One thing I love about the rural NE is the tiny village fetes. They remind me of my childhood, with guess the weight of the cake/cockerel/jar of sweeties, guess the name of the doll/ferret/baby, guess the number of buttons/sweets/hen pellets in the jar, and raffle tickets for prizes for things no better than those for sale on the bric-a-brac. The cake and produce stalls often sell things for less than they cost to make. Despite this, the combined takings on a day often top several thousand pounds. Which is good, beause rural churches, churchyards and village halls, on which the local populace depend, simply would not survive without these quaint events.
I found an interesting old plate at a fete last weekend. 50p. Another objet for my collection, and I might serve some part of an afternoon tea off it sometime.
The strings do not seem to be moulded, but are beautifully formed:
The only mark is this stamped number on the reverse:
I think I have seen something similar at the Bowes Museum in Barnard Castle. Somewhere similar in recent years anyway.
I don’t know what this type of ceramic work is called, and cannot find any examples online anywhere.
Anyone have any clues?
Month: July 2024
I was a newly-qualified teacher when I bought my first car (40 years ago now – how did that happen?), and I have had a car continously ever since, so insurance renewals always come in the school summer holidays. We also have one car that needs MOT and service at this time. The end of July and beginning of August are therefore annoyingly busy with car-related admin, and it is getting harder and harder to work out how to get the best deals. More technology = more headaches, not fewer.
One thing I discovered when renewing house insurance last month is that GoCompare gives you £250 of excess cover free-of-charge on motor and home policies. And I found their website the easiest of all the comparison sites to use.
Moneysavingexpert seem to overlook this in their cheap insurance guides, which I find odd, as adding in £250 voluntary excess when asking for quotes online reduces the price of policies considerably. Fully comp on our 2 cars, £129 and £156. Cheaper than last year. Although not by renewing with the existing companies, who wanted £100 and £125 more than last year respectively, a 70% to 80% increase on each despite nothing at all changing! And no, I didn’t even bother to ring up to ask them their best price as it was never going to come down to the level of new quotations (despite the new legislation saying exisiting customers must get the same deals as new ones).
For the past couple of years I have found the best deals on insurance through confused.com and taken the £20 reward voucher on each policy, but the savings on both house and car insurances using GoCompare with the increased (but refundable) excesses dwarf that.
I’ve written before about car legal protection cover – don’t buy it with every car insurance policy, but buy one policy for all the cars/drivers in your house: Driver Guardian, £18 for two of us (although I think it is £15 per car plus £5 per driver in the first year). Hasn’t gone up for at least 5 years.
Has anyone bought new car tyres recently?
In the past we have invariably bought car tyres in Costco as they were better priced than anywhere else, and you could have them fitted while you shopped.
But now… as we discovered yesterday, you have to book ahead online (about 10 days), and you can no longer just drive in. Despite them having the tyres we wanted in stock, and only one of the 4 fitting bays occupied (and technicians standing about chatting), they refused to serve us even though we were stood in front of them, credit card in hand, with a tyre with a cracked side wall needing replacing.
We looked online for other places in and around the area’s Metropolitan Centre, and in Not-Very-Local Small Town, and went into another tyre quick-serve place. Same story, no walk-ins allowed. Book online, at least a day ahead, choose your time slot, and premiums (up to £10) apply to popular times.
These aren’t unusual sized tyres. Although I do accept there are far too many types of tyre and sizes now for everything to be kept in stock everywhere, I do think they should be available everywhere on (at worst) a next-day service.
Now, is this just a NE phenomenon, or is it countrywide?
What happens if you have a puncture or a tyre with a problem I wonder? Particularly given that no new cars now come with any sort of spare wheel/tyre. And what happens if you fail an MOT unexpectedly on tyre faults? You have to wait days to get it fixed?
And don’t tell me that where you live they will come to you to fit at no extra cost, because they certainly don’t do that up here!
The joy of older vehicles is that they often need money spending on them.
The new car market is an utter mess. No longer can you get good deals by paying cash upfront, and there are no 0% finance deals around except on PCP and similar plans. Manufacturers no longer want you to own your vehicle outright, and make it hard for you to so do.
