Lunch Companions

I tried a couple of new recipes recently (you're waiting to see if any include squirrel now, aren't you?): tarte flambée (also known as flammekueche, and flammkuchen) a dish from Alsace that we love - I cheated a bit and used Jamie's cheat's pizza base from a few months back and it was very nice. The other was salt-crusted potatoes using 1kg evenly sized scrubbed smallish potatoes placed in a single layer in a large pan, covered with water and 30g salt. Boil until the water disappears then turn the heat down and continue to cook for a few mins, shaking the pan to turn the spuds until they are dry and wrinkled. They were nice but rather too salty for me, BUT they came out just like mini baked potatoes but took a fraction of the time so I reckon I could do them again, using less salt, and serve them as quick mini bakers.

We're very glad that June is long past, with all its expenses, but it did throw up another problem before it was done when the kitchen cabinets tried to fall off the wall. The kitchen has been in 8 years now and our dodgy plasterboard walls allowed the rawle plugs to just come straight out. Luckily we spotted it before they did drop off (partly because they were held in place by shelves which hadn't failed) but as that wall held all our booze (and don't forget we'd just had a trip to France!) and glasses, it could have been rather messy and expensive. Took Jon and his Dad a good couple of hours one evening to put everything back together again.

We finally got British Gas to come back and finish off the snagging for Michel, the new boiler. Honestly it took 12 'phone calls to get someone to come back and do a job that took less than 2 mins and which, if they'd left us the bloody manual in the first place, we could have done ourselves! Like many companies they were fine until we'd paid the bill and then they became very difficult to get hold of. But we're still very happy with Michel - he's soooo quiet - and it looks like he's saved us £35 since he was installed part way through the quarter. The shower is also wonderful and it seems to have saved several cubic metres of water already. The nasty hole in the tiles where the old shower fitting used to be has been covered by the creative use of a large blue Sigg Alu-Box as a cabinet to hold shampoo, etc. Looks great and no drilling into the tiles was required!

*****************

These are the little chaps that I share my crusts with at lunchtime. Actually I see the mice far more often than the squirrels, but they're much more nervous of people and they move quicker too!

You can see from the pictures that where I eat lunch looks like a country track rather than part of a busy urban university campus, but we're outside the city proper and there's lots of green space. The path was great because it had become so over-grown that all the seats were almost hidden from each other, so we could all eat and read in our own little worlds. When I threw bits of lunch around for the birds something (mouse, blackbird or brambling) popped out of the bushes, grabbed a piece and dashed back in again with their booty. It’s quite odd to sit on a bench and hear scrabbling and squeaking from the undergrowth around you and behind your head and not be able to see the source! But the undergrowth was so dark that all I could see was a piece of bread or pasta levitating its way along the side of the path, and not the little critter carrying it!

I say 'the path was great' because I went down for lunch about a fortnight after I’d taken these pictures and the place had been decimated. A rather chuffed groundsman was admiring his work at clearing all the growth away to reveal a wide boulevard lined with hitherto unsuspected dry stone walls which he'd pushed the benches back against. The trees used to over-hang the benches so that you could eat lunch in the rain without getting wet, but these had been sawn back too. I couldn’t believe the change: from a thin country track barely two feet wide it had become a two metre-wide gravelled municipal park path.

It’s not an over-statement to say that I was devastated and spent much of my lunch break on the verge of tears. But, as I disconsolately chucked a bit of bread for the birds (who were hopping around looking a bit disoriented), slowly, out came the mice. I was SO happy to see that they hadn’t all run away. They were peering out of the dry-stone walls and scampering out from under the remainder of the bushes and I have to say that I see much more of them now than before – but then I’m sure that predators do too. They are beyond cute.

So, that’s me, turning into mad-old-lady-feeding-vermin and having my happiness levels dictated by whether I see mice at lunchtime… But I really do enjoy watching wildlife getting on with its business without taking much notice of me. Today I was surrrounded by a flock of long-tailed tits hopping through the branches of the pine tree looking for grubs with something small and yellow (woodwarbler?) following in their wake, whilst a lesser spotted woodpecker could be heard alittle further off. Almost made me forget to go back into work at the end of my lunch break!

Ah, the sounds of summer in the city: the gentle tinkle of glass on pavement...

The fashions hark back to the mid-1980s, there's a recession on which is accompanied by mass youth unemployment, there are riots on the streets of Toxteth, London and Birmingham sparked by police brutality - yes, the Tories must be back in power again...

But politics aside; we had one of our best days for ages yesterday at the Science Museum's 'Big Object Store' at Wroughton, on the site of the ex-WWII aerodrome just outside Swindon. WANHS had organised a behind the scenes tour of the store, archive and library as very little public access is allowed at the moment due to the deteriorating state of some of the aircraft hangars that are used to store the objects and financial constrains forcing them to abandon anything outside their core remit. 

It was absolutely stunning. First there are the WWII hangars which are brill. in themselves, but then to go in and find them stuffed with everything from lawn mowers to Polaris nuclear missiles (stuff that make bomb go bang been safely removed), taking in mark 1 hovercraft, trams, 18th century fire engines, a Dan-Air jet and just about anything you can think of in between. We went in 2 stores, a refurbished store (who'd have thought that an empty warehouse could be so interesting?!) before seeing the archives. The archive building included a very early Daimler with the Royal Carriage Collection - they were all housed in the archive because the conditions were better for them than in the hangars.

 I had an interview at the library in 2008 before I got this job and I'm now rather glad that I didn't get it 'cos I would never have done any work and would have been sacked! The archive includes coach builders' plans of their custom-built bodies for Daimlers, Bentleys, Maharajas' Rolls Royces, etc. They have Donald Campbell's photos and diaries, plans for the Conway and Britannia tubular bridges, Charles Rolls' photo albums of his early exploits driving motorcars and motor bicycles, Barnes Wallis's plans for the R100, the paintings of Egypt from Napoleon's Egypt expedition, and so much more. I could quite happily go up there everyday for the rest of my life and just look through the archive a drawer at a time! Honestly, I thought I'd died and gone to heaven.

Almost as good was driving the length of the main runway to get there. Well worth a day off work. We had lunch at Barbary Inn, Broad Hinton. Beer was excellent and the food was a little slow but very nice.

Seeing the hovercraft, hearing about their Concorde and reading elsewhere about the final Space Shuttle flight made us rather sad. All of these innovative mid-20th century projects have now been de-commissioned - no hovercraft has taken you across the Channel for over a decade, no Concorde will fly you to New York in record time, no Shuttle will ever get the chance to take you to the moon for a holiday - it seems to show a lack of ambition and financial will in the governments of Europe and America to fund exciting projects. But perhaps I've just answered my own point. Perhaps it's an indication of innovation and development moving eastwards as Japan and China develop bullet trains, use hovercraft and American astronauts start hitching a lift with the Russians.