The BB Affair

Last Friday we go to have supper with a friend in Burton Bradstock.  Round the table is a couple who live in Pucknowle (pronounced Punnel) which is the village between us and BB.  The couple in question live up a no through road and are therefore virtually traffic free.  Thursday night around 8pm they hear a car and so look out of the window to see who it is.  A police car.  Odd.  Police car drives off but comes back twenty minutes later.  Lady of the house rings local police station to ask why there is a police car lurking in her lane as she is not too keen to go out and investigate if there is a killer on the loose.  After 5 minutes her call is transferred from Somerset and Avon to Dorchester police who tell her there is no need to worry.  Fine.  But as she was being told this, suddenly there were three police cars and a helicopter with search lights hovering over her house.  Not so fine.  And then suddenly they were gone as quickly as they appeared leaving the couple rather frightened and locking every door and window in the house!

So back to supper on Friday night.  Our chum, E, was awoken on Friday morning by the police asking if she had seen anything suspicious in BB on Thursday night.  No, she replied.  Off to work later she sees that the loos in BB are cordonned off and there is a forensic team at work.  Murder, drugs, theft - everyone was avid for information. 

News here travels very very fast so all the surrounding villages knew that 'something funny' had happened in the loos in BB.  There was Blood.  Who had been killed?  Polic cars, helicopter, forensics - it must been something Important. 

Blood samples sent off for analysis and on Saturday the results came through ... rabbit blood!  Someone had been cleaning their game in the public loos.  Don't blame them - gutting rabbits is a very smelly business!

Well, well, well

I don't have the time to write much at the moment - suffice to say I won the curry cook off at the pub on Sunday!  Well done me!  Fought off 15 other contenders so I have won a Sunday lunch for two.  I am so chuffed as I never win anything.

During the week I will tell you about the mystery in the loos in Burton Bradstock which has rocked the community to its core!  Heavens above, it is all happening here and the bush telegraph works faster than the internet ...

Weekend Widow

How quiet it is at the cottage.  GW left at 3.30 am on Friday to deliver English groceries to the suffering expat Brits in Brussels who order on line from us at http://theinternetgrocer.com.  The 'theme' of the deliveries this week was of course haggis and all things Scottish for those in Brussels who are celebrating Burns Night this coming week.  I must admit that haggis and neeps are not my most favourite of food but then I am not Scottish so maybe it just isn't in my blood ... I don't even like whisky!

The weather here is bright and sunny but the wind has moved into the north east so it is bitterly cold outside.  I am itching to get started on the garden but in this weather there is not much I can do.  As we only moved to the cottage at the end of September I dare not rush out and start digging the beds as I have no idea what is lurking under the surface.  The snowdrops and daffodils are starting to show signs of life and there are some valiant primroses that have flowered throughout the Great Freeze but apart from that not much is happening.  In the vegetable garden the kale and the spinach have come through the bad weather pretty well and the parsley is showing signs of new shoots.  Unfortunately it is frizzy parsley which I find tasteless compared to the flat-leaved variety.  So I will just hug the Aga and plan the garden in my head for the moment.

You have until the 24th January to sign into http://worldbooknight.org which I think is a great idea.  Do go and have a look at the site.  I have signed up but won't tell which book I've chosen although having been in the food business most of my life, there is an obvious choice!

And talking of food - our local pub which as you now know is the centre of the village life here has come up with a great idea to pull the crowds during the winter.  On the 30th January there will be a curry competition.  The rules are simple - you provide, anonymously, a curry for 4 people.  The pub provides rice, chutney and poppadums.  If you don't enter the competiton then you pay £2 to be part of the judging team and get to taste all the curries on offer.  The best curry wins a Sunday lunch for two at the pub (which are super).  Although I am a good cook, curry is not on my repetoire.  I admit to buying the ready to cook sauces and adding chicken and a few spices.  However  I made a vegetarian curry the other week which was lovely and I think that with some chicken added to the mix, I might be in with a chance.

