News from Nowhere

Last week in the Guardian Zoe Williams tested celebrity drinks brands. I'm interested in drinks (if not celebrities) and anyway, I'll read anything Zoe Williams writes. This is what she had to say about Emma Watson's Renais gin:

Watson is the closest you'll come to a celebrity with an authentic purpose and hinterland in this market. With her brother, she's created a gin from salvaged grape skins, on the Burgundy estate where their father has been making wine for 30 years. Watson senior has an award for his chablis, which they almost never give anyone who isn't French...

She goes on to say nice things about it. But I was distracted by the way she presents the source as a creative, new idea: distilling the must that remains when the grapes have been pressed for wine, how clever, who would have thought of that?

...The photographer was Italian and raised the inconvenient objection that a spirit made of grape skins is a grappa. That just wouldn’t sound very Watson, though.

Also, while a spirit made of Italian grape skins is a grappa, a spirit made of grape skins from Chablis is a marc de Bourgogne. Which I think of as a product with much higher prestige than gin: but I'm probably out of touch.

D was with us last week, Monday to Saturday: he's an easy enough guest, familiar enough with the house to look after himself while he's here, and with other friends in the north to visit, to keep him entertained. Despite which, I seem to be catching up with things that I have been neglecting. And this journal is one of them. Where was I...?

Well, even before D arrived, we spent Saturday at the County Durham Archaeology Day; we have attended something similar in the past, though I can find no record of it here. That was in Bishop Auckland Town Hall; this was in a lecture theatre on the Science Site, and the more local venue did not make things as much easier as you might expect. One of the talks I found most interesting was on a bare hilltop near Newton Aycliffe, which found the boundary enclosure of an Iron Age fort, with a large unidentified structure in the middle. But others were on high-profile subjects - the Stockton & Darlington 200 celebrations (and how to exploit railway archaeology all the time, not just every 50 years), the wall painting discovered at Durham Castle (as reported by the BBC) though I warn you, it's a painting of one flower, don't expect too much; and an update from the always riveting Gary Bankhead about recent discoveries including a whetstone factory on the banks of the Wear.

I was sniffling through much of this, and hoping it was caused by spending the day in an enclosed lecture theatre, but no: by Sunday it was obvious that I had a streaming cold. Luckily, that was also the worst of it, and by the time D. arrived on Monday, he was asking why I had thought it worth warning him.

Thursday was the day none of us had any other engagements, so we went out to lunch. We thought we had identified somewhere (the Vane Arms, at Thorpe Thewles) that was new to D, but of course as we came into the village he realised "Oh, yes, I recognise it now...". The menu has perhaps skewed further towards the things-on-flatbreads than we were expecting, but we enjoyed it nonetheless. And afterwards we indulged D's desire to frolic on a beach by taking him to Seaton Carew, for the full Out of Season vibe:



On Saturday morning D set off for home, and we headed out for lunch with the pub quiz team. We operate a kitty, paying our winnings in and our entrance fees of a shared purse, and win (or place) often enough that we build up a surplus. From time to time we take ourselves out for a meal to spend it, and since we don't manage to organise this very often, we feel an obligation to be as extravagant as we can. On this occasion, we decided that lunch at Isla would be a good compromise between comfort, convenience and grandeur - and I'd say it delivered. The food was very pleasant: I had the first asparagus of the spring, a handful a thin stems (perhaps you should call it sprue) with a perfectly boiled egg; and grilled cod in a sauce billed as rhubarb, but in which the rhubarb was subdued by just slightly too much cream. I should have ordered chips with it - or actually some more of the bread we'd shared as a starter - and then I would have mopped up all that sauce, so the cream can't have been disastrously excessive.

The particular pleasure that follows a restaurant meal with the smug feeling that yes, I made precisely the right choice there, though, came not from the food but from the wine. It wasn't a long wine list, but it had some good things on it: we had a bottle of cava, more or less out of a sense of obligation - we ought to start withsome fizz - and it got us off to the right start; since everyone was eating fish, we went for a Swiss white, and enjoyed it enough that we had another; and my dessert was a glass of Uruguayan dessert wine. This was wonderful, but also completely unexpected: I've had dessert tannat before, but I wasn't expecting anything this rich, this dark, this caramel- or even coffee -flavoured. I am embarrassed not to have realised (blame it on the excellence of the lunch) that this had not been attained by tannat alone, but also involved fortification and aromatics...

We went on to the even fancier wine bar along the road, and since there was no going back from that dessert wine, I had a glass of muscat, which at first seemed thin in comparison, but I lingered over it, and it became rich and grapey and a pleasure.
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S describes the party we were at last Sunday as her "Christmas leftovers party". The idea is that everyone contributes whatever they have from overcatering for the festivities, or being given presents of more sweets than they can eat. Inevitably, this means that the party itself generates leftovers, but at least we all get sent home with someone else's contribution, which makes for variety.