Only our existing vehicles can meet out needs for small car towing power, so we plod on replacing bits and pieces regularly. Given the costs of running alternative fuel vehicles (insurance, tyres, auxilliary batteries, depreciation are all hugely more than conventional cars), we reckon we can spend several thousand pounds a year before we are out of pocket cf replacing vehicles. And, of course, the longer you keep a vehicle, the more environmentally friendly it is as much of the environmental impact comes from the manufacturing process rather than day-to-day running.
There is so much conflicting information around, and we have concluded that much of it is simply intentional greenwash. Given that the environmental impact of just one flight outweighs many thousands of miles of fossil fuel motoring I am not losing any sleep over our choices. It amuses me greatly that those people we know who drive electric also go on holiday by plane, often several times a year. The more evangelical they are, the more flights they seem to take.
3 years ago we had the aircon regassed in the Blue Broom and it cost £130 then. It’s again not working well. Mr BW’s car has climate control, and that needed regassing too. £300 at least for the two, we thought. Mr BW had a brainwave and searched for DIY regassing. Basically, there are 2 sorts of aircon in cars: pre-2026 and post-2016. Regassing involves attaching a gauge to a pipe in the engine compartment, testing it, attaching the can of gas, squirting it in and then retesting. Even I could manage it as it comes with very clear instructions! Budget versions are available from online retailers of questionnable repute, but a recommended kit to do 2 pre-2016 vehicles is £65 (eg search for ‘Car Aircon R134a Compatible Refrigerant x2 + Professional Type Hose amp Gauge Kit’ on Amazon). Once you have the gauge, further refills are just the cost of the gas, around £20. Quite a saving…
Just in case it is of any use to anyone reading. And yes, I know one can just open the car windows, but this does not work when stuck in traffic on a hot day.
The BBC’s Olympic presenters didn’t seem to know yesterday, so I looked it up.
It’s a poster that took 2,000 hours to design. Much better than flowers, and a nice memento, although if you were 18 you might not think so.
There were only two things it could have been, after all.
The linked page also shows the soft toy medallists get on returning to the Olympic Village. In the shape of a Napoleon hat. Well, OK, strictly it’s a Phrygian cap (pronounced “fri-jee-uh”), but.
…is how I’d sum up last night’s Paris Olympics opening ceremony.
The Guardian were slightly kinder: “soaring ambition deflated by patchy delivery“.
“Bring back Sushi to stop the boats!” was another pertinent comment Mr BW read somewhere.
Dull as ditchwater on TV, not helped by some appalling filming (ever heard of lens cloths to remove rain spots, French cameramen?), bad cutting between scenes, and dreadful sound quality with far-too-variable volume.
Goodness knows what it must have been like for the spectators on the banks of the Seine, or indeed for the athletes who spent most of their time getting soaked on boats so won’t have had the normal drama of the ‘shared opening ceremony experience’ of an epic, fun, show. Here’s hoping that they are all young and healthy enough to survive the prolonged drenching without falling ill.
It seemed as if the TV commentators had been very badly briefed and had insufficient information to keep continuity and the interest of their audiences.
Little thought appeared to have been given to the possibility of rain – and it wasn’t as if it hadn’t been forecast all week. The number of rain ponchos allocated to the boat contingents seemed to vary by nation, with the Ukraine contingent having more than most. Why did no-one think to provide a big long rubber wiper blade on a pole to regularly clear the ‘catwalk’ of water?
Best commentaries and pictures seem to be coming from the US media: CNN and LA Times. If only the BBC commentators had had access to many of the facts in those articles, it would have been considerably more interesting.
But… first morning, first medal (bronze) for Team GB in the women’s 3 metre synchro springboard – but, due to a last-dive error by one of the Australian girls (and one can’t help but feel so sorry for her, despite her loss being GB’s gain).
Boring GB team uniforms this year (from what I’ve seen so far) with extremely skimpy swimsuits and extremely large and shapeless white tracksuits (looking more like judo suits). And what’s the ‘take a selfie with a phone provided by an official at the end of the medals ceremony’ all about?
If you don’t like any kind of sport (surely everyone likes something?), BBC1 seems to be broadcasting nothing else for the next 2 weeks, so bad luck.
