News from Nowhere

There will be more, and not too far off; but for now, it's over and we are back home.

D. researched restaurants in Berwick, and we booked Sunday lunch for the four of us at Audela (so called because it is immediately beyond the Old Bridge, though only if you approach from the south, which on this occasion we didn't). The causeway closed at 10.20 am, so we took both cars, and did our own thing: D. and valydiarosada visited a stately home (Paxton House), while durham_rambler and I visited the Union Chain Bridge for the first time since its renovation, and walked across it into Scotland. Since we still had some time, we drove further into Scotland, to Eyemouth (where once upon a time we used to breakfast after watching the sunrise - but that was long ago and much has changed since then).

Lunch was delightful. They offered a slightly incongruous mixture of haute cuisine and traditional Sunday roast, but I took my own advice, and had two starters: a very rich crab risotto with a sweet and juicy scallop on the top, a piece of chicken confit on an assortment of vegetables (less successful, and over-salt to my taste, which errs in that direction anyway); and a dessert which called itself cranachan but was unlike any cranachan I have met before, more raspberries than whisky cream, with a scattering of some sort of granola, all concealing an intense, ruby, sorbet. A glass of Puglian white wasn't earth-shattering, but refreshing and went well.

After which, Sunday afternoon was Sunday afternoon: I may even have slept, briefly. Later, I sat at the kitchen table writing the previous post, and thinking that the sky was getting darker and perhaps I wouldn't go for a walk after all - and then I saw this:



The building is the island's sewage pumping station, halfway between our cottage and the castle. It seemed like an appropriate 'last photo' (though I may post others in due course...

Yesterday, we stopped at Alnmouth on the way home.

It's a lovely drive from the Ayrshire coast to Kirkcudbright, even in the rain: you drive up the Doon valley into the hills, then follow the Water of Ken down again. The signs insist that it's the tourist route to Gretna, but you don't have to go there, you can just admire the scenery, soft green hills and silver water, trees dotted about for decoration, and plenty of sheep. At the top, just after the border, there's a herd of Belties, belted Galloway cows, to make it quite clear that you are now in Dumfries & Galloway: and we sighted another example of the road sign bearing the conventional 'Beware of cattle' image, edited by painting a broad white band across the midriff of the silhouette of the cow, so that it now conveys the message 'Beware of Belties'. (Previously spotted on last Sunday's Magical Mystery Satnav Tour.)*

We stopped in St John's Town of Dalry for lunch at the Clachan Inn. The quirky décor maybe goes a bit over the top - there's nothin wrong with any of it, in fact it's all fun, but there is just so much... But the food was terrific. We have a booking for this evening, so we couldn't do it justice, but they let us sit in the bar and order a starter from the menu: three juicy scallops in a nest of squid ink risotto, on a layer of creamed cauliflower (and a glass of dry cider). They don't open on Monday or Tuesday, or I'd be plotting to return.

When we reached Kirkcudbright, the on-again-off-again rain was on: rather than come straight to our hotel, we called in at the Galleries. I wanted to see their temporary exhibition, Andy Goldsworthy's 'Winter Harvest', but was a bit disappointed in it: I knew the title described some of his early work, but had hoped for some sort of context. Always a pleasure to look at the pictures, though. A floor down, we looked into Creative Legacies - William Hanna Clarke and Alison Kinnaird MBE because it was there, but with, if anything, a faint hostility (I'm opposed to heredity on principle). I knew nothing about either of them, and was very struck by some of Alison Kinnaird's glass pieces. Not everything: some finely engraved botanical images were beautifully done but - well, fiddly. But a war memorial, an architectural triptych and something you could call a self-portrait:



made a great impact, and while the lighting obviously helps, the use of light is part of the artwork, so that doesn't count against it. The piece shown is Red List, and depicts crafts which are on the Red List of Endangered Crafts, of which wheel-engraving is one (others pictured include Shetland lace knitting, wooden flute making and glass eye making). So I have learned something today.

*ETA: Leaving Kirkcudbright on our way home, I spotted another modified cow road sign; and shortly after it, a modified deer - at full gallop, fine set of antlers, white midriff. Local artist getting carried away?

The Carol Evening last Sunday went well. The mulled wine that I had left to mature after breakfast was pronounced the best yet by several different people: so, for the record, Banrock Station shiraz mataro and heavy of the (fresh root) ginger. A slightly altered seating arrangement meant that GirlBear was in the middle of the musicians and had a slightly different view to her usual, and when I grabbed the seat by the door (so I could slip out after Down in Yon Forest to put mince pies in the oven and refresh the mulled wine) I was just at her shoulder and could enjoy this. Some of the usual singers had carelessly absented themselves, and one had to withdraw at the last minute with which covid: we have been doing this for 40 years, so we are always conscious of absent friends. But A is still finding copies of the songbook in which she has not yet corrected the spelling and punctuation. At the Winter Songs concert boybear had asked me how old was Il est né, and I had looked it up. The initial response, of course, is "We learned it at school," but now we were able to add a proper provenance, that it was first published in a nineteenth century collection of Christmas songs from Lorraine (which doesn't actually go much further than "Nobody knows!") As we say each year: always different, always the same!