One of the guests - only one - was wearing a Christmas jumper (big reindeer face, red woolly bobble nose) which he described, rather defensively, as his "leftover Christmas jumper." He explained that his wife (who I don't think was at the party) had discouraged him from wearing it, because, she said, after Christmas Day, Christmas was over. A whole group of people disagreed strongly with this, and launched into the usual discussion of when is Twelfth Night, anyway? (with much counting on fingers), and what is Epiphany? and don't people break their teeth on the bean in the galette? which is always fun, and reveals much about Other People's Traditions. I maintained, as I usually do, that people who want Christmas to be over too soon are usually paying the price for starting too early, and that Christmas doesn't begin until Christmas Day, though some celebration is permissible on Christmas Eve.

( In practice, though... )

In theory, then, my Christmas ends at Epiphany. But tonight we will go to the Lit & Phil for spooky stories: so traditional an Epiphany event that tonight must be
Epiphany observed. Tomorrow I will take down the Christmas cards (our only nod to decorations).

1. We have a glut of carrots (because reasons) so I baked a carrot cake. I don't often bake cakes, and I was not confident, but I found a recipe which used ingredients I already had (Josceline Dimbleby's Balinese Carrot Cake) and followed it almost faithfully: the honey wasn't as liquid as it should have been, and wouldn't amalgamate, and I reduced the amount of oil because I couldn't quite believe it, and I cooked it in a shallow oval dish, and it was fine. We had some of it hot from the oven for pudding, and some of it sliced as cake, and the latter was better. And there's more in the freezer for another time.



2. The car failed its MOT: a spring was broken, which I think was part of the suspension. I didn't know you could fail an MOT for that, but apparently so. The garage thought it should not have broken, and replaced it uner warranty, but they kept the car until they could get the replacement part.



3. I could still have gone to the Graphic Novels reading group, of coure, since I take the train into Newcastle anyway; but not having a lift to and from the station just made it that bit less inviting (also rain) so I zoomed in instead. I wasn't at the meeting which decided that for our next theme we would read comics on the theme 'Winter', and I'm not sure what they had in mind. I look forward to seeing what they come up with as a reading list. I had rememberd that Miracleman's daughter is called Winter, and this was noted, but it is cheating, isn't it? Bryan and Mary Talbot's Rain depicts a relationship growing against a background of floods and environmental action, but it is framed by the 2015 Boxing Day floods in Hebden Bridge, which is undeniably Christmas. And looking through piles of old comics, I found the four issues of Ollie Masters' and Tyler Jenkins' Snow Blind, which I hadn't looked at since I bought them: there's a cover endorement from Warren Ellis, who calls it "an elevated crime drama that feels like it should be the best indie movie of the year" (and I see that it has been made into a movie). Crime drama, certainly, and more than enough bloodshed, but I'd have majored on the coming-of-age aspect: boy discovers that his family is on a Witness Protection Program, and sets out to learn why. For my present purpose, what matters is that they have been relocated to Alaska, providing a dramatic snowy backdrop for confrontations. This isn't Winter, it's just North (which may be a pattern in my collection), but the relocation from Louisiana to Alaska provides an almost-seasonal contrast...



4. In a small domestic comedy diaster, I managed to drop a pack of black pudding down the back of the freezer. I was rummaging in the depths of the chest freezer for something else, and piled things higher than was wise; this small, flat package slipped off the top and through the gap between wall and lid. By the time durham_rambler was available to help move the freezer and rescue it, it was well on the way to thawing, so there was unscheduled black pudding for dinner last night. Fried with leeks, served with potato and celeriac mash, andI didn't know what wine to choose, but rosé worked very well.



5. The puffins are returning to the Isle of Muck (though probably not the Isle of Muck youare thinking of). I don't know why this pleasing but very small piece of good news has achieved so much news coverage. And I even more don't know why it is such big news in November, when it must have happened back in the summer.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I have to see a man about a plaque. Two men, in fact, one to veil the plaque and the other to unveil it.

...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 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.

On Wednesday we went to what the Wine Society calls a 'walkaround' tasting. We don't often do this: the format offers the chance to taste wines from the Society's current list in an informal way, but it's quite an expensive way to sample wines which don't greatly excite us. Not necessarily bad value, but not good value for us. We look out for tastings which play to our interests (the most recent of these was the Languedoc Roussillon tasting eighteen months ago). Wednesday's tasting was in Durham, though, which should be encouraged; and it had a theme of sorts, "Wine Champions", wines which have scored highly in the Society's internal tastings. I was unconvinced, especially because it was on a Wednesday (quiz night), so the logistics were complicated, but durham_rambler was keen, and hope triumphed over experience.