We usually buy potatoes from a potato farm up near the Scottish Borders. They have a shipping container just inside their gate and you drive into the yard, pick up a sack of 20kg, put it in your car, and put your money in the honesty box. They only have two or three varieites available at any time, according to what they are digging at the time.
They also do a lot of processing for northern businesses, particularly chip shops, and most of that happens inside a series of polytunnels. One day I will pluck up the courage to wander over and peer in, because I imagine it would be interesting.
We haven’t been up that way recently, and they might be sold out currently anyway. It’s hard to know when they will start digging new potatoes.
So, our last sack being finished, I’ve had to order spuds with my online grocery order the past couple of weeks. I noticed that the 2.5kg bags I bought last time I had to buy from a supermarket have shrunk to 2kg, but the price has increased drastically.
Yesterday I sent back the bag of baking potatoes as they were from Israel. I have a problem both with Israel, and with potatoes needing to be imported from there. The delivery driver told me that the crop had failed on many UK farms due to persistent flooding and that was the only place from which their buyers could source enough potatoes to meet need.
I noticed that the bag of Maris Piper potates were grown in Suffolk, and the potatoes were (as is often the case) actually larger than those being sold specifically as bakers.
I did a bit of research and found that last year 105,624 tonnes of fresh potatoes were imported into the UK, plus 829,438 tonnes of processed potato products.
We have near-perfect growing condiitons for potatoes in the UK. Why on earth are we so dependent on importing such a basic foodstuff?
And why oh why are we exporting potatoes to the same countries from which we are importing them? I don’t think it is about varieties either, and seasonality (early new potatoes, for example) is not enough to account for that kind of imported tonnage.
35 minutes into the Paris Olympics Opening Ceremony. Will we survive 4 hours of this? Hmmm. The Thames Pageant for Maj’s Diamond Jubilee back in 2012 was more impressive, surely?
And talking of Maj’es, I finally have a new £5 note (issued 5th June). I have yet to see any of the new CIII coins though. What on earth have they done to Charlie’s left eye?! How many people must have signed off on that design? Presumably he did too? Even my poor Photoshop skills could have managed to correct that…
We often dig up things in the garden which were buried in the days before from-the-house rubbish collection. Mostly they are fragments of plates, cups, jugs, ceramic tiles, or some sort of glass receptacle or glass marble. Occasionally we find intact items.
I often think, “Now, what shall I do today? Go to a junk shop” (increasing numbers locally, with the huge influx of tourists in recent times) “or have a dig in the garden?” *
This is (I think) a meat or fish paste jar, although it isn’t as deep as those I remember from childhood teas at Grandma and Grandpa’s (the only time we had such delicacies):
I found these in a cupboard the other day when I was looking for something suitable for rhubarb fools:
I did a lot of miles in the mid- to late- 80s and still have many of the petrol station drinking and sundae glasses that were given away free – with tokens – then.
They were made of quite poor quality glass, and most of them are now probably broken and buried in landfill sites. You certainly don’t see many around in junk shops or charity shops. Not that many people would actually want them to use these days. Except me.
Anyone else still have any relics of the past of vehicle fuel retailing Or remember any?
* this may not be true
You may think they’re a load of old cobblers, but I like my lasts. I actually like them lined up rather better than this, but I did not take this picture specifically to illustrate this post so had not straightened them up and spaced them out first:
These are just some of my collection: the ones with wooden ‘legs’ attached (that would rot outside) are usually displayed in the summerhouse, but we don’t have one of those currently, so they are in a pile of boxes in the conservatory, awaiting availability of funds for the purchase of a new summerhouse. The property market down south in our price bracket finally seems to be waking up again (maybe because of confidence increasing with the change of government and likely fall in interest rates on mortgages, or perhaps as the million pound plus bracket, hitherto unaffected by the bad economic times, has now crashed after the news that 20% VAT is to be added to private school fees in 2025), so fingers crossed that the day of the return of financial security comes soon please.
The metal triangles are from the floor of a foundry in the next village to us down south that was stripped out and converted into flats. I wish we’d bought more of them when we had the chance 20-odd years ago.
