The bantams have arrived

Posted on September 11, 2014 | Leave a comment

We’ve been planning to add to our flock for a little while. Much though we love our Ixworths, they’re handsome rather than pretty, and we fancied some, well, fancy fowl. And we thought that a small flock of bantams would have some grandchild appeal. But maybe that was just an excuse.

Anyway, we paid a visit to the very excellent and highly recommended Orchard Poultry. There we asked for advice and picked out a selection of beautiful and healthy bantams.

It’s always great fun to watch to see which one will emerge from the travel crate first …

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New caravan

Posted on September 1, 2014 | Leave a comment

At last the day came. We collected our nice Bailey Unicorn Madrid from the very excellent Glossop Caravans.

It wasn’t the sunniest of days, and we were glad to get back to our storage site with enough time in hand before dusk to put into practice our handover of the motor mover and security features.

The new Powrtouch motor mover is a significant improvement on our old Rhyno.

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Chalk and cheese: the attack on good food

Posted on August 15, 2014 | Leave a comment

My attention was taken by a Tweet from @samphireshop linking to a panic-stricken press release from an organisation called CASH, Consensus Action on Salt & Health.

Well, it certainly alarmed me! Let me quote the headlines from this paper. The use of capitals for emphasis is theirs, by the way:
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Excited as a kid – new caravan

Posted on August 13, 2014 | Leave a comment

It’s foolish of course, and at my time of life I should know better, but I’m as excited as a small boy in a toy-shop.  We’ve upgraded our caravan to a much more recent model.  We’ll be collecting it at the end of August.

I don’t regret having bought the Elddis as a first caravan, though.  The EX2000 was a special edition for the millennium, and was a posh van for its day, with top class fittings.

Caravan08a

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BBQ anathema, but it worked!

Posted on August 5, 2014 | Leave a comment

I’ve been watching an American reality TV show called BBQ Pitmasters, in which teams compete to cook the best and tastiest barbecued meats. We actually went to one of these cook-offs in Dodge City on one of our mid-west motorcycle tours, but at that time we didn’t really appreciate the nuances of competitive BBQ.

Anyway, inspired by the Pitmasters, we decided to do a family BBQ last weekend. We booked a couple of pitches at a campsite in rural Essex. We pitched the caravan on one, and the big frame tent on the other to act as an awning.
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My Little Porkie: Sausages

Posted on July 25, 2014 | Leave a comment

Well, the day came when Ethel was converted into joints of pork. She’d had a lovely life at Samphire at Sycamore Farm, so we don’t feel bad about eating the end product.

A couple of days before she arrived on our doorstep, we had a message from Karen Nethercott, who runs Samphire, to tell us that “Ethel was quite a big girl”. That sent us into a minor panic, since although we thought we’d cleared plenty of freezer space, we hadn’t bargained for a larger than average pig.

We made some backup arrangements, but we shouldn’t have worried. The pork arrived immaculately butchered, boned, packed, and labelled.

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Chicken and redcurrants

Posted on July 14, 2014 | Leave a comment

No, not a recipe!

We’ve inherited a few old fruit bushes on the part of the allotment where we keep the chickens. We kept the bushes because the birds love to shelter under them. They’re lovely and cool and shady in the summer. We don’t give a lot of attention to the bushes, pruning them rather crudely, and let the chickens have the fruit. But this year there were so many redcurrants that we thought we might take a little share for ourselves.

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Caravan miscellany

Posted on June 28, 2014 | Leave a comment

With some sadness I realise that we’ve only got a day left before we have to pack up and move back to Caen to catch the ferry.

This has not only been our first time in France with the caravan, but by far the longest that we’ve spent in it. So it seems a good point to review how we’ve managed, and to comment on what’s worked well for us.

140621 Rolandiere 020a
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Giant Asian Hornet

Posted on June 28, 2014 | Leave a comment

No pictures with this post, I’m afraid. I was a bit preoccupied to reach for the camera.

Inevitably we get the occasional unpleasant insect coming into the awning, including wasps and hornets. But yesterday evening we were invaded by a hornet the like of which I’d never seen. It was fully 4cm long, and from looking on the internet it was indeed a Giant Asian Hornet, not the yellow-bodied European one.
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Great gadgets: Aeropress coffee maker

Posted on June 26, 2014 | Leave a comment

I hope that she won’t mind my mentioning it, but one of my daughters-in-law is even more of a gadget connoisseur than I am. It was she who recommended the Aeropress coffee maker. It also comes highly recommended by Has Bean coffee.

Now you can’t go to France on a camping holiday and drink instant coffee, can you? So I had every excuse to buy one to produce our breakfast café au lait.

140622 Aeropress 011a
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