Another festival; with added puffins!
May. 29th, 2013 10:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustI filed the news that Amble was planning a puffin festival under 'ambivalence'. Government funding to regenerate the economy of small, slightly down-at-heel seaside town, puffins as a stimulus for local business: altogether not promising. Still, seaside! Puffins! There was no way we were going to miss this, even before we had such a good time at another seaside festival.
There was a very full programme of activities, which I was rather overwhelmed by, and ignored - I'm not saying that I wasn't tempted by the promise of an environmental burial exhibition by Co-operative Funeralcare, but we weren't free that day; and maybe going on a Bank Holiday Sunday was tempting fate, but the sun was shining...
In fact it worked out very well. Despite my ambivalence about puffin-related retail, one of the most charming features of the festival was the way local businesses had adopted the theme. The Co-op funeral parlour had a parade of puffins marching along its frontage. Large cut-out puffins had evidently been made available, and businesses had accessorised theirs appropriately: carrying a pint on the wall of a pub, with a cornet outside the ice-cream parlour, heading towards the skateboard and scooter shop - which also had a small window display of fishermen's ganseys - wearing a cycling helmet. There was a small food market in the Town Square, where we sampled and bought some seabird-themed beer, and the biggere, regular market on the quayside - more tat and less car-boot than I remembered it, but I bought some cherries, and a paperback about Robert Stuart and the Oregon Trail (a subject about which I know nothing).
We lunched at The Old Boathouse on the Quayside. It looked promising - emphasis on the simple and the fresh, in the menu and the décor both - but we got off to a bad start, walking at 12.30 into an almost empty restaurant to be greeted with "Have you booked?" And then: "Well, you'll have to be out by two!" I suppose they'd accepted a large booking for a late lunch - we were long gone by two so I never found out - but there was no need to make it into my problem, and the result was probably to make me more critical than I would otherwise have been. I had the fishcake and asparagus, and a side order of chips: that's one, spherical fishcake, pleasant but slightly bland, sitting on maybe four or five stalks of asparagus, sliced lengthwise and perfectly cooked, tender but not soft and intense in flavour, in a pool of thin creamy sauce, which I suppose was hollandaise. I thought the quantity a bit mean, and was glad I'd ordered the chips - except that they weren't the crispy sort of chip, and were altogether too similar in texture to the fishcake. If we'd been sitting in the window watching the gulls on the quay, over a leisurely lunch, I might have been very happy; as it was, I thought it was good but overpriced, and when we were offered the dessert menu, we said no, thanks, and headed off to Spurreli for ice cream.
Here, the opposite applies: the ice cream was OK - it was probably good of its kind, but that kind is too sweet and creamy for my taste. The flavours sounded interesting, but sea buckthorn turned out to be orange in colour and flavour both (maybe just a bad choice). But we sat by the window, near the screen showing the RSPB's DVD of Coquet Island (puffin cabaret!). I was charmed by the fact that not only were the staff all wearing puffin t-shirts, they were all wearing different puffin t-shirts, presumably their own. The coffee was good, too.
From the ridiculous to the sublime: we had booked the four o' clock puffin cruise, which gave us time to walk out of town one way along the Braid and watch the kite-flyers, and out the other way and back along the jetty. The cruise was pure joy, and we saw many puffins, more than last year: on the water in the large groups which are apparently known as rafts, on the island by their burrows, in the air - at one point a raft of them took off as we passed, and just for a moment I was surrounded by puffins. There were also some inquisitive seals, many terns, one of which the boatman (Dave Gray Jr, according to his name badge) said was roseate, and just one gannet. I took a number of photos, not really expecting to catch anything, so the sparkly light in this one was a pleasant surprise:
And those flecks in the water over toward the island are a raft of puffins.
Bonus link: Muffin the Puffin. (Warning: contains earworms, and unreliable information about the social life of the puffling.)
There was a very full programme of activities, which I was rather overwhelmed by, and ignored - I'm not saying that I wasn't tempted by the promise of an environmental burial exhibition by Co-operative Funeralcare, but we weren't free that day; and maybe going on a Bank Holiday Sunday was tempting fate, but the sun was shining...
In fact it worked out very well. Despite my ambivalence about puffin-related retail, one of the most charming features of the festival was the way local businesses had adopted the theme. The Co-op funeral parlour had a parade of puffins marching along its frontage. Large cut-out puffins had evidently been made available, and businesses had accessorised theirs appropriately: carrying a pint on the wall of a pub, with a cornet outside the ice-cream parlour, heading towards the skateboard and scooter shop - which also had a small window display of fishermen's ganseys - wearing a cycling helmet. There was a small food market in the Town Square, where we sampled and bought some seabird-themed beer, and the biggere, regular market on the quayside - more tat and less car-boot than I remembered it, but I bought some cherries, and a paperback about Robert Stuart and the Oregon Trail (a subject about which I know nothing).
We lunched at The Old Boathouse on the Quayside. It looked promising - emphasis on the simple and the fresh, in the menu and the décor both - but we got off to a bad start, walking at 12.30 into an almost empty restaurant to be greeted with "Have you booked?" And then: "Well, you'll have to be out by two!" I suppose they'd accepted a large booking for a late lunch - we were long gone by two so I never found out - but there was no need to make it into my problem, and the result was probably to make me more critical than I would otherwise have been. I had the fishcake and asparagus, and a side order of chips: that's one, spherical fishcake, pleasant but slightly bland, sitting on maybe four or five stalks of asparagus, sliced lengthwise and perfectly cooked, tender but not soft and intense in flavour, in a pool of thin creamy sauce, which I suppose was hollandaise. I thought the quantity a bit mean, and was glad I'd ordered the chips - except that they weren't the crispy sort of chip, and were altogether too similar in texture to the fishcake. If we'd been sitting in the window watching the gulls on the quay, over a leisurely lunch, I might have been very happy; as it was, I thought it was good but overpriced, and when we were offered the dessert menu, we said no, thanks, and headed off to Spurreli for ice cream.
Here, the opposite applies: the ice cream was OK - it was probably good of its kind, but that kind is too sweet and creamy for my taste. The flavours sounded interesting, but sea buckthorn turned out to be orange in colour and flavour both (maybe just a bad choice). But we sat by the window, near the screen showing the RSPB's DVD of Coquet Island (puffin cabaret!). I was charmed by the fact that not only were the staff all wearing puffin t-shirts, they were all wearing different puffin t-shirts, presumably their own. The coffee was good, too.
From the ridiculous to the sublime: we had booked the four o' clock puffin cruise, which gave us time to walk out of town one way along the Braid and watch the kite-flyers, and out the other way and back along the jetty. The cruise was pure joy, and we saw many puffins, more than last year: on the water in the large groups which are apparently known as rafts, on the island by their burrows, in the air - at one point a raft of them took off as we passed, and just for a moment I was surrounded by puffins. There were also some inquisitive seals, many terns, one of which the boatman (Dave Gray Jr, according to his name badge) said was roseate, and just one gannet. I took a number of photos, not really expecting to catch anything, so the sparkly light in this one was a pleasant surprise:
And those flecks in the water over toward the island are a raft of puffins.
Bonus link: Muffin the Puffin. (Warning: contains earworms, and unreliable information about the social life of the puffling.)
