Weekend

Phoebe insisted on calling our Lincolnshire lodge a hut. It was perfect. So clean, so well-maintained and so warm and comfortable. Twenty five yards away there was an indoor swimming pool attached to Kenwick Park Hotel. On Saturday afternoon, your intrepid correspondent donned his skimpy red speedos and dived in with the rest of them. Phoebe was a like an eel as Margot relaxed in the water like a basking shark.

We really struck lucky with the weather. Mostly there was bright autumnal sunshine with a little chill in the air. On Saturday morning, we mooched around Louth, had lunch in a nice little cafe and visited the local museum. before Margot had to get back to the hut for her middle-of-the-day nap.

St Helen's Church, Little Cawthorpe

On Sunday morning, I was up bright and early, walking on a public footpath that headed south over the golf course to two villages that sit on the very edge of The Lincolnshire Wolds - Legbourne and Little Cawthorpe. The walk took just over two hours and then we set off for the coast - to the unsophisticated little resort of Mablethorpe.

We enjoyed a light lunch in Gerardo's on the high street. Beforehand, we had walked half a mile along the seafront. After visiting the lifeboat station, Phoebe was keen to write her name in the sand.

A motorcycle racing event was about to take place further along those broad sands as the tide receded. Unsurprisingly, there were a lot of bikers in town. 

In Jacksons amusement arcade, Mablethorpe

Mablethorpe is a tacky, working class resort and I had not been there in many years. The majority of visitors stay on sprawling caravan parks and hanging outside one high street souvenir shop I was amused by a T-shirt that read, "What happens in the caravan stays in the caravan". That is so Mablethorpe.

Stew and Margot

Back in Louth, we had a very late Sunday lunch in "The Woolpack Inn". It was excellent apart from the ridiculously long wait we endured before the arrival of our  desserts. Not good when you have two little girls with you and it's almost their bathtime. Ah well.

It was a great weekend that will live long in our memories even though we had to sleep in a hut.

On Kenwick Park's golf course

East

 

East? Please do not worry about my sanity. I have not been painting the word "EAST>>>" on the wall at the front of our house or anything like that. No. Let me explain.

Yesterday afternoon we headed sixty miles east with Frances, Stew and the little girls. We are staying in the lodge shown above and this my friends is another "scheduled" post. It feels a bit like cheating.

We are here for three nights on the other side of the Lincolnshire Wolds - an official "AONB" - Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The lodge is on a country estate close to the town of Louth that I blogged about two years ago.

Yes folks - we are roughing it. The primitive frontier lodge has four bedrooms and three bathrooms and below you can see pictures of the open lounge area and the off-shot kitchen...

I expect that we will survive the experience. Back home on Monday afternoon.

Triumph

The National Theatre's Olivier Award-winning smash hit, "Dear England" has arrived at Sheffield's  Lyceum Theatre in a highly  praised national tour. And last night, Shirley and I went along to see it.

The promotional blurb said this: "It’s time to change the game. The country that gave the world football has since delivered a painful pattern of loss. The England men’s team has the worst track record for penalties in the world, and manager Gareth Southgate knows he needs to open his mind and face up to the years of hurt to take team and country back to the promised land.

Football and non-football fans alike will be brought to their feet in this joyous, five-star ‘new stage epic’ (Telegraph). From multi award-winning writer James Graham (Sherwood, BBC) and director Rupert Goold (Patriots, Cold War), Dear England tells the uplifting, at times heart-breaking, and ultimately inspiring story of Gareth Southgate’s revolutionary tenure as England manager.

David Sturzaker (Doctors, BBC) plays Gareth Southgate in this gripping examination of nation and game. He is joined by stage and screen actress Samantha Womack (EastEnders, BBC; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) as team psychologist Pippa Grange."

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At the end, following a rapturous standing ovation, Shirley and I dashed out of the theatre  onto Arundel Gate and managed to clamber on board a Number 88 bus that took us homeward straight away. We chuckled with delight about our good luck.

I had laughed and cried during the performance. It was brilliantly staged and though not what you might call "high drama", "Dear England" was certainly very entertaining - especially for somebody like me who loves English football and cares a lot about it. 