On Monday we celebrated durham_rambler's mother's centenary: for many years, trying to allocated our Christmas visits among three sets of parents, we would spend her birthay with her, a week ahead of Christmas Day (I'm not sure she ever found this an entirely adequate substitute for spending Christmas with them, but better than nothing): this year we met with those members of the family not detained by work (his brother, sister-in-law and nieces at the cemetery where durham_rambler's parents' ashes are interred on the margins of the memorial to his illustrious relative; after which we adjourned again to the home of Younger Niece, who had prepared a lunch which would remind us of her grandmother (she had not recognised durham_rambler's suggestion og banana custard, and prouced a very elegant cream, in the manner of a fancy restaurant deconstructing a familiar dish).

In the evening we went with the Bears to Unity Folk Club, which is where we learned to sing Deck us all with Boston Charlie. C. startled me by singing A Sailor Courted a Farmer’s Daughter (what Mainly Norfolk describes as Dominic Behan's version): why was this song which no-one else seemed to recognise so very familiar to me? (Mainly Norfolk blames Robin Hall and Jimmie Macgregor, which means I knew it very well more than 50 years ago). It's a very supportive club, and wedid actually take up our turns on the singaround: since we had had some (political) parodies of Christmas carols, I, with the help of boybear sang Hark the jelly babies sing..., and durham_rambler with the help of the assembled company, sang The Man who Waters the Workers' Beer and Alex Glasgow's Socialist ABC.

What did we do on Tuesday and Wednesday? A little light shopping: guided by GirlBear, we went to Kentish Town, to the Phoenicia Food Hall and the Owl Bookshop, and then to the Wellcome Collection, whose gift shop filled the last few gaps in my Christmas present list. We had planned to meet boybear at the East West restaurant which serves various Indian inflected pizzas; I wasn't sure about this, but the Bears recommended it. Anyway, it was closed, so we crossed the road and ate Thai instead, which was fine. Back at our flat, durham_rambler and I caught up with an episode of Only Connect which delighted me by including a reference to Peter Dickinson in a sequence of fictional detectives (his was the difficult first one, which you aren't supposed to recognise, and I didn't, until we reached 'the second son of the fifteenth Duke of Denver' whom none of the contestants identified).

Wednesday was mainly packing. Lunch with Bears, an evening of tapas with helenraven in Southwark. High points, catching up with helenraven, fishy rice, excellent wine (Montsant,adjacent to Priorat); low point, spilling a glass of said wine over myself (and the table, but luckily no-one else).

And yesterday we left London via Waltham Cross, where we had coffee with A. Now we are in Ely, with D. and valydiarosada. Not going anywhere right now, just lazing with crosswords and internet, watching the wild muntjac deer browsing in the garden, being looked after by our hosts.

Chronologically, our visit to Bishop Auckland last Friday was a lunch of tapas followed by a visit to the Faith Museum, but I find it easier on the tongue the other way around, so I'll let that title stand. They may sound like two very disparate activities, but in fact both are aspects of the Auckland Project, the extraordinary development charity which has grown from Jonathan Ruffer's intervention to save a set of Spanish old master paintings from dispersal (some background here) into a cultural powerhouse. We met friends for lunch at El Castillo (see what they did there?) the tapas restaurant at the ground floor of the Spanish Art Gallery, before visiting the Faith Museum which is the Project's newest venture.

Tapas ought to be the perfect food style for people who suffer from buyer's remorse in restaurants: if you always see what others are eating and wish that you'd ordered that, well, at least you get to share what your companions have chosen. But the more dishes you order, the more chance there is that you will regret some of them. Or perhaps it's just me: certainly, I should get over my conviction that this time the croquetas will be as good as they sound. So it's no criticism of the restaurant that I liked some of the dishes better than others - not to mention that our party was evenly divided between those who really like whitebait, and those who really don't. But I was right that even though I don't like calamari, they'd be worth ordering for the chickpea accompaniment; and I was doubly right to toss in that last minute order for bread, which was delicious. I only wish I'd gone with the impulse to double up on the order for charred broccoli. The carafe of rioja was perfect: we used to drink a lot of rioja, I don't know why we stopped...

