Friday, August 22, 2008
Project 365 - er, 209.
Mat: I've decided to end my project 365 early.It was loads of fun to begin with, and I learned a huge amount about photography. However, the last few months has really dragged, and I don't feel I'm learning anything new and I'm not really enjoying it any more.
Thanks to everyone who encouraged me, and to the people who have listened to me moan about in the last couple of months and encouraged me to stop! Thanks too to everyone who's appeared in the series, if you want copies of any of the pics let me know.
Monday, August 04, 2008
Wild food
Kat: The wild food course that Mat, Caitlin, Rob and I went on the weekend before last was fantastic, but also quite sobering. Our guide was nothing like the berry-eating hippie you might expect to find foraging, and this wasn't The Good Life. He's an academic with many years of experience, who spends as much time in the great outdoors as in the British Library researching historical recipes for clues about what plants used to be eaten.The focus of the course wasn't cooking so much as identification of plant species. It was an intensive 7 hours of learning with a short break for nettle aloo and wild rocket salad at lunchtime. We must have identified at least 50 species and tasted a lot of them. By the end of the day we were exhausted but full of enthusiasm.
The motivation for collecting wild foods is interesting. It's probably not practical or desirable to live from food collected in the wild, but there are a lot of flavours out there to explore. Many haven't been used for hundreds of years, giving the opportunity to combine them in ways they've never been used before. Fancy restaurants have picked up on this and our wild foodie spends some of his time providing top chefs with new flavours to experiment with.
Safety is extremely important - apart from the dangers of identifying the wrong plant (if there's a shadow of doubt, don't try it) we got a strong warning about allergies. Wild food sometimes contains chemicals that aren't in typical supermarket fruit and veg and people can react unexpectedly. So it's all the more amazing that celebrity chefs will sing the praises of wild plants without emphasising the dangers- or even worse, get them muddled up. The story about Anthony Worrall Thompson recommending poisonous henbane when he meant edible fat hen is a case in point - a little knowledge can be a very dangerous thing.
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Birthday weekend
Kat: I may have been young for my year at school but July is a great month to be born in because the weather is invariably good, even in the UK. On Saturday we started with a big birthday breakfast of pancakes at B&D's house, followed by a pile of chocolate brownies with candles in (instead of a cake).Rain threatened so we tried to visit nearby Carnglaze Caverns but there was a wedding holding up the tours and the sun had come out, so instead we picked-our-own raspberries at Pencarrow and wandered around the gardens before having a pub lunch. It was the final day of the Lostwithiel carnival so there was ready-made entertainment for the evening: a parade followed by a band and general merriment at the pub next door to us, with a firework finale.
Sunday was glorious so we met the gang for a BBQ at Cardinham woods. The icing on the cake was a double win at the pub quiz! My birthday treat is planned for next Saturday: a wild food cooking course run by a chap who lives a few doors up from our house. Mat, R&C and I will be foraging around Lostwithiel then learning what to do with the plants we find. Visitors can look forward to unusual food at ours in future!
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Win some lose some
Kat: It sounded perfect: chilled out music on the beach. We bought tickets to Jack Johnson at Watergate Bay on Saturday 5th July but the rain was like something out of One Hundred Years of Solitude, so the gig was cancelled. On the plus side the tickets were refunded and we had one of those "we're living in the future" moments - automated text and phone messages telling us first that the gig was postponed and later that it was cancelled. Friends who went to the gig the next day told us that it was actually at a farm on top of a cliff rather than the beach. Also, you couldn't bring in your own food or drink and burgers or bottles of water were exorbitantly expensive and an hour wait.In contrast, last Friday we were back at the Eden Sessions to see Bill Bailey do musical comedy stand-up. It's the first time Eden have had a comedy act and it went down a storm. Bill Bailey is amazingly talented and full of energy not to mention very funny. At one point he had us all doing a Mexican wave of jigging. Eden is a great venue: sheltered from the weather in the clay pit, excellent facilities and lots of lovely food and drink in interesting surroundings.
Lesson learnt: go to the world-class venue just down the road rather than the rip-off gig on a wet and windy cliff on the north coast.
Friday, July 04, 2008
Food budget
Kat: A while ago I kept a record of what we spent on food and drink for just over a month, mainly because I really had no idea. We didn't change our eating habits but we did go to Amsterdam, so that skewed the figures. Our holiday food and drink for a week cost £267 - the same as basics for the other 24 days!I separated the costs of eating out. Apart from the holiday we ate at one restaurant, one pub and one café in 3.5 weeks. In a normal week this is what we average:
| Basics per week | £78 |
| Eating out per week | £35 |
| Milk | £2.58 (3% of basics) |
| Pasties | £7.50 (10% of basics) |
| Drinks at the pub | £6.78 (9% of basics) |
Recently I've read about people switching to budget supermarkets to save money. In our case we could save more money by not eating out, whether it's at a restaurant, grabbing a pasty in town or drinks while we're out and about. That doesn't sound much fun, but planning ahead instead of getting caught out hungry or thirsty would let us have more treats like our anniversary meal at Trewithen Restaurant last week. (Nice website! I wonder who designed that...)
Wednesday, July 02, 2008
Lost in Film
Kat: Possibly the most exciting thing to happen in Lostwithiel since we moved here (apart from us moving here) was Monday night's test screening of Lost in Film. Mat and I helped organise the event along with a handful of other people. We showed No Country For Old Men to a full house. One hundred tickets had sold out weeks before and everyone was buzzing with excitement about the possibility of having our own film club.The film ruffled a few feathers as the older folk aren't used to seeing such challenging and violent movies, but our plan is to show a variety of films in future which should please a wide audience. My initial impression of the film was shellshock, but after chewing it over for a couple of days it's grown on me and I can now see why it swept the boards at the Oscars. Big Lebowski and O Brother, Where Art Thou? are great fun but No Country For Old Men is epic and awesome.
