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Oxford weekend

I had a grand reunion with my London poetry workshop group last weekend, when we all travelled to Oxford for a couple of days of reading poetry and eating nice food. One night we ate at Folly’s Bridge Brasserie near the Folly, (a For Sale sign on the front of it when we passed).

Although we had a very fruitful workshop, discussing consistently interesting, challenging and inspiring poems, another highlight was in store for us, in the form of a group reading, organized by Jenny Lewis, at the Albion Beatnik Bookshop in Jericho, Oxford. An enthusiastic, attentive and book-buying audience of 55 or so squeezed into every available corner to sup on mulled wine, mince tarts and the ambrosial words of Jenny (who read poems from Fathom), Claire Crowther (reading from Mollicle and Incense), Anne Berkeley (reading from The Men From Praga), Tamar Yoseloff (reading from The City with Horns)

 

 

 

 

 

and I (reading from Sunday Dinners, The Earth’s Kitchen and Cartography) before we were treated to a slightly longer reading from Sue Rose in celebration of her new collection, From The Dark Room. We were inclined to agree with the bookshop owner who said he’d never had a better poetry evening.

The next morning we opted for an amble through Oxford, a browse of Objects of Use, and a nice coffee and sandwich at The Missing Bean before scattering to the four corners.

www.jennylewis.org.ukAlb

Shropshire nosh

Back already from a week in Shropshire, enjoying good food and better company as we whiled away the week talking about food and food writing with tutors Lindsey Bareham and Paul Bailey and enjoyed the opportunity of a lifetime to break bread with Claudia Roden, who was a delightful, articulate and well-travelled guest speaker.

On arrival last Monday it had been deemed warm and fine enough weather, after a week of record-breaking rains, to sit on the terrace for a before-dinner drink. Unfortunately this left us open to an enthusiastic welcome by hosts of Shropshire midges, wild with appetite. I had in all my years in England somehow never personally experienced midges and always imagined them as some smaller variety of mosquitoes, but now I think they are more like a tiny, carnivorous mutation of the fruit fly, which has evolved with an insatiable taste for human flesh and an instinct that causes them, en masse, to try to enter the human head by any available orifice. More like what we Canadians might call a no-see-um. Ouch, by any name.

Luckily we had a few distractions of our own: a generous sampling of excellent breads and local cheeses (clockwise from top left: Wrekin White; Stinking Bishop; Gloucestershire Brie; Shropshire Blue; and Cothi Caws Cynros goat cheese)

and some wonderful Old Spot ham

from the nearby Ludlow Food Centre,

which we visited on Wednesday. A custom-built local food shop, in essence the farm shop of the Earl of Plymouth estate, 80% of its provisions come from 4 counties (Shropshire, Worcestershire, Powys and Hertfordshire). It has a central selling area surrounded by kitchens, from which resident cheesemaker Dudley Martin produces butter and cheese;

desserts (she was finishing work on some raspberry brulees during our visit) from food prize-winner Catherine Moran’s Sweet Stuff Slow;

meats, responsibility of the centre’s butcher John Brereton (from the estate, including organic beef, lamb and traditional Old Spot pork);

coffees (roasted and ground in-house), baked goods, and preserves like this Thai Perry Pear Pickle.

It was all, as they say, food for thought and we talked about the centre for the rest of the week, with interest and ambivalence. While there I picked up a little morsel of Tipsy Cherry Fruit Cake, the handiwork of The Simply Delicious Fruit Cake Company, and it was. The jam and pate I bought at the same time will be sampled later.

We were near a pretty village called Clun, where they have a castle with views of the town:

We ate well, by our own fair hands, with a little help and challenge from Lindsey’s and Paul’s collection of recipe books. Wednesday’s team were the winners of favourite all-round meal, with some Chez Panisse chicken, roasted vegetables, baked potatoes, and a garlic, pine-nut and cream sauce to bind it,

and a self-assembly apple crumble made of 3 different apples, with rum-soused raisins, crumbly flapjack and lots of double cream.

There were many other nice things to eat and drink through the week as well….

Now I must prepare myself for a change of country and cuisine as I’m off to France tomorrow.

Oysters to Oysterage


Garlic butter oysters from the Hanami Japanese Restaurant at the Vancouver Airport. Pan-fried with mushrooms.. not bad.. even better were the gyoza and California roll. A pleasant change to see an airport restaurant managing to serve nice food to a captive market!


A beautiful day on the Aldeburgh seafront.


Dog-friendly town, Aldeburgh.


We did our best to liberate what cheeses we could from the overloaded display at Lawson’s Delicatessen: Suffolk Gold, Mrs Temple’s blue cheese, St André – a vignotte lookalike – and a wedge of Manchega. Lots of nice looking sheeps’ milk cheeses on offer too, and you can fill your bottle of olive oil from a silver keg in the back. Hours of fun.


Here was my welcoming committee to the Butley Orford Oysterage. Some big fat grilled sardines, who followed a very tasty oyster soup – thick and creamy with chopped oysters adrift in its scalding depths.


If you can think of it, they smoke it at Richardson’s Smokehouse. Some of their fish in preparation, below.

Ottawhere

I left West Sussex yesterday, on a scorching cloudless morning and landed in Ottawa drizzle, with temperatures on the monitor dropping from 19 to 14 in the time it took to taxi toward the terminal. This trip has been a see-saw ride from hot to cold and back again. I am staying in a b&b; in the heart of Ottawa, and from the conveniently supplied pc in the lobby I can gaze between the high-rises up at the leaden skies and count the intermittent umbrellas before making my move up the road toward the National Library.