Anyway, Nice Nearest Neighbour was having (yet another) clear out the other day (I fear she has the ‘death cleaning’ bug rather prematurely) and presented me with a very unusual example, that belonged to her father, for my collection. He died in 1999 and rescued it from a cotton mill in Lancashire, where he once worked, when he retired:
It is mounted on a piece of wood, but offset, which Mr BW thinks was to allow it to be held in a vice for use. The right hand part slides in and out to make different sizes.
The tiny child’s shoe part is just so sweet:
I’ve not seen an example like this before and it’s not in any of my reference books of objets. I have done a quick bit of searching and found a couple around on the internet, but neither has this small piece.
I shall treasure it.
I like dips, with fresh veggies or crackers/pittas/crisps.
What I don’t like is those packs of ‘dip’ available from supermarkets at inflated prices. It’s so easy to make your own by popping ingedients into a food processor or blender and giving it a quick zap. Yoghurt, creme fraiche, soured cream, mayonnaise, Philly or yoghurt (in any combination) along with anything you’ve got to hand: avocado, cucumber, tomatoes, chilli, chives etc etc.
What is harder to find is good non-dairy dips.
Here’s a bean and olive dip that is absolutely delicious (all the other recipes on the site – all vegetarian and many vegan – that I’ve tried have all been excellent too).
I’ve been ringing the changes using all sorts of pulses: chick peas, butter beans, red kidney beans etc etc, green olives instead of black, and handfuls of whatever herbs or lettuce-like salads are needing a chop back.
They’ve all been delicious, but of particular merit was butter bean, basil and black olive with garlic salt.
Anybody got any other good recipes for dips?
I love cabbage.
I bought a variety of brassica plants on a really good deal (so good that it was no more than the price of all the different packets of seed), delivered in 3 tranches, from DT Brown this year. We now have rather a lot, under enviromesh hoops to protect it from The Cabbage White (although sadly – in biodiversity terms at least – there are maybe 10% of the usual number around). I found a great recipe for cooking them a little differently: roasted cabbage steaks with mustard vinaigrette (or, just the recipe without all the annoying adverts here). The mustard dressing is worthy of eating with many other things too, and the amount of jar mustard used emulsifies it, so it can be kept in the fridge for a while before using.
Here are the cabbage ‘steaks’ before cooking:
We have probably 40 peaches on a tiny patio peach tree, now 28 years old (I found its original sale particulars recently). It used to live on the balcony at Coven Sud, but now lives in the Big Greenhouse at Coven Nord as this meets its needs rather more in Northern Climes.
We also currently have figs for breakfast, along with redcurrants, raspberries, strawberries, blackcurrants, jostaberries, gooseberries and blueberries.
HFW aims to eat 30 different plants a week for health. We aim for 30 a day, almost all of them home-grown. But, the HFW book is worthy of a look. I ordered it from the library first, but it is so good – lots of original ideas – that it became the first cook book I have bought for probably 10 years. Given that I have several hundred cookbooks from all eras, that must be a recommendation.
Anyone else got any good recipe or cookbook recommendations?
If you eat my garden, rabbits, The Black Familiar will eventually eat you:
If you eat the head of my hen, rats,
we will eventually get the better of you, snappy snappy:
And what’s more, I will cut off your tail with my secateurs when I put you in the bin, crunchy crunchy.
If I have to look at this stuff, so should you…
St Swithin’s Day yesterday.
It didn’t rain for the first time in many weeks.
It won’t last.
Well, Meadow Guru thinks it’s a common orchid, and The Last (Elderly) Tory Voter in WitchPig, whose garden we visited this afternoon in the pouring rain, in aid of continuing to cut the grass in the churchyard of the church (that doesn’t really have a viable congregation any more) 16 times a year (yes, there’s a story, best not to ask) reckons it’s an Early Purple. So we are no further forward.
But we did manage to have our included-in-the-entry strawberry tea under the raffle gazebo without being obliged to purchase any raffle tickets, thanks to the opportune arrival of a 12 year old whose parent obviously thought that £5 a strip is an OK amount for raffle tickets. Raffles are definitely a form of accepted/expected extortion in rural areas.
It’s strange that the people with whom we feel most at ease all seem to be very churchy types, which is very much Not Our Thing.
Mi1dred was 91 yesterday and The Black Familiar was 12. Here is the latter on the former.
