shewhomust | Entries tagged with wine

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).

Yesterday morning we said farewell to D. and

valydiarosada who had helped us to see in the New Year: we sent them off into heavily falling snow, but the shower passed, and word came that they had reached home safely.

Unusually for us, we were still up to see the new year arrive. In recent years we have simply ended the evening and gone to bed as usual, but this year, for whatever reason, by the time we looked at our watches it was so close to midnight that we decided to wait. It helped that the BBC has been filling our evenings with Only Connect specials and been filling our evenings with Only Connect specials and the University Challenge alumni edition; and Our Friend the Quizmaster had posted the 'missing' quizzes (while there's a break from the pub quiz) online... So what with this and dinner and the crossword, New Year's Eve just flew by.

On New Year's Day we lunched at the Rose and Crown in Romaldkirk: not the first time that we have chosen this venue to meet D's sister and brother-in-law, as it's halfway between us and them, serves good pub food and welcomes their dog. The drive out was drab and grey, but while we were at lunch the late afternoon sun came out, low but brilliant. It hit the windows of the church (the Kirk, I suppose) so tha the little leaded diamond panes gleamed black and brilliant like splintered coal; it picked out the white farms in the green valleys and gilded the tawny hilltops.

( Bedoba )

So that's the year off to a good start. We looked at the snow, which is still lying, and the other things to be done, and decided to skip this morning's farmer' market. But this afternoon we will go to S's Christmas leftovers party, and next week there will be ghost stories at the Lit & Phil, so the festivities are not over yet.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

It was

desperance who first told me about Graeme Rigby's Work in Prepetual Progress, a book about herring. This must have been before he emigrated, so a decade ago, and it was a long-term project then. Now at last Rigby's Encyclopaedia of the Herring has been completed and published, and last week we went to a launch party at the Lit & Phil, and enjoyed many beautiful herring facts (from prehistory to the Radio Ballads), and some herring snacks.

We only went to one event at Durham Book Festival, but it was a good one: Ann Cleeves and Steph McGovern in conversation, chaired by Vic Watson - not that they needed chairing. Two good, interesting speakers, who have become friends in real life, just wind them up and let them go.

We would have liked to stop by after the event, to thank Ann for organising tickets for us - but the signing queue was (the usher estimated) forty minutes long, and led into a closed space which we could not enter. So instead we headed across the river to Veeno for a late lunch. We both wanted to try the deal (which I can't now find on their website) of a glass of orange wine and some fishy nibbles ('dark tuna', whatever that may be, and anchovies). I haven't tried orange wine before, despite it being so fashionable, and was glad of the chance to order a single glass. The staff were keen to warn us that it's a 'marmite' thing, which we would either love or hate: in fact I was underwhelmed. I found it thin, lacking fruit but also lacking anything else in its place, dry though not particularly acid. I'd order the fish again, but with white wine.

Last night's pub quiz took me looping back to the starting point of this post, with the question: what kind of fish are referred to as 'silver darlings'?

...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.

durham_rambler's brother (another D.) and sister-in-law (M.) are in between some impressive holidays, and are filling the gap with a short tour of friends and relations in the UK. They fitted us in between an old friend in Easingwold, and a couple of days on Lindisfarne (just because). We had a couple of evenings together, and the day in between - long enough for a lot of chat, a bottle or so of wine and a visit to the cathedral.

It was Sunday, so access to the cathedral itself was restricted. We cut across the west end of the nave, on our way out to the the cloisters; I just had time to photograph this detail of some Restoration woodwork:

It's part of the casing of the old "Father Smith" organ, relocated when the organ was replaced.

Rather than dodge the worshippers in the cathedral, we wanted to visit the cathedral's museum, which currently houses an exhibition around Magna Carta. Durham owns the only surviving copy of the 1216 issues of the Charter (the year after the original, and restating it after the original was rescinded) plus, if I have this right, two copies of the definitive 1225 issue.

( More than you want to know about the museum... )

We left the cathedral through the College. At the gateway into the Bailey we met a man in military dress, crisp knaki and cockade in his beret, studying the notices, and

durham_rambler asked if we could help.
Was this, he asked, Saint Nicholas' cathedral?
Durham cathedral is dedicated to Saint Cuthbert, and I told him so.
No, he definitely wanted Saint Nicholas.
Well, the church in the Market Place is Saint Nick's, would that do?
He didn't seem all that sure, but he asked for directions, and we pointed him along the Bailey towards the Market Place.
We were heading towards the Market Place ourselves, and before we got there we met our friend coming back (very much more briskly than we were going). He had found someone to solve his conundrum for him: he wanted Newcastle cathedral. (I should have thought of that).