I dined Wednesday night in the Swan Inn in Fittleworth, described a bit snootily on a Real Ale website as an “Impressive 14th-century coaching inn with pretensions as a quality hotel.” Well be that way then. I thought it was charming in appearance, whatever its pretensions, with oil paintings set in panels all the way around the dining room, each with a tiny name plaque underneath. Given the number of similar views it on display looked like a long ago group of local painters might have contributed works. The art, sadly, was better than the service, and the roast Sea Bass better than the sea trout fillets, and the creme brulee far superior to the bread and butter pudding, but I had a wonderful meal with my beloved aunt and cousin and a charming gentleman to round out the numbers.

Said gentleman had just turned 88 and was a long retired Desert Rat with many travels to many places since those days. He and my aunt and cousin were all on the same cruise a year ago, steaming toward St Petersburg on a Swan Hellenic discovery tour of the Baltic, but they said the operators are sadly headed for merger with P&O; later this year. Their charm apparently is the small size of the ships and the excellence of the lecturers. Gentleman mentioned the Hebridean Princess as a good alternative, but my aunt said they are spectacularly expensive. Very plush too from the looks of it. One day my cruise will come…

The day before, dear cousin and I had driven down from London after a hearty lunch at the Gourmet Burger Kitchen in Chiswick, where you can get a mountainous Aberdeen-Angus beef burger (with tomatoes, red onion, tomato relish and garlic mayo) guaranteed to give you a good mandibular work-out and leave you well fed and covered in burger goo. I am surprised they haven’t thought to hand out hot towels…

I flew across the ocean yesterday afternoon on Zoom, another budget airline with Canadian roots. It was quite pleasant and the crew were helpful and kindly. We managed three movies in a six and a half hour flight: some nail biting Harrison Ford film, followed by the Steve Martin Pink Panther, followed by the new King Kong, whose vertiginous finale was a bit of a questionable idea coming as it did just before we began our descent into Ottawa airport. Such was the scale of amusement on offer that disappointingly my seatmate did not manage to get to her Hello magazine with its full and exclusive coverage of Angelina and Brad’s new arrival, so I landed unenlightened on that score, but it was still a pretty reasonable flight back to Canada.

Poetry doings this morning and more news from the front to follow, and so to all a good day.

Yorkshire been and gone

Photos will follow; can’t seem to post them today. I’m working on a laptop equipped with Office 2003 which for me lacks the most important and useful freebie from the Office portfolio: PhotoEd, which was removed by the software nazis after Office XP, sad be the day. It was replaced by the less than wonderful Picture Manager which is a pain in the jpeg. Here endeth the rant.

Spent last week at Lumb Bank, a baker’s dozen of us on a NAWE writers retreat. A good mix of prose and poetry writers from all over Britain, plus one Canadian, wrote feverishly in a scant week of freedom – for most – from the stopper of teaching duties and family responsibilities. The poets took matters into our own hands and five of us sat round the big library table and constructively admired one another’s work for a couple of hours. There was a kick-off workshop by Paul Magrs the first day, which I sadly missed due to an overwhelming need to nap after the previous day’s long journey to get here. Magrs’ name is known to me because of the Creative Writing Coursebook which he edited with Julia Bell, so I was sorry to miss his workshop. He stayed on for consultations and to give us an entertaining reading in the evening.

We were accompanied in our musings by the cat Ted Hughes who has taken over her namesake’s former home and cosies up to all who dwell here, sadly for the departed dormouse who had an ill fated encounter with her one afternoon and had to be dealt with by two of the writers.

We, as is the custom at Arvon courses, took turns in teams with the cooking, and it has to be said we ate well. Wednesday night’s meal, lovingly prepared by the ro-ro-rho team of Rosie, Rosemary and Rhona, was a Jamie Oliver special, chicken with sweet tomatoes and chillies, and a smoked tofu/falafel variation for the half of us who were vegetarian; tender new potatoes, and carrots and broccoli. Dessert was a heavenly fruit (apple, strawberry, blackcurrent) crumble served with cream, yogurt or ice cream. The night before was a West Country Casserole, which delectably perched grilled sausages on a mixture of onion and apple, accompanied by mashed potatoes. Cheat’s Dessert was a surprising and successful pairing of sliced oranges with crushed gingernut biscuits, smoothed out by ice cream. Vegetarian lasagne was followed by Raspberry Crowdie – raspberries crowded into a bowl of thick yellow cream and sprinkled with oats and cinnamon. We had some spectacular slabs of salmon with perfectly cooked asparagus to end our stay, with a health giving fruit salad to finish.

What there wasn’t was interruption by phone or email: a request to keep phones switched off and the total lack of internet took care of these. Although I had hoped to slink into town to visit the internet café in Hebden Bridge I was thwarted when I learned it had been closed down, and the public library was reportedly out of commission due to renovation work.

Unfortunate. It’s not just the email I wanted to have available, but the resources I’ve become accustomed to using even for poetry – rhyming dictionary, thesaurus, encyclopedia and quotation resources as well as instant research – I need them all. The centre director – who has to balance the needs of a few grown-up writers on retreat as well as school groups and workshop attendees – insists his policy holds firm because he wants to make Lumb Bank an island of undisturbed tranquility amidst the crashing and intrusive waves of today’s technological sea. All very well till you have that one thing you need to deal with from afar…