Somewhere in our recent past, England football supporters began to sing Neil Diamond's "Sweet Caroline" at international matches and at the end of last night's  show, the entire cast and audience sang along and danced to that familiar song. Tears ran down my cheeks.

Foxes

Visitors who have been popping into "Yorkshire Pudding" for a long time may remember that since I retired I have derived a great deal of pleasure from the Geograph photo-mapping project to which, at the last count, I have submitted 18,638 photographs.

Geograph has increased my motivation to get outside walking and it has also taught me a great deal about the geography and history of these fabulous and fascinating islands - The British Isles.

I do not know exactly how many active contributors are still sending their images to Geograph but it will be somewhere around ten thousand people who live all over this country and in Ireland too. 

In recent months, I have been impressed by fox pictures taken by a contributor called Peter Trimming. He has gathered them in West Brompton Cemetery, London. It is bang next to Stamford Bridge - the home ground of Chelsea F.C. and about a mile from where my son lives - along Lillie Road past North End Road to Fulham.

In the past, Shirley and I have explored West Brompton Cemetery. It is where the women's suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst is buried. Go here. During our visit, we saw squirrels and pigeons but we did not spot any foxes. They may have smelled us coming.

However, Peter Trimming has had much better luck and below I have picked just six of his magical fox pictures to share with you...

And finally, using my Google detective skills, I was able to track down a picture of  the old fox himself - the man responsible for these images. Let us applaud Peter Trimming. Such patience, such technical skill and such affection for urban foxes...

Latitude

West from our garden and out beyond the suburb of Greystones, following an invisible route that hugs Latitude 53°North like a ley line. Over the Porter Brook to the reservoirs at Redmires – thence to The Derwent Valley and out across the wild high moors that cleave northern England. There’s Manchester Airport ahead from which planes ascend like dragonflies, then onward to the low-lying Wirral Peninsula before striking out across The Irish Sea to Dublin. The way is arrow straight over those emerald fields to Galway. In front, The Atlantic Ocean heaves, its waves white-tipped.

Two thousand miles to Canada and below there’s the raw coast of Newfoundland. We travel inland to Labrador City ever westward and on to the southern end of Hudson Bay crossing uninhabited Akimiski Island before striking out over the emptiness of Northern Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Soon the invisible line cuts across the sprawling city of Edmonton in Alberta before advancing to the mountainous coast of British Columbia and out across Hecate Strait to the Queen Charlotte Islands

And now the immensity of The Pacific Ocean confronts us till the latitude 53°N eventually brings us to Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula and The Sea of Okhotsk. From Russia to Inner Mongolia and back into Russia again where mighty Lake Baikal imagines that it is an ocean. On and on to the steppes of Kazakhstan thence to Belarus and northern Poland and into the states of Brandenburg and Lower Saxony in Germany. Still like a knife we slice across the northernmost part of The Netherlands and head over The North Sea to the Lincolnshire coast of England.

Soon the line advances to the city of Sheffield in South Yorkshire and the word “West” painted on a garden wall. As T.S. Eliot wrote in “Little Gidding”:-

“What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an 

end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.”

WEST>>>

Our semi-detached house was built on a hill. Consequently, as you step down the street the houses also step down. The neighbours above look down on our garden and we look down on the other side's garden.

Above us there's Tony and Jill - a lovely couple who are now well into their eighties. They have lived on this street for fifty years. Between our two houses, near the back doors, there's a brick wall with a concrete panel on top of  it.

Recently, I repainted our side of this rough-textured panel with white masonry paint. In idle moments I have often thought about adorning it with a mural - perhaps sunflowers or a giant robin but a month ago, a much  simpler idea came into my simple mind.

The garden is west facing so I thought of painting the word "WEST" upon it followed by an arrow. I know the idea is slightly bizarre but as I said to Tony and Jill when explaining it, "I am a bit mad". The design I had in mind would be reminiscent of the painted directional graphics that may still be spotted in old football stadiums.

In any case, the word "west" crops up quite a lot in our culture. "The west" is where most visitors to this blog reside and Percy Shelley wrote "Ode to The West Wind" in another October - two hundred and six years ago...