We had a late lunch at Turkish Kitchen in Saddler Street: new to me, but would go again. Excellent bread, and a glass of pinot grigio rosé. M's halloumi salad was enormous: she boxed up most of the salad part, and we all shared it for dinner.

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).

A couple of small irritations, which need to be written about, apparently, just to get them out of my system:

( Customer service fail I: Majestic )

Yesterday

durham_rambler and I did not leave the island, but went our separate ways, wandering about each at our preferred speed and distance. I went down to St Cuthbert's island:

and spent a peaceful while sitting on a bench listening to the seals mooing to each other on the far shore - and trying and failing to spot the oystercatcher(s) I could also hear.

( Customer service fail II: the Crown & Anchor )

I did not get up at 4.00 am to watch the sun rising: but D. assures me that it did so, before the mist closed in. Another solstice past, and the nights begin to grow longer.

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.

We dined out spectacularly last Friday, with not just one but two pub quiz teams. It is the practice of our team to pay our entry fees from, and pay our winnings into, a kitty: we don't always win, but we cover our costs, and over a period it mounts up. Once in a while, we spend our accumulated capital on a meal out; and since those whiles are pretty long, the meals out can be quite fancy. We haven't done this since the eve of lockdown, and in the interim our restaurant of choice has closed. But another door opens: not only has coarse opened, they have now also opened an upstairs floor. When we discoved that another team had similar plans (our friends and rivals, usually referred to as 'the Physics Department', because several of them work there), we got together, and booked the two big tables which fill the entire upstairs.

It was enormous fun. The food was good. The discreet lighting increased the sense that each course was a surprise, and some dishes more successful than others: there were scallops, which I can never resist, though I didn't think they were enhanced by the little sphere of deep-fried haggis (tasty in itself) nor by the Italian red wine which accompanied them. None of the wines was a revelation, though I enjoyed the chasselas: people were generally pleased to taste a Swiss wine, and there were comments about not having done so before; we had, but enjoyed doing so again. And the company was great: perhaps we should have made more effort to move about, and mingle between courses, but I enjoyed staying where I was and talking to the people around me.

On Monday we went to lunch with A and D in Barnard Castle. A complete contrast: lunch, not dinner; at home, not in a restaurant; more relaxed, continuous conversation. Simpler food, though D's smoked haddock soup was as good as anything we ate at coarse (and his sancerre was nicer than most of what we drank). We lingered, talking books and politics and gossip and work until late in the afternoon.

From the sublime to the ridiculous: tonight we will eat at the Elm Tree, so that we will be there early enough to secure a table for the quiz.

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.

Yesterday afternoon was a big family gathering hosted by the Younger Niece: this overlaps substantially with tomorrow's event, but also included some people who won't be at that one, including the whole of the youngest generation (great-nephew level). We also met for the first time the Elder Niece's new partner, and his son (bonus great-nephew-person).

Quite late in the day, Younger Niece informed us that there was a challenge, to come wearing or carrying a clue to a seasonal song, but that it was purely optional. With no time to think and very limited resources, I decided to pass, but

durham_rambler cut up the packaging from our lunchtime mini-panettone and made himself a festive badge. "Life is a panettone," seemed the obvious comment, but caused confusion when our host tried to add it to the party playlist, and couldn't find it. Our hostess with her mistletoe wristband collaborated with her husband who didn't have to work too hard to represent Mistletoe and Wine; an Elvis fan in a blue Santa bonnet (never seen one of those before) indicated Blue Christmas; and thoughtful Elder Niece had a bag of seasonal odds and ends for anyone who hadn't brought their own reindeer antlers and very shiny nose, or even a stick of jingle bells.

We left the party early, to go to Leytonstone Folk Club's concert of Winter Songs: a completely different set of winter songs, I don't think there was any overlap at all, though there will certainly be overlap between the concert and tonight's carol evening - and some overlap of performers, too! We had Cranbrook, for example, with almost no audience participation, which was odd. Sweet Bells got slightly more response, but the fun aspect of that one was that singers were sent out from the stage to the back of the church, to sing "Sweet Bells" back at the performeers. Il est né le divin enfant turned up in a sequence of French songs, between a splendid Noël nouvelet (I should hunt down more of this song) and something I didn't know and couldn't grasp, but suspect may have been humourous. Two Joni Mitchell songs: River, which has become a Christmas regular, and, unexpected but welcome, The Circle Game; Sidney Carter's When I needed a neighbour; the Rolling Stones Winter (how did I not know this? I mean, it wasn't that special, but surely I should have heard it before...?); and assorted Muppets and Greg Lake. No Fairytale of New York, and I'm happy about that, since I think it is very overexposed, but I'm quite surprised, too.

