Pickles

By shendyNo Comments
Once the chutneyfest had been completed, we moved on to pickled onions. In the end, our garage smelled very slightly of vinegar - I wonder why that might be? We did two batches of onions - one used bog-standard Sarsons pickling vinegar, the second used vinegar "enhanced" by us. My brother is the first to have tried some of these, and reported that while his sinuses were perfectly clear, he appeared to be missing the top of his head. Got them about right then!...
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Tomatoes

By shendyNo Comments
We cleared down the last of our tomatoes at the weekend, to get them in before any frosts. A lot were still green, but realistically there's no chance that they will ripen now. We picked the small matter of 28lbs of the things! This is what 28lbs of tomatoes looks like SWMBO has made a tomato sauce out of the ripe ones, but the rest are going into chutney - and that many tomatoes need a lot of vinegar, apples, onions and sugar! The brother has suggested that this beast, 1lb in weight, should be made into an individual batch of chutney - much like a single-cask whisky... A 1lb tomato...
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Northampton Saints v Munster

By shendyNo Comments
At Franklin's Gardens in Northampton yesterday evening for the Saints first game in this season's European Cup, playing Munster for the first time since we beat them 9-8 in the Heineken Cup Final in May 2000 - 27/05/2000 to be precise, a date firmly embedded in my memory. Also the Saints first match in the Heineken Cup since they were relegated at the end of the 2006/07 season - one season in Division One, and winners of the European Challenge Cup last season.And what a game it was last night, ending in a 31-27 upset win for the Saints. Munster are one of the best teams in Europe - last season they won the Magners League and were runners up to Leinster in the Heineken Cup Final. They are stuttering a little at the moment, and this was the first game for many of their Lions players, but this was a fantastic win for Northampton against a side packed full...
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Bletchley Park

By shendyNo Comments
We spent Monday at Bletchley Park, home of the wartime code breakers. The following day, it was announced that they were receiving £500,000 of Lottery money - and quite right too. Thoroughly deserving, as an important part of our national history, that is in disgracefully poor condition in parts. Without the geniuses that worked there, we wouldn't be where we are today. Whether that's a good thing just at the moment is a matter for debate... First up, this just made me smile - somehow I always imagined that Bomber Command would be far more impressive... This is a real, actual, proper German Enigma machine. It's in a glass case so that no nutter can nick it again. Anyway, why did they give it back to Jeremy Paxman? Stephen Fry must have been gutted. This is part of a superb slate statue of Alan Turing, father of modern computing. Without him, it is quite possible I would be doing something completely different for...
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Oxford

By shendyNo Comments
We spent last Friday wandering round Oxford, having deposited my mother at John Radcliffe hospital for a minor eye operation (all fine, thanks for asking). I think I've only been once before, and that was about 30 years ago when we had a French exchange boy over (well, when I say "exchange", he came over [as did his brother a couple of years later] but we never went to stay with them). There may even be photos of this somewhere in my dad's collection, but it'll take a while to get there as it must have been 1978 or '79 and and I'm only up to 1958...Anyway, the best shot of the day came from the top of the University Church of St Mary The Virgin, showing the Radcliffe Camera, with All Souls College on the right and Brasenose College on the left. No, that's not a bird above the dome, it's a speck of sodding dust on the sodding...
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