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,

Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead

Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing...

And once young men were advised to "go west" to seek their fortunes. In contrast, the expression "gone west" means to have met with death or disaster. So "west" isn't just a cardinal point, it has plenty of other connotations.

Anyway, anyway beyond the dark midnight I have hatched many wild plans. Mostly they are not followed through but this time, this time I did it as the two pictures prove - taken I might add on a rather cloudy afternoon.

Apples

A mast year is a year in which a tree bears an unusually bounteous crop of nuts or seeds and this term can also be used for fruit trees.

2025 has certainly been a remarkable year for apples here in Great Britain - a genuine mast year. Several newspapers have reported as much and people with apple trees in their gardens agree that this year has been quite special.

We have five old apple trees in our garden which we have looked out upon for thirty six years. Throughout that time, the four big trees have given us lots of green cooking apples each autumn. But this year something very odd has happened because the apples that hang from those selfsame trees have turned red for the very first time. (see picture above)

Scientists might explain that perfect growing conditions with plenty of summer sunshine will often trigger much greater production of a red pigment called anthocyanin and that seems to be what has happened to our apples.

In all previous years, our apples have been so tart they would make you wince. They have only been good for pies, crumbles and apple sauce - all requiring the addition of sugar. In spite of that history, today I thought I would try one of this year's red apples and sure enough I could eat it without squirming. 

Though not quite as sweet as many modern eating varieties, the level of sweetness was more than acceptable and I carried on to eat the whole thing. 

When it comes to apples, I might have to wait another thirty six years for a similar mast year. I will be 108 years old when that crop arrives.

Two

 

Our grandson, Zachary will be two years old next Friday. On Saturday morning, we took him to the urban farm at Hounslow. It is very close to Heathrow Airport and all the time we were there we had to experience aeroplanes rising into the sky - so low that you could easily make out the names of the carriers - from "United" to "Lufthansa". You can imagine the noise they made.

Personally, I loved Hounslow Farm because of its higgledy-piggledy amateurishness. It has clearly been there a good number of years, relying upon the goodwill of volunteers to proceed. The animals Zach saw included sheep, goats, llamas, pigs, horses, donkeys, rabbits, chickens, turkeys and ducks. In the guinea pig shed I saw a rat which was not supposed to be there. Maybe he had been invited over for lunch by the guinea pigs.

At ten thirty in the polytunnel,  two teenage girls introduced us to some small animals, including stick insects, hissing cockroaches, a diadem snake from Sudan and a soft-shelled tortoise from southern Russia. One teenage girl advised me to hold it like a hamburger. And here I am showing it to Zach...

The photos don't really reveal what a happy little chap Zach is. He loved meeting up with his grandma again but took time to warm up to his silly old grandpa. I don't blame him. This morning, we took him to Battersea Park, south of the river. It is exceedingly popular with local Londoners. They run there, ride bicycles, feed ducks, amble along, play sports like tennis or visit the popular cafes. There were hordes of them.

And here's Zach looking at you from the crotch of a tree. He can see exactly what you are doing so stop it right now!

On the way down to London by train, a famous woman sat opposite us, texting and phoning and berating a guy called Simon who was her underling assistant. It was Sharon Graham, the powerful leader of Great Britain's Unite trade union. It has over 1.2 million members. I have often seen her on television. Strangely, she did not ask for my autograph...

Absentia

 

Like yesterday's "Fossils" blogpost, this one has been "scheduled" to post via the magic of Blogger.

We are currently down in this country's sprawling metropolis. See the video at the top in which a much younger Ralph McTell sang about "The Streets of London", focusing humanely on those who are overlooked or neglected in big cities - people like shadows who nonetheless have stories to tell. Did anyone ever aim to become homeless - living out on the streets? I doubt it.

Ralph McTell is now eighty years old. I guess we are all getting older. Years flicking by, one after the other.

Yes. We are in London, visiting our grandson Zachary and his parents too. I doubt that we will see a West End Show, visit an art gallery or grip the railings outside Buckingham Palace, hoping for a glimpse of King Charles III and the true love his life - Queen Camilla. Zach will be two years old next weekend.