This morning we breakfasted with the Bears, did a little light tidying, and I combined the ingredients for the mulled wine and left them to get acquainted.

durham_rambler and I lunched at the Tufnell Park Tavern: the soup this year is chestnut, and the wine list is full of things I want to try (I had a glass of txakoli, dry and almost saline, which cut beautifully through the richness of the soup). We had hoped that J & J would call on us before the Carol Evening, but they have worn themselves out doing other things, and have spent the afternoon recuperating, ready for this evening - and we have done likewise.

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.

Damsons from the greengrocer; blackberries from the garden.

Salon des refusés: dark but not exactly black fruits:

An outsize aubergine from the greengrocer; 2015 Gigondas from the wine cellar.

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.

D. departed from his most recent visit leaving behind him Edith Somerville and Martin Ross's In the vine country. One of the constants of our friendship is that we have very different tastes, often completely misjudge what the other will enjoy, and keep trying, anyway. So, Somerville and Ross? As in that classic of Victorian humour, The Irish RM, which I have not read but remember being ambivalent about the television version in the 1980s? Yes, that Somerville and Ross.

But D.'s edition was published by a specialist wine publisher (it's also available from Project Gutenberg) which was promising: I like old-fashioned travel writing, I'm interested in wine and I have visited (though I don't know it well) the area of France concerned ... How could it fail to be entertaining?

That's only half a rhetorical question. Somerville and Ross have a distinctive flavour: Irish (or is that Anglo-Irish?) ladies, called away from hunting to go to the Médoc, not for their expertise (they claim none) but for their wit and humour - and they oblige, they are resolutely witty, which can be wearing. Their comedy horror at the unhygienic practices of wine making (the peasants treading the grapes) is displayed at length, and the text is liberally sprinkled with "Irishisms", turns of phrase delivered as if they added some comedy value which was invisible to me... I was very conscious of enjoying reading their account of their travels more than I would have enjoyed travelling with them - but I did enjoy reading it.

Then right at the end, it startled me. In the final chapter, on the homeward journey, the cousins spend a day in Paris. They are familiar with the city, they feel at home, they revisit a hotel, a restaurant that they know of old,they make their way to the galleries in the Jardins du Luxembourg (now the Musée du Luxembourg):

When we got out into the gardens again, with their linked battalions of perambulators, and their thousand children courting sea-sickness on the zoological merry-go-rounds, the afternoon was still young. The tops of the tall horse-chestnuts were yellow in the sunshine, and above them, in the blue sky, the Eiffel Tower looked down on us, suggesting absurdly the elongated neck of Alice in Wonderland, when the pigeon accuses her of being a serpent. Its insistent challenge could no longer be resisted; in spite of the needle-cases, yard-measures, and paper-weights that had horridly familiarised us with its outlines, it was decidedly a thing to be done. People who would go to sleep if we talked to them about the vineyards, would wake to active contempt if they heard we had not been to the Eiffel Tower.

I like the Alice reference, and I recognised that sense that it's hardly worth visiting the Eiffel Tower, its image is so inescapable.

But when the travellers got off the tram at the wrong stop, and "consequently had a long crawl through the empty Exhibition buildings and grounds", I thought again: the tower was built as part of the Exposition Universelle, held on the centenary of the French Revolution. It wasn't old and familiar, it was a new intrusion into a well-known townscape. Somerville and Ross visit it almost against their will not because it is hackneyed, a cliché, but because it is a novelty. How could they refuse to visit the tallest tower in the world, when they were so close, and they might not have another chance (it was intended as a temporary structure, to be demolished after 20 years)? Somerville and Ross's account of their visit to the tower is a lovely piece of writing anyway, a mixture of their trademark self-deprecatory humour (they are not keen to enter the life cage) and vivid description ("the girders that looked like all the propositions in Euclid run mad") but this shift of perspective makes it stand out from the rest of the book.

