I had three days of off-site customer meetings last week, so was staying at a hotel two hours away from home, a few miles from the customer’s site. Not at Fawlty Towers, for once, as this was a different customer in a different county, but the hotel was only marginally better. The service at dinner […]
Ever since my favourite pub, the Plough and Harrow, closed I’ve been looking for an alternative place to go to for an occasional lunch/dinner with friends. The pub at the top of my hill is well within walking distance and serves good food, but it would be good to have other options on my shortlist. […]
There is a Roman villa somewhere at the foot of the Cotswolds outside Cheltenham that I remember Chris and I searching for years ago. The trouble was, although it was just off Ermin Street, so clearly a place of some importance 1700 years ago, times have moved on and now it’s pretty much in the […]
Throwing a lid for a tagine Further to my last, Jon the Potter at Eastnor Pottery has put up on his blog some photos of last Sunday’s workshop, including some of me throwing a tagine lid. I deliberately don’t take my camera with me, as I get absolutely filthy when I’m throwing, and clay and […]
On Saturday nights I always make a major effort to cook a good dinner, and last night I pulled out the stops and cooked one of my favourites, a lamb and pomegranate tagine. I cooked it very slowly in a hand-thrown terracotta tagine which Chris and I bought several years ago at a foodie market […]
Malvern has a somewhat old-fashioned single-screen cinema, and it takes a while for films to diffuse out this far into the boondocks. When they finally do get here, it’s only the real blockbusters that are scheduled for more than a single week. So that means that, in the event that there is a film on […]
There is a group of women I know through work (though through a combination of the Three Rs – Retirement, Redundancy and Resignation – only one of them is still there) who have a standing arrangement to go away together once a year to a meeting of The Pudding Club. This year, for the first […]
My father and I so enjoyed the study day at the Museum Of London that we went on a few months back, that we booked ourselves onto another study day. This was again organised through Andante Travels, my favourite holiday company, who specialise in archaeological trips. However, the weather up here in Malvern has been […]
The city of Lima was founded by the Spanish on the site of an existing Inca and pre-Inca settlement, and some mud-brick ruins remain, somewhat incongruously squeezed in between residential buildings in the suburbs of Miraflores and San Isidro. Knowing I was interested in such things, my driver had taken me past one of the […]
The Temple of the Moon was on one side of a valley. On the valley floor were the remains of houses of the original inhabitants, and on the other side was the Temple of the Sun. Despite its name, given to it by the Spanish, it’s probably not a temple at all but more likely […]
