Monday 3 March 2014

Cambridge Market, Sundays. Visit! You'll enjoy it!

Where can you buy real things these days? Real things sold by real people who are not just shop assistants programmed to smile, say 'Have a nice day!' and 'Is there anything else you want?'

Answer: Cambridge Market on a Sunday.

Besides my stall there are numerous other stalls worth a visit.

Here's a couple [more next week]:

Paul Neeve's book stall. A real book stall where you can get real books. Where you might find something unusual not just the predictable stuff that Waterstone's , for example, sell. Paul is real book seller not a business that happens to make its money out of books. He has nice jazz and blues playing in the background and you can get into an interesting conversation, if you wish, with Paul or his clientele.

The Cambridge Chilli Sauce Company. Tim's chilli sauces are delicious. My favourite is his smoked scotch bonnet and red pepper sauce. If you want a challenge you can try his 'Ghost Pepper 10'. Tim is a very knowledgeable botanist as well, an expert on hellebores, who makes regular trips to the Balkans in search of new species. He's a really nice guy! [He's going to hate me for saying that!].

Yes this is a kind of advertising. But in the  old fashioned sense of bringing to your attention something worth knowing about in this cased small traders who sell good stuff and who, like us, struggle to be make themselves heard because of the cacophony generated by  the retail juggernauts that dominate our dreary High Streets.

Driving home after Cambridge Market. March 2nd

Starlings above the A 14.

After a dull day in Cambridge -prosaic overcast weather, switched off punters ...even King's College Chapel seemed lacklustre- needed something to perk me up. Felt drowsy, too, from having little sleep last night due to stranded inebriated son requiring rescue ....

Driving home. Dusk. A 14. Just before Huntingdon tens of thousands of starlings espied. Forming a unified entity. Whirling in complex geometries. Convolutions, involutions, Fibonacci ecstasies!

Avian delight.

Who are what should be thanked for this?

Certainly not the abstract thing 'Nature', nor the sexist old curmudgeon, Jehovah.

Saturday 1 March 2014

Browsing seed catalogues at the moment....


A lot of people will probably find it hard to understand the pleasure I derive from buying vegetable seeds.

The process evokes....

... visions of summer salads accompanied by your favourite chilled white wine sipped in the lingering dusk of midsummer.

...visions of voluptuous autumn harvests turned into hearty meals washed down by a luscious, stronger than I realised, red that induces a grinning stupor.

...visions of reassuringly sturdy winter vegetables ...parsnips, kale, leeks...hot, aromatic, freshly cooked, and a rib of beef anointed with mustard and horse radish...preceded, perhaps, by a glass of vintage port [sorry I'm starting to sound like an alcoholic!].

...the benign vibes of old friends present or not.

...and that sense of old the wise old country folk that have lived on this land over the centuries who left no record but can be felt in the rich soil of my allotment, their traces hinted at by shards of medieval pots, fragments of clay pipes and pieces of blue willow pattern crockery...