Not for the first time, the Eiffel Tower hogs the limelight. In the vine country as a whole is very much a case of if this is the sort of thing you like, you will like this. But that final chapter has a much wider appeal.

A random post about our holiday in Brittany; only not exactly random, because I could equally have titled it Good things in unexpected places, or A tale of two mills. Not to mention, what could be more connected, less random, than bread and wine?

First, the bread:

En route from Saint Malo to Paimpol, we plunged into a commercial centre on the edge of Saint Brieuc where our information told us there was a supermarket with a charge point. By the time we had definitely failed to find it, we were sufficiently ready for a late lunch to risk the bakery and tea shop at the entrance to the centre, the Moulin d'Elise. My tuna sandwich was good; even better was a kouign amann, a traditional Breton cake dripping with butter; but best of all was the view from our table of the bread counter. I wished I could buy a loaf, or two ...

Most of the wine we drank in Brittany was the local muscadet; we also drank quite a bit of cider. We enjoyed both of these, but neither was exactly a suprise. But twice we were served red wine which was quite unexpectedly good, and both times that wine was a corbières.

The first time was that same evening, in Paimpol. Weary and a bit frazzled after a day's car-wrangling, we walked along the row of restaurants which line the harbour, all of them offering variations on much the same menu, and settled on the last and most casual looking of them (once we had checked that yes, despite appearances, it was open and serving food). We sat outside, and we ordered steak and chips. Red wine, then, and from the narrow selection on offer, we ordered half a litre of corbières. It came as a full bottle, and we confirmed that it was what we had ordered, before two thirds of it were poured into a jug for us (I hadn't met this practice before, but it happened several times this trip: it means you get more choice of wines in smaller quantities, which is good). Then the bottle was taken away, of course, so I can't be more precise about what it was. It wasn't so phenomenal that I rushed into the restaurant and demanded to see the bottle again: it was just a really satisfying, rich red wine, good enough to remind me that we used to drink corbières quite often, and to make me wonder why we had lost sight of it lately.

Once upon a time, corbières and minervois were our two go-to reds: Sainsbury's stocked both, and they were more than reasonably priced. That's probably my earliest memory of the wines of the southwest, and it could go back to 1985, when the two regions gained their AOC status. We have actually visited Corbières (though we were more impressed by Minerve, on the same trip).

The second corbières of the trip was equally unexpected. We were in Dinan on the last night of the holiday, and we had identified a restaurant which looked really interesting. It wasn't open at lunchtime when we passed, or we'd have tried to book, but we hoped that turning up early would get us a table. It didn't, perhaps because it was Monday, and many places weren't open. Eventually we found a large and not very busy restaurant in the market place: it didn't look very promising, but it would do. I can't even remember what I ate there (it may have been pizza, which was certainly on the menu). From a very short wine list I chose what looked like the most interesting option (it was certainly the most expensive), a bottle of faugères. What we were given, though, was this Vieux Moulin corbières, which hadn't been on the list. I can take a hint. We drank it. It was spectacular, elegant, fruity, well balanced... Am I overreacting to having had such low expectations to begin with? Perhaps. Bring me another bottle, and I'll tell you. It certainly rescued what set out to be an anticlimactic end to the holidays.

ETA: I was forgetting to say that as a result of these two bottles, we were on the lookout for corbières when we made our end-of-holiday visit to Terre et vins, our regular stop on the edge of Dinan. We didn't need to be: there was a big display, front and centre, of two wines from Castelmaure co-operative: these two, in fact, Castor and Pollux. They are described as 'ephemeral wines', which I think means they produce a different themed wine each yeat. It could have been a triumph of marketing - well, it is a triumph of marketing, but they are also a couple of very drinkable wines. Pollux is grenache / syrah, open and fruity, Castor is dominated by carignan, more structured.