We had planned to take Mi1dred to see some similarly aged friends at The Mines today, but it isn’t a short journey to get there, and the rain was just too torrential.
Not wishing to watch knocky ball or kicky ball, a quite local open garden was the next best thing.
What did you get up to today?
It didn’t rain yesterday, so we took the opportunity to take our Meadow Guru’s advice to pull out and cut down a lot of the seeding coarse grass heads in the orchard/meadow/field, and also rebattled the nasty field thistles (48 huge black sacks full now in 3 years, and still counting – probably forever) and re-mowed the paths.
Mr BW has marked all the (now many) patches of yellow rattle with bamboo canes so we don’t accidentally cut them down before they are ripe and can rattle out this year’s seeds to continue to field-to-meadow process. He gathers armfuls of cut-off grass heads (some 18″ tall) and puts them on a tarpaulin, then folds it over and drags the lot off to a huge and growing pile in a scrubby area that may one day be something else, but that is a project that will involve a bulldozer and a dumper truck, and we haven’t yet had adequate inspiration, let alone time, so won’t be doing that for several years.
As he pulled out some clumps of grass from around one of the fruit trees (protected against rabbits with posts and wire netting) he saw something very exciting!
We just need to work out which one it is.
As it is mostly over now, and the pictures we took yesterday aren’t great (and it’s raining too much to take any more yet) it’s hard to tell: perhaps common or early purple? Any experts out there?
Later he found a wasps nest in the ground. When you keep b33s, the last thing you want is wasps a few metres from your apiary as they can kill a hive in a couple of hours in late summer. It’s the b33s or the wasps. They are now ex-wasps. We hope.
On Monday, summer finally arrived and lasted until 4pm.
Early afternoon, our Local Guru on Traditional Wildflower Meadows came round to inspect how ours is coming along, give us further advice and have tea. It was mid-20s and we sat out in the garden in the shade and shared stories of loved ones dying with dementia.
Within 10 minutes of her leaving, the temperature had dropped 10 degrees and it started to drizzle. Since then it has been grey, cold and raining at varied intensities. It is currently 14°C and overcast.
I don’t like socks. Usually I abandon them by the beginning of May and don’t re-find them until at least the beginning of October. But this year, even if I start the day without needing a pair, a few hours later my feet are so cold that I have to put some on. That is annoying as I can’t stand the feel of socks on feet that aren’t totally clean, so it always involves footwashing first, and getting feet dry enough – when the atmosphere is so moisture-laden – to put on socks is challenging.
This is not summer.
We need to get outside to cut the seed heads off the coarse grasses (that have grown on what was sheep field for hundreds of years and are not inclinded to desist unaided) before they shed their seeds everywhere and swamp the yellow rattle that Mr BW has finally got to grow in significant quantiies this year, after 3 years of trying. The first year with commercial seed (useless) followed by 2 years of seed we gathered from Local Guru on Traditional Wildflower Meadows’s historic 25 acre field. Which currently looks glorious:
Ours will never look like that as we are only aiming for ‘species rich’ meadow – in between fruit and native trees – and happily seed, plant or relocate anything in there that will provide nectar and pollen for the b33s.
I’ve tried to upload a larger file, or to upload just a part of it to show the many different flowers present, but annoyingly the software isn’t playing ball and says the files are too large.
For those wondering why anyone would keep and maintain wildflower meadow in this day and age, a field that size qualifies for a £2,000 annual grant (£80 an acre).
By contrast, planting just one tree (which can include hedging trees) will get you £42 (cost of sapling plus tree spiral guard is around £2 in bulk, plus labour to plant, but grants are available to farmers and landowners both for these costs and for the costs of establishing and planning the venture). There are then (significant) ongoing annual payments, separate income from carbon offestting schemes, and a final timber value. The ancient sheep pastureland fields around here are quickly being forested. Small patches each year. Who’d farm sheep (a non-stop responsibililty with unknown costs and no final prices guaranteed) when you can plant trees, sit back and watch the money roll in?
I hasten to add that we did not qualify for any incentives or grants at all to plant our 700 trees, and had to meet the costs from our own pockets.
We had summer today. Well, at least until 4pm when it clouded over, the wind got up and it’s now drizzling. Hang out the flags!