Hopefully, the three o'clock train from St Pancras will bring us back to Sheffield as daylight begins to wane on Sunday.

Fossils

On the mantelpiece in our front room, there's a fossil that is 180 million years old. It is an ammonite that was found on the coast of North Yorkshire. I should add that I did not find it myself. Instead, I bought it for a mere £5 in a fossil shop in Whitby. To me this was an incredible bargain. I mean - 180 million years! How amazing. Admittedly, my ammonite is only two inches in diameter but still...

Courtesy of YouTube, I have recently been following a pair of Yorkshire lads who are skilled fossil hunters. They explore remote North Yorkshire beaches  - invariably on the look out for stone nodules that may contain ammonites. These nodules are often contained within layers of shale that were formed millions of years ago in warm, tropical seas.

Unusually, in the half hour video that follows there are no spoken words. It's just one of the young fossil hunters searching the beach for promising nodules and then splitting them open with his hammer. Sometimes there's absolutely nothing within but often he finds an ammonite - viewed for the very first time by human eyes.

I found it all rather mesmerising. In fact, I have occasionally considered passing an hour or two on a remote Yorkshire beach searching for ammonites myself. The "Yorkshire Fossils" videos give you a good idea of what to look out for.

Bonio

Bonio

When the quiz team here at Yorkshire Pudding H.Q. were preparing yesterday's bones themed quiz, no one expected the wrath and indignation that the "Bonio" question would engender. It was like a volcanic eruption of unbridled disagreement.

Consequently, we contacted Bonio, the founder of "Bonio" dog biscuits but his response was couched in promotional terms. We could not get a straight answer.

He said this:-

"Dogs know their Bonio! They know the cupboard where it's kept, the sound of your hand delving into the pack - and they know the excitement as their favourite biscuit appears, closely followed by the first satisfying crunch! They love Bonio as a quick breakfast and they will be happy crunching on them whilst you pop to the shops!"

He continued:-

"There's something yummy for everyone from small pups to gentle giants with Bonio dog bisuits. Every single, yummy Bonio biscuit is lovingly and traditionally oven baked. This means that not only are these delicious dog treats totally tasty, they are also wholesome and nutritous too. Choose from our Happy Fibre, Meaty Chip, Bonio Original and Mini Dog biscuits."

Here's one very satisfied dog owner, praising the benefits of "Bonio":-

Thank you Felicity. And to conclude, here's an old "Bonio" commercial...

My sincere apologies to any quizzers who were aggrieved by the "Bonio" question. We will try to ensure that all future quiz questions are more thoroughly road-tested in order to avoid distress.

Quiztime

 

Okay, okay. The day has arrived for another exciting edition of "Quiztime" with your genial host Persimmon Pudding. As intelligent visitors to this channel will appreciate, our team of quiz question setters often struggle to find themes that have worldwide relevance. However, this week they have excelled themselves. The theme is bones - a truly international topic.  As usual, answers will be given in the comments section.

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1) In a normal adult human skeleton how many bones are there?

(a) 106 (b) 206  (c) 506 (d) 1006

2) What is this human bone called? 

(Clues: we have two of them/ much bigger in real life)

3) Where will you find your metacarpals?

4) In the spiritual song "Dem Bones" which bone is the knee bone connected to?

5) This is the skeleton of an animal but which animal?

(a) horse (b) mouse (c) stegosaurus (d) rabbit

6) "The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones".  Part of a funeral oration, in which Shakespeare play will you find this remark?

(a) "Julius Caesar" (b) "A Midsummer Night's Dream"

(c) "All's Well That Ends Well" (d) "As You Like It"

7) This is the biggest bone in the human body but what is it called?

(a)radius (b) femur (c) tibia (d) humerus

8) Which one of these "bones" is NOT found in the inner ear?

(a) stirrup (b) anvil (c) hammer (d) drum

9) Below - some bone-shaped biscuits for dogs but what is the brand name?

(a) "Woofalot" (b) "Bonio" (c) "K.Nine" (d) "Waggy"

10) What is by far the principal mineral that makes bones hard and strong?