Bearing those caveats in mind, it was a fun evening. It helped that the venue was the Masonic Hall, a building which I have passed many times but never entered. We walked there, retracing to a large extent the route we had taken home from the Gala, pausing halfway to sit on a bench in the Riverwalk to eat our sandwiches and enjoy the view of the Castle and Cathedral, and arrived just after the start time, without getting too hot and sticky doing so. We were shown into the downstairs hall, a large light room with decorative modern stained glass windows, and a door at the far end opening onto the garden. We headed for the table to the left of that door, where our wine - we started with the champagne, it seemed only polite - was poured for us by The Other Quizmaster (Retired), this, it turns out, being his day job. We took our glasses out onto the patio, and enjoyed the view of the racecourse (and eavesdropping on other participants, who can't have been all that local, because they all seemed to be discussing whether that could possibly be a race course; we didn't tell them what had been going on there last Saturday). This was a pleasant way to spend an evening; the wines were almost irrelevant.

( Nonetheless, for the record: )

We had booked a taxi to take us from the tasting to the Elm Tree, which worked smoothly for us,though the taxi firm may have been confused. We arrived at the pub to discover that since we had not been there early to snaffle a table, we were reduced to squeezing onto the end of one occupied by our friends and rivals from the Physics department. Since neither team was at full strength, this wasn't really a problem. We did not do well in the quiz, but I don't think our performance was impaired by wine: there were just too many questions about things we didn't know (sport, mostly).

The Wine Society has been celebrating its 150th birthday by commissioning a series of wines which reflect different eras in its history. We haven't been moved to order any of them, but I have enjoyed reading about all the choices which this involved. In the current mailing, the series reaches its conclusion with not the last but the next fifty years: what wines will we be drinking in the future? Short answer: wines grown sustainably, using resilient hybrids, at high altitudes or in new regions (or England).

There are, of course, accompanying recipes. The future of food will be plant-heavy, with a focus on local produce. I wouldn't argue with that, but I was tickled to see that two out of their three recipes feature carlin peas. Chef Paula McIntyre explains that there is a Lancashire tradition of eating carlin peas on Bonfire Night; my father used to talk about them as a tradition of his north-eastern childhood, when they were eaten on Passion Sunday, two Sundays before Easter. Carlin, Palm and Pace-Egg Day... (More here.)

I have seen the future, and it is not what I expected.

But then, there are aspects of the present I still think of as living in the future: which presumably makes me a person from the past. On Friday durham_rambler was deep in WhatsApp conversation with the rest of the pubquiz team (I have a dumb phone, which makes phone calls, and leave the smart stuff to durham_rambler, who enjoys it); they were trying to organise a farewell dinner for a departing member. And really I should not be surprised that one of the contributors to the conversation was in Buenos Aires at the time. It did slightly take the futuristic gloss off the situation that he was trapped in a lift in Buenos Aires. (He was released within a couple of hours, and the hotel gave him free breakfasts for a week.)


ETA (02.10.24) Our Gardening Correspondent adds:

In spring [a friend from Whitley Bay] handed me some seed packets she had bought at a Heritage Seed Event. These included a pack of The Carlin Pea, which she said was of local historical interest. Beamish celebrate Carlin Sunday when they tell of the peas saving the population of Newcastle from starvation under siege in 1644.

I grew them. They wouldn't have saved us this year. Germination was poor. I had intended them to be planted out into a raised bed but those that did germinate did not look strong. I grew them in two pots on the patio & gave them lots of attention. In due course we podded them & had them for tea.

As with many heritage varieties I was interested but not that impressed. I can usually tell why heritage varieties have gone out of favour.

There you go.

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 on 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 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 of 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.

Two excursions this week, neither requiring any great degree of intrepidity, but each, in its way, feeling like an adventure.

On Tuesday we went to Newcastle for a Wine Society tasting. We don't do this often, but this one was particularly tempting, wines of the Languedoc Roussillon with representatives of the growers in attendance, and held at the Station Hotel, which made the journey as straightforward as it could be. I agreed that I could manage the walk up to the station on the way out, and durham_rambler agreed not to fuss about getting a taxi home from the station, and this worked pretty well. I coped with the walk and was no slower than I had anticipated (which was, admittedly, pretty slow) and with the amount of standing required throughout the evening (there were some chairs, but it was pretty crowded) and although there were no taxis to be had at the station, we managed to hail one before we reached the foot of Station Bank. And the wines were worth the effort.

( a beaker full of the warm South... )

The second excursion was around Durham, to entertain visitors: it is they, not we, who were intrepid, having taken the train from York into the blizzard:



( Third time lucky? )

So all in all, despite the day not having gone at all according to plan, I'd call it a success.

And girl it looks so pretty to me
Like it always did
Oh like the Spanish City to me
When we were kids

On Monday, for my birthday treat, we went to the seaside.

We spent the day in Whitley Bay: a bright, breezy stroll along the front, brunch in Valerie's Tearoom at the Spanish City, and then we hit the shops... Fewer artisan speciality shops than I had expected, but plenty of charity shops, and durham_rambler indulged me, so we went into them all. And bought a surprising variety of books: from a nice little copy of Daisy Ashford's The Young Visiters to Jo Walton's What Makes This Book So Great, and even a detective story for durham_rambler (a Martin Edwards, whose title escapes me at the moment).

Then we came home, and I cooked a fennel risotto and opened a bottle of Jurançon. A day well spent.