News from Nowhere

According to my automatic reminder system, recycling will be collected tomorrow. durham_rambler thinks that this will not be affected by the holidays, but I thought I'd check.

There's a jolly Christmas image on the front page of the County Council's website, of stockings hanging by the fire, and it promises "Festive info - opening times, bin collections, events and more". Bin collections - that's what I want, so I click it, and it takes me to a page with a number of paragraphs, each one headed with a link. The top one is "Festive period closures", which isn't how I would have put it, but the text says "Over the festive period, there will be changes to our services. This page gives information about these changes." That sounds about right. But I can't find the information I'm looking for, not on that page and not by following any of the alphabetical links it offers...

There's a feedback form, though, so I decide to be helpful and give feedback. I select the answers 'no, the page wasn't helpful' and why, from drop down menus, and in the box for comments I type: "I'm looking for information about waste and recycling collection over the holiday period. Should I assume that if there is no information, there is no change? Or is that information somewhere else? Not under T for Refuse, W for Waste or B for Bins, but something I haven't thought of?" Then I click 'submit', and the screengrab on the right shows the result.

Luckily, I'm a web design professional. I know that when the County Council tells me my opinion is invalid, the chances are that what it means is 'tl;dr'. I delete the last sentence of my comment and click 'submit' again, and yes, this time it works.

People, if your form has a maximum length for comments, why not say so?

But look on the bright side. In the process of composing this diatribe I found the answer to my question. If I had scolled on down, below "Three months free if you join a gym in December", below the fold, I would have found an item about bin collections over the holiday period. Apparently "People in County Durham are being advised of arrangements for bin collections over the festive period."

Don't know how I missed that, but of course durham_rambler was right. Better go and sort the recycling, then.

desperance says: "There are not only more books than you imagine, there are more books than you can imagine."

- which is true. And he hasn't even seen the pile in the bedroom.

Mel Gibson says: "Avatar? Dances with Smurfs."

So that's one movie I needn't go and see, then.

Helen Savage says: "Mourvèdre is always best when it can see the sea."

I need to verify this. Bring me several bottles of mourvèdre, and a map.

Further to that last: of the wines we tasted at Helen's Corbières and Minervois dinner last week, I particularly enjoyed the La Combe des Oliviers 2007, which is 70% mourvèdre, and available from Majestic; also - though this one is mainly carignan / grenache - the Domaine du Grand Arc Cuvée des Quarante, which she purchased from The Grape Unknown, a farmer turned wine merchant based at Kiln Pit Hill in south Northumberland. They have a web site, allegedly, but there's no information on it, so here's Helen's article in the Journal instead.

A day in Skipton starts with the drive there: not an unreasonably long way (about eighty miles) but slow driving, especially if you take the scenic route through Wensleydale, and over the pass into Wharfedale, following the river down a sequence of falls and rapids - a lovely drive, but wasted on us because we couldn't stop and look round, we were due in Skipton to visit friends who are spending a week's holiday there. And eventually we found them, and there was lunch and chat and then out to look round the market, and buy cheese, and stroll along the canal:



The Town Hall was advertising the forthcoming Skipton Puppet Festival (good grief, do they still make web sites like that? it's completely inaccessible), which looked great fun, as did the associated competition for "Faces in Spaces" - photographs of 'found' images of faces, which sounds silly, but the posters showed some wonderful examples, very simple images which didn't look like faces at all, until you saw it, and then you couldn't unsee it!

We ate at The Angel at Hetton, tucked away just off the Grassington road. We'd never heard of it, but looked through the recommendations in the Good Pub Guide, and thought it sounded the more interesting of the two in the area - but it's clearly well established, and as much a restaurant as a pub. I felt that the presentation was just slightly grander than was appropriate: if this is a pub, why are the staff all dashing about in long white aprons? and if it's a restaurant, why are we perched on pub-style seating? and why can't we order at our table instead of at the bar? The service was charming, but a little frantic (two sorbets and a glass of dessert wine were delivered as one sorbet and two glasses of dessert wine) - and so on. Despite which, the food was excellent: I had the spiced beetroot in a coconut pancake (my companions - as they say in the restaurant reviews - chorused "What? Where did you see that?" because it was hidden in the vegetarian menu, which they hadn't looked at), which was delicious, and the cheeseboard (cheese slate, as it was described, and was indeed served on a slate, an interesting selection of unidentified cheeses accompanied by two slices of fruit cake - though not, as the menu promised, walnut cake. You see why I didn't demand to be introduced to the cheeses?) The dessert wine was mine, and with the beetroot pancake I drank a glass of Yorkshire Sunset rosé (from Ryedale Vineyards, further write-up here). It was surprisingly good, well-balanced fruit and acidity, bearing in mind that I like my rosé pale in colour and dry in flavour; and it worked well with the beetroot. I could have grunk a larger glassful (something I don't often say in pubs).

The first surprise encounter of the evening: all of a sudden there was Harry, demanding to know what durham_rambler and I were doing so far south.

The second surprise encounter of the evening: on the last turning on the way back to K. and B.'s house, durham_rambler did an emergency stop. There was a hedgehog in the middle of the road ahead of us, and we weren't going any further until B. got out in the rain, and moved it (which he did).

The rest of the drive home was not particularly agreeable; we took the non-scenic route (it was dark, in any case) but it was raining quite heavily, and there was water on the carriageway, and altogether not good. Worth it, though.