(a) calcium phosphate (b) sodium chloride

 (c) iron sulphate (d) magnesium phosphate

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That's all folks! How did you do?

Lunch

 

We enjoyed a special lunch today - partly as another celebration of my seventy second birthday. We went to "The Silver Plate" restaurant which is within the main Sheffield College building. There, post sixteen students mostly pursue work-related courses ranging from engineering to hairdressing.

One of the departments specialises in food and hospitality and the main point of "The Silver Plate" is to give students real life opportunities to experience meal preparation and table service. The young people are carefully supervised and over many years the department has developed a reputation for excellence.

The dining room is spotlessly clean and the tables are expertly laid out with polished cutlery, glasses and small flowers in vases.

Shirley and I were assigned a young waiter called Thomas. He is just eighteen years old and we were the very first diners that he had ever served as he only began his course three weeks ago. He was really nervous so we had to assure him that he was doing a good job and need not feel overstressed. With his shaking hands, he managed to spill a little water when he poured it into our glasses but I assured him that I would not be complaining to his supervisor. This made him chuckle.

The very reasonably priced three course meal was utterly delightful. There was college baked bread to accompany our starters. It arrived in a small hessian sack that had hot ceramic beads in the bottom. I chose the ham hock terrine but Shirley went for the mushroom bao buns. 

For the main course we both picked the sea bass dish (see above and below). I asked Shirley to take a picture of my plate saying, "I plan to make my blog visitors jealous!". The fresh fish was steamed to perfection and the complementary accompaniments - braised rice, bok choy, slices of lotus root and coconut and lime sauce enhanced one's enjoyment of the sea bass.

For dessert, Shirley selected the Eve's pudding but I opted for the baked egg custard tart with nutmeg ice cream. Both were exceedingly yummy. We each had a glass of good quality sauvignon blanc.

It was a superb lunch and we vowed to return early in the new year. Securing tables can be challenging as "The Silver Plate" is a well-known secret for Sheffielders who enjoy great food that is above the norm and very reasonably priced.

Peacemaker

 

Blessed are the peacemakers. It seems that a kind of peace has broken out in the middle east under Trump's watch but will it last and what is the way forward?

Gaza  is little more than a wasteland of concrete rubble now. Who is going to fix it and where is the redevelopment plan? Besides, even before this most recent "war" broke out, living in Gaza was like being incarcerated in a giant coastal prison. Such a situation could never be sustained in the long run but for years it provided perfect growing conditions for Hamas. There has to be a better way.

Today is a good day in that all living Israeli hostages have been freed and some dead hostages are being prepared for dignified transfer to their families. Numerous  Palestinian hostages are also being released but not all the many thousands who were imprisoned without trial or legitimate evidence. Their stories have not really been told.

Of course, The President of the USA has capable lieutenants on the ground - middle eastern deal brokers like his real estate investor son-in-law Jared Kushner and his hand-picked special envoy - the real estate developer Steve Witkoff. With their team, these untrained diplomats have surely been charged with forging an agreeable way forward that will lead to Palestinian statehood and the quelling of the most bellicose Israeli voices.

Past history seems to militate against optimism but you never know. After all, on a much smaller scale, peace broke out in Northern Ireland at the end of the last century and that seems to be holding. Can a similar miracle occur in The Holy Land? Time will tell. Today is merely a beginning, a foreword - with all of the main chapters of the weighty tome to follow.

In the interim, however reluctantly, it seems we are obliged to bow to The Great Peacemaker.  This is not a day for understandable pessimism, it's a time for hope.

Laziness

In the modern world, laziness is frowned upon. In our waking hours, we are all meant to be doing something, achieving things and if we idle away our time, we are supposed to feel guilty about it. The term "lazy" is generally used in a negative manner.

Let me examine this issue for I am of the opinion that laziness is intermittently beneficial to human beings.

If we constantly live manic, high energy lives that involve ticking off this before ticking off that, then I would ask - are we really living at all? As the poet W.H. Davies concludes in "Leisure":-

A poor life this if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

and I agree with him. Time for relaxation and reflection is crucial if we are to live fulfilling lives.