Steer cleer of the desserts unless you have a very sweet tooth. An allegedly Basque cheesecake was heaped with cherries in sweet syrup which overwhelmed the delicate cheesecake. I think they were glacé cherries, and I think that was a mistake, but we did spend some time discussing whether they were maraschino cherries, and what are maraschino cherries anyway? Are they a variety of cherry, or does the name come from the liqueur? Subsequent research says that a maraschino cherry is a preserved, sweetened cherry in syrup, originally containing maraschino liqueur. The liqueur is so called because it is made from marasca cherries (from the Italian amaro, bitter), but the cherries preserved in it are varieties of sweet eating cherries. We did not have profound abstract conversation about faith, so this meditation on cherries will have to do.

Time to visit the museum: entry is through the castle:



( More pictures, plus a few words )

Coarse describes itself as a "tasting menu restaurant in Durham city centre" and we have been curious to try it since it opened in the autumn (press coverage here). So when J. suggested taking us out to lunch as a birthday treat (midway between durham_rambler's birthday and mine), that's where we suggested, and she very generously agreed.

It's in Reform Place, which sounds grander than it is: it's a little courtyard off the North Road (once a main shopping street, now in limbo while the bus station is being rebuilt). At the far end of the courtyard is the Head of Steam, a pub with a good reputation, in a building which was once the gardening department of Archibalds:



This picture doesn't really convey the enclosed nature of the space. It wouldn't have taken much effort to falsify it still further, by cropping out the edge of the dustbin - but a gaggle of dustbins do dominate the space, evidence of how all the premises above shops are being converted into student flats (not in itself a bad thing)...

( Food in words and pictures )

A shot of espresso fortified durham_rambler for the walk home, J and me for a tour of the North Road's charity shops, the perfect end to -

Well, look, here's the thing: I've been quite critical about the experience, but that doesn't mean I wasn't enjoying myself, it just means that being critical is aa majoe part of how I enjoy myself. I would certainly do it again. The food was good, but the entertainment was even better.

After all the excitements of yesterday morning, we had lunched very late, and made a leisurely return to our hotel through the streets of the walled town. By the time I had finished posting about our adventures, it was time to go out and look for dinner, although neither of us was very hungry. We enjoyed exploring a little further, reading menus and wondering what might tempt us, and eventually settled on Bara Gwin, just round the corner from the hotel. They had no tables indoors, but we compromised on a table (set for four) under the awning, rather than one of the smaller ones right at the road's edge - which is why you see durham_rambler sitting next to a window still bearing the publicity for last week's Quai des Bulles comics festival (wearing the satisfied expression of a man who has just seen off a bowl of moules marinières):



I had the house galette, which involved generous quantities of goat's cheese and potatoes, and a sprinkling of walnuts; and we shared a 'route du rhum' ice cream - vanilla and rum-and-raisin, with a shot of rum (the Route du Rhum solo yacht race has apparently been going since 1978, but it seems to have raised its profile lately). We shared a carafe of unconvincing muscadet (deep yellow in colour, and perfectly drinkable but completely anonymous). I first drank muscadet as an undergraduate, visiting Richard in Rennes when we were both spending the year in France our course required; I have rarely drunk it since without thinking of him, and we raised a glass to absent friends.

The name 'Bara Gwin' was nagging at my memory: isn't there a French verb baragouiner? And doesn't bara mean something in Welsh? (my culinary Welsh suggests that bara brith is a kind of fruit loaf). And doesn't gwin mean white? Well, half right. It turns out that Bara Gwin is Breton for bread and wine (which suggests that there was no Breton word for wine, and the name arrived with the drink) and that baragouiner means to talk gibberish, and is indeed (probably) an insult to the Breton language, though one of some antiquity. I'm glad we've got that cleared up.

This morning was grey, with a threat of rain, so we put aside any plans for more ambitious walks, and set off to stroll around the ramparts. This, too, is something I had done on that long ago visit with Richard: he was, as I recall, looking for vestiges of the lost tramways of Ille et Vilaine, but I also remember him gazing for some time out to sea (a habit we later referred to as 'communing') and talking about the tomb of Chateaubriand on the island of Grand Be - Richard was fonder than I am of Romanticism...

Anyway, we had a very pleasant if not very long walk this morning, and took our time and admired the view, and discussed why Saint Malo isn't a World Heriage Site (mysteriously, it seems not to be) and when we reached a dead end just as the rain was setting in, we descended from the walls and started looking at menus. So, Sunday lunch at the Café de l'Ouest short version, it was extravagant, but it was worth it.