And finally, it's marmalade time again and I am so happy to be in England and able to source Seville oranges in large quantites.  They are sitting in my larder waiting to be dealt with so after giving the cottage a well earned clean and lighting the fire in the sitting room as it is now getting seriously cold I shall brave the elements to find the jam jars in the garage and mess up the kitchen with sticky jam pans everywhere.  If you want my marmalade recipe that I nicked from the Sunday Times last year here is the link.  It is so easy and the marmalade is perfect, even though I say it myself - but hurry as Seville orange time is coming to an end and I read today that all the major stores are running out of them - sales are up 30% on last year.

A Jimmy Riddle anyone?

Well at last December is out of the way.  The village was effectively cut off from the Rest of the World for two weeks, the only access to civilisation was down the already dangerous lane to Burton Bradstock - add a couple of inches of ice and it really wasn't worth going out.  Then of course Christmas arrived and it would appear that England stopped for two weeks - I have completely lost time of days of the week, dates, the month and when the rubbish is collected.  I religiously put out my rubbish last week congratulating myself on being the first in the lane to do so and it didn't get collected.  Obviously as newcomers there is some secret about rubbish collection to which we are not yet initiated.  When inquiring if and when it would be collected there were shouts of 'Go and look at the website - all the collection days are published there' - so you see we may live in the middle of the most glorious nowhere but we are hi-tech down here!

Anyhow, before the forced hiberation of December, GW and I went and visited the Piddle Brewery.  People snigger at its name but the brewery is on the Piddle river in Piddlehinton, so it is very aptly named.   This micro brewery was started in February 2008 by Rob and Paul and met with immediate success - so much so that in 2009 they won the much acclaimed Taste of Dorset award for the Best Drinks Supplier.  I'm not a beer drinker myself but am assured by GW that it is good stuff.  The sacrifices that we have to make to find good produce to put on http://www.theinternetgrocer.com!

If you follow this link you can see the video on how the beer is made and giggle at the names of their different beers!  GW was given a beany so has been walking around in the cold weather with it and the slogan 'Piddle on my head' across his forehead - don't say we don't do class down here.

After our welcoming visit to the brewery, it was magically lunchtime and our thoughts turned to yet more beer and food.  Blandford Forum is just up the road from Piddlehinton, so off we set.  GW didn't know Blandford and that day he knew it even less - thick fog, cold and grim.  As we arrive in the town I see a Piddle pub, so the car is quickly parked and we stride rapidly and purposefully up the street to the Dolphin.  A real pub, a good pub, a pub with a fire, a pub with friendly staff, a pub with locals, a pub with good honest food, and a Piddle pub.  What more do you want on a dull and cold day in Blandford?  I had what must have been the worlds' largest BLT sandwich and GW gobbled down a huge plate of homemade terrine, aided by Piddle. 

Whilst we sat there, I thought that probably my father and my brothers must have surely drunk in this pub, albeit before the days of the Piddle beer.  They used to drink scrumpy until legless and the masters used to drive round picking them out of the ditches on their way back to school - not just my family I hasten to add, although I'm sure that when they left school the takings in the local pubs probably took a turn for the worse!

So if you are down around Blandford, do go and have a drink and some food at the Dolphin and for my Belgian clients who can't enjoy the experience, we can bring some Piddle to your doorstep!

Humbug

Started a post last week about the fabulous hand-dived scallops to be found in Lyme Bay and a wonderful micro-brewery called The Piddle - named after the river where the brewery is to be found; however the snow fell and the temperatures have remained firmly below zero, getting in and out of the village is virtually impossible and so we have slipped into hiberation/Christmas mode.  GW has courageously got out the motor to slither to Bridport to do a bit of shopping while I do something with the turkey.

The original plan was that my two children and one small grandson would come over for Christmas from Brussels so I ordered a small free range turkey locally.  We have all been following the weather forecast constantly, together with all the problems that the snow/ice has caused in England with the result that one day they would be coming, the next they weren't; yesterday looked positive and GW was going to do a round trip today and collect them.  The weather has gone downhill rapidly in Brussels where they have had a huge amount of snow and here is not much better so we decided to call the whole thing off and wait for the weather to improve.

