Time flies...
Sep. 29th, 2025 04:02 pm...when you're having fun, which we have been, and also when you're busy, which likewise. Fun was a second consecutive weekend of visitors - Bears this time, my brother the ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
boybear and sister-in-law the GirlBear; busy was mostly clients waking up after the summer and wanting to update their websites (I'm planning a newsletter, to be announced on FaceBook within the next couple of days, can you put a sign-up on my website by then?) but some self-inflicted pub quizzing and book grouping. Also laundry. And plumbers. So this is the condensed version of last weekend.
The Bears arrived on Friday evening. Saturday was cold and rainy, but GirlBear was intrepid and went out and sang Sacred Harp, and returned triumphant and weary with the New!Book! - having been so overwhelmed by the occasion and the weather that she got the wrong bus home, and didn't realise that she was going in the wrong direction until she passed the Angel of the North... The rest of us had a quiet day at home, and felt all the better for it.
On Sunday we lunched at Durham's newest wine bar, Veeno: one of a small chain run by a Sicilian vineyard as a way of marketing their wine, which I think is a great idea. J and J came up from York to lunch with us, which was doubly appropriate since a) they are the perfect companions with whom to explore wine and b) it was J's birthday. Since Veeno had opened only a few days ago, we were greeted with complementary glasses of their own wine, which felt suitably celebratory, though we preferred the bottle of nebbiolo which J selected to accompany our various main courses. It was particularly good with that item on my cheeseboard which I suspect was flavoured with truffle (I have recently come to the conclusion that I don't like truffle, but this cheese was really good). There was marsala for dessert (the vineyard is in Marsala, though this was not their own wine). I suspect that Durham's other wine bar (not open on Sundays) would be grander, but this was a lot of fun, and I'd go back.
I don't now recall at what point in the previous couple of days the boiler had gone on strike, leaving us with no heating and no hot water: not ideal at any time, but especially when there are guests... So it was just as well the Bears had arranged to spend Monday with a friend in Newcastle. We, too, fitted in a long-overdue visit to S, and in the evening, since we were in town, we and the Bears went on to the Bridge Folk Club. The guest was Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne whomdurham_rambler and I had seen and enjoyed a couple of years ago at the Hartlepool Folk Festival, and we enjoyed him all over again: the music's good, if not necessarily what I want to listen to around the house, but the performance is great. There were floor spots, of a generally high standard (not just the Bears, although they had a spot too).
The plan was to insert ourselves into J's busy schedule by meeting her for an early lunch on Tuesday at the Dairy Barn, a farm café near Crook. Butdurham_rambler, ever optimistic, had agreed that that the heating engineer, having shown him how to reset the boiler, should return on Tuesday morning to see why the heat was not reaching the radiators. When it became obvious that this task would not be completed in time, the Bears and I took the bus to Crook, where J collected us, and after a quick look round the market took us to the Dairy Barn: pleasant food (not exclusively dairy) and a spectacular view over the Wear valley. We were just preparing to embark on the return journey when durham_rambler arrived, so J went off to her Italian class and the rest of us settled down for the second sitting.
Then home to recuperate before the Bears caught their southbound train.
boybear and sister-in-law the GirlBear; busy was mostly clients waking up after the summer and wanting to update their websites (I'm planning a newsletter, to be announced on FaceBook within the next couple of days, can you put a sign-up on my website by then?) but some self-inflicted pub quizzing and book grouping. Also laundry. And plumbers. So this is the condensed version of last weekend.The Bears arrived on Friday evening. Saturday was cold and rainy, but GirlBear was intrepid and went out and sang Sacred Harp, and returned triumphant and weary with the New!Book! - having been so overwhelmed by the occasion and the weather that she got the wrong bus home, and didn't realise that she was going in the wrong direction until she passed the Angel of the North... The rest of us had a quiet day at home, and felt all the better for it.
On Sunday we lunched at Durham's newest wine bar, Veeno: one of a small chain run by a Sicilian vineyard as a way of marketing their wine, which I think is a great idea. J and J came up from York to lunch with us, which was doubly appropriate since a) they are the perfect companions with whom to explore wine and b) it was J's birthday. Since Veeno had opened only a few days ago, we were greeted with complementary glasses of their own wine, which felt suitably celebratory, though we preferred the bottle of nebbiolo which J selected to accompany our various main courses. It was particularly good with that item on my cheeseboard which I suspect was flavoured with truffle (I have recently come to the conclusion that I don't like truffle, but this cheese was really good). There was marsala for dessert (the vineyard is in Marsala, though this was not their own wine). I suspect that Durham's other wine bar (not open on Sundays) would be grander, but this was a lot of fun, and I'd go back.
I don't now recall at what point in the previous couple of days the boiler had gone on strike, leaving us with no heating and no hot water: not ideal at any time, but especially when there are guests... So it was just as well the Bears had arranged to spend Monday with a friend in Newcastle. We, too, fitted in a long-overdue visit to S, and in the evening, since we were in town, we and the Bears went on to the Bridge Folk Club. The guest was Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne whom
durham_rambler and I had seen and enjoyed a couple of years ago at the Hartlepool Folk Festival, and we enjoyed him all over again: the music's good, if not necessarily what I want to listen to around the house, but the performance is great. There were floor spots, of a generally high standard (not just the Bears, although they had a spot too).The plan was to insert ourselves into J's busy schedule by meeting her for an early lunch on Tuesday at the Dairy Barn, a farm café near Crook. But
durham_rambler, ever optimistic, had agreed that that the heating engineer, having shown him how to reset the boiler, should return on Tuesday morning to see why the heat was not reaching the radiators. When it became obvious that this task would not be completed in time, the Bears and I took the bus to Crook, where J collected us, and after a quick look round the market took us to the Dairy Barn: pleasant food (not exclusively dairy) and a spectacular view over the Wear valley. We were just preparing to embark on the return journey when durham_rambler arrived, so J went off to her Italian class and the rest of us settled down for the second sitting.Then home to recuperate before the Bears caught their southbound train.