I lunched on four hand-dived scallops in pools of butter (with a huge chunk of tasty sourdough to mop it up) accompanied by a panful of truffle risotto. I'm not always a fan of truffle, but this was delicious. And this time the muscadet was absolutely classic. Almost as good as the food was the theatre. At least half a dozen waiters in long aprons bustled about the salle; durham_rambler could see over my shoulder the person whose job it was to open the oysters; and I could see behind him a French couple who seemed to be celebrating a special occasion, with champagne and lobster. The lobster was brought out for them to admire and photograph (and the waiter posed with it to enable this) and later flambéed with a whoosh of flame we felt three tables away. durham_rambler's desert was a coupe colonel (which is lime ice and vodka), which was brought to him as a glass of ice cream and a bottle of Grey Goose (French vodka). My 'Suprenante café' which I was promised was their version of the café gourmand, was surprising indeed: a gilded chocolate sphere, broken open just nough to show me that there was treasure within the thin shell - tiny meringues, chunks of nut brittle, a fruit jelly, worms of pink mallow, a macaron in an almost toxic shade of green, a chocolate truffle, toasted flakes of almond... In the end we ordered two more coffees, and worked on it together.

We took a slightly zigzag route back to our hotel, via another bookshop. And we are not likely to be dining out tonight.

This is another post composed incrementally. It was already overdue, and taking shape in my mind if not on the page, when a feature in last Saturday's Guardian provided the perfect opening. In the week's piece about unlikely house-shares; the teacher and the student (not currently in a teacher / student relationship):

He once said, "You've made my life so different. I'm learning so much." I thought, "What's he talking about, quantitative analysis?"

"No," he said. "Now I know what shiraz is."

Which is as good a way as any into a post about how the last third of March (yes, as I said, overdue) seems to have been awash with good wine.

( Dinner at Finbarr's )

( Gate-crashing the wine club )

( Sunday lunch with claret )

David at the Creel takes a justified pride in his breakfasts, but this morning's was exceptional - and not just because we were honoured with inspection by the cat. The first course was crème de marrons de l'Ardèche topped with crème fraîche - not something I think of as a breakfast dish, but which I could happily eat at any hour of day or night (I feel about marrons the way some people feel about chocolate...). This was followed by bubble and squeak flambéed in Laphroig - a mixture of green vegetables ("Not leftovers!" David was very firm about this, though I have no problem with leftovers, especially if they can be induced to bubble and to squeak), sautéed potatoes and bacon. The bread, William told us, came from Westray. It was perfectly good granary sliced, but apparently special because bread from Westray only comes to Mainland once a week.

By now I had been in Orkney 36 hours, and not once been offered a bere bannock. I was beginning to wonder why, and this seemed an opportunity to ask. William seemed surprised: evidently he doesn't think of bannocks as central to Orcadian produce, but he thought that there was still one baker making them, at Harray. I've always bought them from Argo's bakery in Stromness, but this meant nothing to him.

It turns out that Argo's now have a branch in Kirkwall, where I bought one bere-meal and one wheaten bannock as part of our supplies for our self-catering stay on Rousay. Also a pair of runic socks from Judith Glue. And durham_rambler picked up a copy of the Folk Festival programme, and is trying to work out whether we can get to anything on Sunday, when we return to Mainland. Then we drove round to Tingwall, for the Rousay ferry.

While we waited, we checked the internet for directions to our cottage: 41 minutes, it told us, "mainly flat." I'm trying to upload the picture which shows why we found this so funny, but the internet is having one of its funny spells, so perhaps I'd better not wait, but try instead to see whether I can upload this.

ETA to illustrate what's funny about that "mainly flat":

Today being my birthday, durham_rambler took me out to lunch in the very swish surroundings of Marco Pierre White's restaurant at the new Hotel Indigo - which is the building I think of as Old Shire Hall, and a very splendid building it is, too:



Though not always quite as magnificent as it looked when illuminated for the Lumiere festival. It was built to house the County Council, but by the time I arrived in Durham it had become the University's admin. centre. Since they moved out it has been empty. Somewhere in the archives of this journal I'm sure there are accounts of visits during Heritage Open Days, and once for an art event which was showing short films in dusty and abandoned spaces... So I'm delighted to see the building back in use, and that was my main reason foe requesting this particular lunch venue.

The restaurant was - oh, well, it was fine. A bit corporate, a bit unexciting. We were handed the set lunch menu, and it's possible the à la carte would have been more inventive, but I doubt it. Anyway, I enjoyed my 'brandad' (that's what it said) of hot smoked salmon with blobs of chili mayonnaise and the laciest slice of sourdough toast, the roast chick was pleasant enough and the Pablo Old Vines Garnatxa was very nice indeed. I wasn't even tempted by the desserts.

Our route home led past the Oxfam bookshop - and when I say "past", you know I don't mean it. I picked up a Patrick O'Brian (though not, alas, one I will be getting to any time soon) anf Jennifer Niven's The Ice Master, the story of the voyage of the Karluk about which I have just read a graphic novel, Luke Healy's How to Survive in the North.