We were thirteen at table: last Saturday, for dinner after the match with visiting cousins and family. The match itself was nothing to celebrate: Sunderland had lost, and had in any case played atrociously badly - I have no opinion on this, but note that the supposed fans very often judge it tobe the case. The party, in addition to ourselves, were three brothers (including a pair of twins), one wife and one partner, a daughter (and, I think, her partner), her daughter (in her first term at university) and boyfriend, a step-grandson - and one more: his girlfriend, possibly? The table sorted itself, as if Maxwell's demon had been at work, older generation at one end, younger at the other, so I never really sorted out all the young folk. We can't help being aware of those who are missing from the party, and that each time we all meet may be the last, but any family gathering which is not a funeral is cause for celebration.
Celebrating a Hatfield man: More or less by chance, and at the last minute, we spent Sunday afternoon at the Assembly Rooms with John Watterson, Paul Thompson and the songs of Jake Thackray. Part tribute act (Watterson has an ongoing existence as Fake Thackray, and his mimickry of Thackray's voice is at times uncomfortably good); part book launch (the pair have collaborated on a biography), part homecoming: I think of Jake Thackray as a Yorkshireman, and a French chansonnier, but it turns out he was also a Durham graduate, specifically a Hatfield man. There was to be a further, more conversational, event in the college bar the following evening, but I bought the book, durham_rambler bought the DVD and we decided that this was enough. It wasn't until we got home that we discovered that the DVD, a BBC compilation of Thackray's half-hour shows, also contained performances by guests, including Alax Glasgow - I'm looking forward to playing those.
Celebrating Georges Brassens: I probably travelled in the opposite direction to most people, because I discovered Jake Thackray through Georges Brassens, rather than vice versa (There's this man who is undertaking the impossible task of translating Brassens, and - gasp - doing it rather well!.) So this photo from Leclerc's autumn wine promotion seemed appropriate:

No, I didn't buy a bottle: I love the marketing, but who knows what the wine is like? The Leclerc catalogue doesn't say what region it comes from, what grape it's made from - it's a 'vin de France', which could mean anything...
Still active at 80: The City of Dur ham Trust celebrates its 80th birthday this year - which means it was founded in 1942, when you might have thought local residents would have other things on their minds. But a plan to build a huge power station just along the river from the cathedral sparked the creation of a Durham Preservation Society, and it's being going strong ever since. There have been various serious events to mark the anniversary, but Wednesday was the actual birthday, and a group of us got together over a glass of wine to gossip. The Mayor was there - he's a member -- wearing his chain of office, not for our benefit but because he had come straight from a gathering of the Showmen's Guild...
Other people's parties: A student party in one of the houses in the street that backs onto ours finally wound up about two o' clock this morning. Mostly I can sleep through the roar of their conversation, but the beat of the music gets into my bones. Several times I almost got up to phone the police, but it seemed to be abating - and then started again. Oh, well, a month or more into the term, and this was the first really bad one.

Back on the train, northbound this time, and not as busy, thank goodness. Yesterday was full of many things, which I am still processing: what follows is ordered by chronology, not importance -

( Mercy cut )

And that was that. This morning we had time in hand - I had thought we might enjoy the opportunity to look around the area, but that didn't seem to apply. We vacated our room, booked a taxi, waited and read in the sitting area, lunched at the Upper Crust at Parkway (better than I had expected) and now we are on the train. Homeward bound, mission accomplished.

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/772544.html

There are two men in my back garden, dressed in orange head-to-foot, wielding sharp implements and buzzing at an ear-splitting volume. Is this Hornetman, a hitherto inknown superhero? No, they are tree surgeons. Not that 'surgery' is the first word you would think of, because the instruction we gave them was "Clear the lot!" Everything must go, the elder tree I unwisely planted and all its self-seeded offspring, the shrubs that a friend planted long ago and which are now taller than I am, the ash of unknown provenance which is suffering from ash die back (is that how you write it?), the brambles... What will I do thereafter, with the blank canvas? I don't know. One step at a time.

Last night I had my second vaccination, and this morning my arm is sore (thankyou to everyone who warned me that the second one may have more impact than the first). It was administered by my GP, who apologised for forgetting my name: "You're with

durham_rambler, aren't you? I can remember him, because I saw his face on a piece of paper ..." "Ah, you live in our ward, do you?" I confirmed that

durham_rambler was standing as an independent councillor, but shopped short of actually canvassing a vote.

We came home via Lidl, disconcertingly busy between five and six: I bought onions and couscous and a bottle of the riesling with a wombat on the label.

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/753085.html

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The Shadow Gallery

January 2026

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News from Nowhere

Entries tagged with wine

When is Christmas?

Day of 'faith and luck'

Five things make a week (compressed)

Fish book / book festival / [fish]

Time flies...

Tourists at home

Champagne with the Freemasons

The grit in my oyster

Days of future past

Eating out

Where was I...?

Winter songs

To boldly go...

Black fruit season

A keepsake and a kiss

I'm sorry, I'll read that again

Bread and wine

A week of celebrations

Many things

Stings