Investing every waking hour in work and home projects means that you never get time to weigh up how things might be going and before you know it there's new stuff in your mind

Why should we ever feel guilty about bouts of laziness? Why not just say it loud and proud - "I had a lazy day yesterday - I didn't do anything!"

People will often say, "What are you doing tomorrow?" or "What did you get up to yesterday?" or "What have you got planned for next week?". The answer "Nothing" should not always be delivered apologetically because "nothing" is often something. Closing your eyes to listen to the rain. Staring at the horizon as memories of long ago wash over you. Just sitting with your eyes half closed, breathing slowly and rhythmically in a kind of trance.

Laziness is an underrated state and it is quite different from boredom that is  tinged with misery or withdrawal from the world of activity because you are just plain sick of it. I would go so far as to say we need laziness and to be very wary of the manic street preachers.

Buddhist monks often sit cross-legged, seemingly doing nothing. Perhaps they are watching a wood louse scurrying across the floor and maybe they are conscious of the wind ruffling the trees that grow next to the temple. Who is to say that they are living less significantly than the executives who jet across the world, logged in to their tablets or i-phones with people to see, places to go? 

There is a lot to be said for being lazy.

Eruption

Last Sunday, I walked up our long garden with little Margot. On the way, we passed the stump of the old horse chestnut tree. It was felled four years ago and I now use it as an extra bird table. I was quite efficient at removing any signs of new growth as we did not want the tree to grow back via side shoots.

On Tuesday afternoon, I took our kitchen  caddy bin up to the large compost bins that are situated near the top of the garden. Again this involved passing by the horse chestnut tree stump. Within those forty eight hours, something amazing had happened.

A lot of mushrooms had burst forth from the earth - dozens of them in clusters. We had never seen fungi there before and I am sure it was connected with the dying tree stump and its roots that no doubt reach out like tentacles beneath the soil's surface.

Perhaps the air temperature and the autumn moisture in the air had ignited this sudden burgeoning of life. And it's funny how this should have happened just as I was beginning to read the book I recently retrieved from a drystone wall - "Entangled Life". It is all about fungi and the secret worlds it occupies across the globe.

Our fungi is I believe a common honey fungus. It is especially connected with dead tree root systems and can be quite destructive in any garden - perhaps spreading to other susceptible plants. There are no known chemical treatments that can successfully destroy honey fungi. You either live with it or dig out old tree roots and stumps before burning them. Some gardeners even bury rubberised barriers like pond liners in the ground to prevent the potential spread of honey fungi but there's no way I will be doing that. I prefer to let nature simply takes its course.

McKee

I think I have blogged about Pete McKee before. Let me see... Yes! Go here.

He is a fifty nine year old Sheffield artist who found his own, distinctive  style some years ago. His work is much loved in this city and many homes display original McKees or prints of his work.

A typical painting by Pete McKee - "Spit and Polish"

He grew up on the Batemoor housing estate to the south of the city and attended a secondary school where I used to teach. In fact, he was there at the same time as me in the early eighties.

The city's Weston Park Museum honoured him last year by inviting him to curate an exhibition of his own work and through the past eleven months that particular gallery has been very popular. I had been before with the granddaughters but I vowed to go back on my own so that I could soak it all up without distraction on a quiet midweek afternoon. That absorption day was Wednesday of this week.

Pete McKee based this painting on a seaside photo booth snap

Only a few months later his mother would be dead.

Through the paintings and the carefully considered labels that sit alongside each one Pete McKee bared his heart. His mother died when he was only seven years old and that tragedy has stayed with him like a tattoo. He knew deprivation but his two brothers, his older sister and his widowed father gave him a loving family home which he recalls with gratitude, affection and good humour.

He has always been passionate about music and his football club - Sheffield Wednesday. His pride in the city of his birth is almost tangible. He would not want to come from anywhere else.

Pete McKee's painting of Sheffield's "pram man" - John Burkhill

who has raised over £1 million for Macmillan Cancer Support

Pete McKee does not paint for high brow intellectuals and he does not have some lofty philosophy to convey through his art. His style is simple and cartoonish, rooted in his experience and the warm, often humorous way that he looks at the world around him.