Next step for Lost in Film - plan our first season of films for Autumn!
Monday, June 30, 2008
Raconteurs
Kat: Last night was the start of our summer of gigs and our first Eden Session. It's a great venue - you can wander around the Biomes, eat and drink at the cafes and restaurants and then watch an intimate gig (up to 6000 people) in beautiful surroundings. Headline act were the Raconteurs and supporting were Vampire Weekend, both fresh and relatively mud-free from Glastonbury. Both bands were absolutely brilliant. Organisation at Eden is top notch so there were no queues, and the gig finished promptly because neighbours often complain about the noise. In the words of Spinal Tap's Marty DiBergi's "I remember being knocked out by their exuberance, their raw power - and their punctuality."
Monday, June 16, 2008
Reunion party
Mat: On Saturday we hosted a reunion party for our friends from Amersham at a lovely country pub in Chenies. About forty people came, some of whom hadn't seen each other in five years or more.The star of the show was little Rowan Miller, Ben & Vickie's ten-week-old son, who made the trip from New Zealand with the casual jet-setting attitude that his parents have about long-haul flights. The prize for unexpected attendee went to Nico, who is back in Blighty to use the NHS to fix his knee from a running injury - healthcare in the US is too expensive.
A wonderful time was had by all, and we're looking forward to the next one!
Saturday, May 31, 2008
The 'Dam
Kat: Our Kiwi friends Mark and Claire have left Melbourne for Amsterdam, and we spent last week with them exploring the city. I haven't been there since I was 16 and Mat's last visit was on his stag night, so both of us had hazy memories of the place.It's amazing that such a tiny city (750,000 people) can be so varied. Of course there are smoky coffeeshops which don't sell coffee and the Red Light district, but there are also the grand old houses along Herensgracht and Princesgracht canals, the trendy and upmarket Jordan, the bohemian and ethnically diverse De Pijp and Oosterdock with its stark modern buildings.
We visited the high-brow (Van Gogh museum, Rijksmuseum) and low-brow (Cannabis college, Sex museum) tourist attractions. The weather was warm but showery, so much time was spent in cafes sampling local beer, pancakes and poffertjes (mini pancake balls covered in icing sugar) as well as international food. Much as we love Cornwall, it's great to be in a multicultural city.One day we took a trip in a small open-topped boat which is funded by donations. Our captain Diego told us that there are 2500 houseboats on the canals, a housing solution after WWII but now their number is strictly limited. Their waste goes directly into the canal water but the canals are flushed daily so the water doesn't smell. 50 bodies a year are pulled from the waters, mostly drunk men taking a pee (they're found with unzipped trousers) who trip over the metal mooring bar at the canal's edge and don't last long in the icy winter water.
The Red Light district is a defining feature of Amsterdam, but the authorities are trying to clean up the city by closing brothels and converting them to designer fashion shops. Cannabis is even more closely associated, but a smoking ban in pubs and restaurant is due to start on 1st July. It's hard to imagine Amsterdam without these and it'll be interesting to visit Mark and Claire in future to see how the city changes.
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
We can, canoe?
It was an idyllic weekend - hot and sunny, larking about on the river. We've explored down as far as St Winnow, but at low tide it's a wide mud flat down there, which almost claimed my shoes when I tried to stand on it!
We need to learn a bit more about kayaking before we embark on multi-day trips around the coast, but we're really excited about the possibilities...
Thursday, May 01, 2008
Obby Oss
Kat: May Day, and the first day of summer is heralded by the Obby Oss festival in Padstow. We decided to chance the showers and crowds to see this very popular and very Cornish celebration. Apparently it started at midnight (we weren't around for that part) and then carries on for the rest of the day with singing, drinking, music, drinking, dancing and even more drinks.
There are two Obby Osses: the red original Old Obby Oss and the new-fangled Blue Ribbon or Peace Obby Oss. The blue Obby Oss was originally started as a Temperance alternative to the beer swilling red Obby Oss gang, but I don't know if there's any less drinking now for either group now. If you're hoping to have a child then it's good luck to get caught under the skirt of the Obby Oss.
The whole town is decked out with spring flowers, bunting and tree boughs, and the rival Obby Osses plus their supporters parade around the streets dancing, cavorting and singing a repetitive and hypnotic folk song. It felt a bit like the Wicker Man but with less nudity and violence - the only time it got a bit hairy was when Mat's pasty was stolen from his hand by a seagull.
Next year we'll have to wear white and the Obby Oss colours of whoever we decide to support...
Saturday, April 19, 2008
My daily blog
Last month I did a photoshoot for a friend's band, and last weekend Kat and I went up to London for a photoshoot for another friend's company. This one involved wandering around Oxford Circus at 6am with a camera, looking dodgy. Luckily we managed to avoid any police attention!
Some of the strangest pictures seem to be the most popular on Flickr, which calculates an interestingness score based on how many people look at the photo, comment on it or mark it as a favourite. Of my project 365 pics, Wool and Ducky are my 2nd and 3rd most popular pictures overall - I quite like them, but I wouldn't rate them that highly...
It's going to be hard to produce 365 different photos (I've already got three featuring rubber ducks, and two flowers-with-water-drops) so expect to see more themes like colours of the rainbow from a week ago. My latest plan is to do a series based on the poem Monday's Child, and I'm looking for volunteers - if you're interested in being a day let me know which day of the week you were born. I'm especially looking for someone born on a Wednesday who's full of woe, and someone born on a Sunday who's gay.