norwich shops, had moved; but they'd left directions to their new store on the shopfront of the old one and it was spectacular, a renovated Victorian skating rink.

This photo was sneaked from the top balcony, where the small textile items are, looking down at the furnishings, architectural features etc. below... There's a picture of how it all looked as a skating rink here. I only bought one small item and it's a present...

I also had a thoroughly lovely holiday French lunch at a basement place in the market-place I've been to before. I think it's called the Wine Cellar now - I'm pretty sure it was called 'La Vigne' or something last time. Anyway. They do something called a 'meze' which was actually a plateful of warm duck confit and merguez, caperberries, tapenade, grilled baguette and salad... there are fish and veggie versions available too. And a very nice glass of Picpoul de Pinet. Perfect. I could almost hear the cicadas.

With my usual unerring sense of direction, once I had really, really tired feet I headed out of town back over the river... forgetting entirely that Norwich is in a loop of the river. I should know this - I did, after all, go to school in Durham, which is a more extreme version of the same phenomenon. So I saw a bridge, crossed it - and, it turns out, headed dead north for the station, which is actually at the south-east of the town... After a while, I found the bypass - and had a not-so-happy 45 minutes following it round the town to the station... By the time I was getting back to the river, though, the sun was setting, and it did all look very pretty...

MS3, stage 3

There's quite a lot of knitting going on here, but most of it of the 'move along, nothing to see' variety. Apart from Mystery Stole 3. Here's Clue 3 roughly blocked. The "shadow of the Cross" effect is slightly creepy, but the light was really bizarre and that's the window-frame in the way... At long last there was enough light to take pictures of the beads, which are subtle but lovely.

The resident inspector seems to approve, anyway.

I made a present for a friend a couple of weeks ago, which has now been handed over, so here's Sue's Pot, drying upside down over the glass jar I use for holding balls of yarn so they don't fly around the floor while I'm knitting. It was made of felted Paterna tapestry wool, a present from Jan a couple of years ago - the colours are gorgeous and it so nearly didn't leave the house...

And this is Sunday night's production - a friend came round with a couple of kilos of jostaberries, and I had a bag of birds' eye chilis left from my Chinese supermarket trip the weekend before, so jelly was made...