Perhaps unsurprisingly, due to the amount of water that has fallen from the sky this year (including hail on Saturday), there are more slugs and snails than we have ever seen anywhere.
Down south we successfully used nematodes to control slugs for many years, but then the price went up dramatically, and we calculated that for 6 applications on the size of garden we now have, it would cost over £1,000 a year as they don’t seem to sell packs any larger than to treat 100 square metres. Even if we had £1,000, I wouldn’t think that was good use of money. Plus, nematodes don’t control snails or the largest slugs, and they require the ground to stay moist, which it doesn’t on top of a windy ridge, even when there is rain.
Now having created an allotment-sized vegetable garden in the orchard, as well as the flower and vegetable areas in the main garden, we have been using what market gardeners and farmers now use to protect crops – so-called organic slug pellets, “Sluxx” (3% ferric phosphate), which are (allegedly) pet and wildlife friendly, but you do have to buy it by the sack and it’s not cheap. Plus when you find a slug and chop it in half using a piece of slate (revenge is sweet) it oozes blue which is the same blue as the nasty recently-banned metaldehyde pellets, which is really most off-putting..
Having tried all the other recommended mechanical methods of slug control over the years (baked crushed eggshells help a bit around seedlings, provided it is a thick layer, but the rest all unsuccessfully), a few weeks ago I finally got round to trying beer traps.
I cut a 4 pint plastic milk container in half, just under where the handle starts, and fill the bottom section with one-sixth of a can of cheap beer (Sainsbury’s do ‘tramp beer’ that is 2% and the cheapest I can find: 4 x 440ml cans for £1.45 – would that there were any local pubs left who might give me their slops – Aldi and Lidl no longer seem to do cheap beer), some old dried bakers’ yeast (mine is from 1998, yours might be younger), a tablespoon of sugar and add water to two-thirds of the way up.
Then simply give the mixture in the pots a good stir, leave it in the warm for half an hour to start fermenting (on the kitchen worktop should be fine), then put these traps amongst your flower or vegetable plants and and be surprised when they are absolutely full up with slugs and snails in a couple of days. I’ve watched a procession of slugs simply crawl up into them in the early morning, just after dawn (about 3.30am up here – your sleep paterns might be better than mine – but it is absolutely the best part of the day). The small slugs that cause the most damage seem especially partial to my concoction.
Now, I would imagine that in hot weather the smell might get rather pungent, but, as we’ve only had 3 weeks of ‘summer’ in total (2 weeks at the begining of May, a few days a couple of weeks ago and today until 4pm) I’ve not been troubled by it yet. At least the slugs die happy.
I have been absolutely amazed at the efficacy of these beer traps and wish I’d discovered them years ago. Now, if there was something useful one could do with the dead drunken slugs….
I spared you a picture, be grateful.
… but thankfully it is now.
The Sushi’s off.
“Mrs Sushi looks like a zebra!” I exclaimed.
“She doesn’t, she looks like dazzle camouflage used on WW1 ships to make them difficult to spot!” noted Mr BW.
Now then, who’s left to take over as Leader of the Opposition? Cruella, *unt, Badenough (having had her as Consituency MP and seen how utterly useless she is, that would be the worst option), Pratel, The Man Whose Name Doesn’t Even Finish Its Own Sentence?
We now live in the midst of a solid Red Wall. Pretty much mirroring Hadrian’s Wall.
Every seat in the NE bar one.
This proportional map from here.
It was fascinating to see the usual/historic Blue ‘vote for me’ signs all across huge swathes of the central County feudal ruraldom turned Red.
The landowners and the farmers had clearly had enough: well and truly Trussed Up.
Tactical voting means that for the first time since 1991 when I moved from Paddy Ashdown’s Yeovil LibDem constituency, I have an MP I voted for.
Into my seventh decade, it’s also the first time I’ve ever voted Labour, but, I’ll get over it, and back to voting for Independents or Person Not Party. On the positive side, as a collector of many odd things, I can now claim a complete set of votes for all the major Parties.
Interesting times.
Tory Lite though.
And plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, undoubtedly. And that comes from 1849, or possibly earlier.
Who’s happy with what they’ve now got? Predictions for new Leader of the Opposition?