There were some instructional videos at the exhibition

I thoroughly enjoyed those two hours of absorption and I am very glad that I took the trouble to go back before the exhibition shuts down next month. Thank you Pete!

"The Wake" - Pete McKee recalled his mother's funeral when he was seven

BOSH!

That's my boy Ian on the right. With Henry, who is on the left, they formed a vegan food company nine years ago. It is called BOSH! They have had a big impact as vegan influencers and have sold over a million cookbooks.

Recently they have been working with Britain's biggest supermarket chain to produce a new range of vegan ready meals. The supermarket chain is called TESCO and earlier this week the BOSH! ready meals started to appear in hundreds of TESCO supermarkets throughout Great Britain. Smaller TESCO stores are not yet stocking these new BOSH! products but all of the bigger stores are. It is quite a coup.

I keep my fingers crossed that this initiative will really work out for Ian, Henry and their team. The truth is that TESCO are very skilled when it comes to launching new products. They tend not to back losers.

This evening our family evening meal consisted entirely of the new BOSH! products:  

• N’duja Sourdough Pizza
• Margarita Sourdough Pizza
• Creamy No-Duja Pasta
• Goan Chickpea Curry
• Creamy Mac & Greens
• Teriyaki Mushroom Noodles
• Hearty Vegetable Lasagne
• Ultimate Bean Chilli

They were all very tasty and though we think a couple of the dishes could be tweaked a bit more we were pretty delighted with the range. I especially liked the Teriyaki Mushroom Noodles, the Creamy No-Duja Pasta and the Margarita Sourdough Pizza.

I should apologise to North American, German, Swedish, Irish and Australian visitors because currently you won't be able to purchase these new BOSH! products in your local supermarkets but here in Great Britain I hope that some of you guys will look out for BOSH! chilled ready meals in the cold display aisles at TESCO.

Needless to say, I am pretty proud of that son of mine. To make it with TESCO is quite a thing.

Poem

 

Utopia

There you can be who you want to be -
Nobody’s yelling or carrying on.
Pure brooks replenish rivers
Fit for swimming and drinking
And on the seashore, no tangled plastic
Nor the matted corpses of seabirds.

There you can really create stuff -
No one’s dissing your best endeavours.
Sleep is easy in the quiet safety of home
With dreams that are serene
And on the TV screen no endless tales of crime
Nor gloomy broadcasts all the flaming time.

There you feel you are truly living -
Nothing’s menacing your peace of mind as
Starlings flock in rhythmical shoals
When autumn days submit to dusk
And on the edge of felicity - no sudden thuds
Nor faraway grey thunder grumbling.

Elsecar

It's not too far to Elsecar. Using my South Yorkshire Senior Travelcard, I paid only £3.50 for my return rail journey (American $4.70). From Elsecar Station, I plodded a six mile circular route in sweet autumnal sunshine. 

The walk took me in the vicinity of Wentworth Woodhouse - a palatial mansion that is currently being restored by an army of volunteers. It was the country seat of the influential Fitzwilliam family. They were fabulously rich and in the  eighteenth century even had spare money to build several follies within sight of the grand house - such as Needle's Eye - shown above.

Close to that edifice, I passed Stump Cross Cottages that were knocked through to create one larger residence. This was the scene at the front with a compass design over the bricked up doorway and Halloween gourds on the table... 

In the estate village of Wentworth, I took pictures of two churches named Holy Trinity. Below is what remains of the old church that was superseded  in the 1870s by the bigger church in the next photo. This was funded by a member of the Fitzwilliam family - William Thomas Spencer Wentworth-Fitzwilliam, the 6th Earl Fitzwilliam. He and his wife Lady Frances had fourteen children. His vast wealth was derived almost totally from coal mining though he never raised a pickaxe himself.

Back in Elsecar, I spotted this magnificent residential building basking in the October sunshine - Fitzwilliam Lodge. It was built in the mid-nineteenth century to accommodate single men who were coal miners in the nearby pit. More recently, it has been converted into single unit apartments.

Along my way, I spotted this tantalising sign nailed to a telegraph pole and it has already given me an idea for tomorrow's hideously unpopular post. You might be able to guess what is stewing inside my thick skull...