But I have a turkey!  There is no way we are going to eat it in one go even with a greedy husband.  And I am not a fan of turkey, and even less of a fan of leftover turkey.  So I have just carried out major surgery, taking off the legs and the wings and tomorrow we will cook the crown traditionally.  We then have the rest that we can do things with in a proper way, rather than eating rather recycled turkey that becomes drier by the day!  So the giblets are stewing away quietly on the Aga ready for the gravy for tomorrow and I have put the carcasse in the oven to roast - a wonderful trick I learnt in the Perigord when I lived there years ago where the carcasse is left to go all crispy in the oven and then you rip off the bits of skin and meat with your fingers - lovely.  All I have to do now is make some stuffing, roast potatoes and brussel sprouts and that is it!  And cook the turkey crown of course.

This evening we will slither down to the pub for a Christmas Eve drink and listen to some live music and then struggle home again - I think there is a carol concert in the church and midnight mass but heathens as we are, the pub will win.

So a bit of a sad Christmas without my favourite children (and my dog) but at least we are all safe - the thought of all my loved ones on the road tonight would have been too worrying.

I hope you all have a lovely Christmas and from freezing, darkest Dorset I send you all the very best of everything for the New Year.

We are the champions!

Yes, we won the pub quiz last Sunday night (we won't mention that there were only half the number of teams due to the weather).  We each made enough to pay for our participation and the pie and peas served after the match, so we went home happy!  Weatherwise the week has been atrocious with -7° at night and a north wind blowing relentlessly.  The cottage is now classed as freezing.  We have the craziest heating system in the county, relying on domestic fuel (for the Aga) wood and coal and a bit of electricity that heats the hot water at night - during the day the Aga takes over the hot water duties.  We have worked out that if we want to be warm everywhere in the cottage we will have to rob a post office, so I am permanently in the kitchen with 'my' Aga while GW freezes quietly in his hell hole the dining room.  The sitting room fire is burning up most of the woods in Dorset and seems to heat the crows sitting on the chimney pot rather than us.  Today it is mild and the wind has at last dropped after two weeks of constant blowing but I fear this is most temporary.
Only two weeks to go until Christmas and I have done ... nothing.  Well, I have ordered a small turkey from someone down the road and that is all.  I still don't know if my favourite children are coming over from Belgium for Christmas.  Despite emails telling them to book tickets before they cost a squillion pounds I still have not heard.  There is no point in phoning as their state of the art mobile phones are tuned to refusing calls from their mother but not from their friends and I know that they are on their laptops as they are permanently hooked up intraveniously to Facebook.  I hope they will come but if they want to stay in Brussels for Christmas and not spend all their hard-earned salaries buying ridiculously overpriced air tickets then I quite understand.  Just think of GW and I, my little treasures, huddled up to the Aga trying to eat 4kg of turkey!
Oh, and if anyone is interested, for Christmas I would like a pair of mittens so that I can still use my laptop!
Over the weekend I will try and do a post about the wonderful scallops we have sourced from Lyme Bay ... one of my most favourite shellfish!

Serves me right

Well, the snow came so that was good.  At least now we feel part of the general breakdown of the system ... obviously the ploughs and gritters haven't been through the village and yesterday the weekly rubbish collection which we all religiously put out was still there at the end of the day and there was no hate mail post either.

Having stamped round in the snow a bit, checked that the birds had food and other various snowy jobs, by the afternoon the excitement had worn off, so I decided to tackle my Mac.  Mid August as we were in the process of moving and when I needed access to important emails, my .mac account just disappeared.  One minute it was there and the next - gone.  I twiddled around a bit, but with about a week to go before moving out I didn't have the time to waste trying to sort out the problem, so moved everything to my gmail account and just hoped that all the important paperwork I needed ended up there.

Yesterday in a moment of rare stupidity genius, I thought that if I put in the install disc and reinstalled the system, saving all the other stuff, I would eventually find my .mac account again.  Press all the right buttons, the Mac whirs away and bingo ... nothing.  Everything had gone.  Totally everything.  The Mac has been completely lobotomised.  Oh yes, I have my mac email page back but all mails are through gmail but four years of work have disappeared totally, utterly and completely.  And more importantly, four years of photos.  Gutted.  I am just hoping that somewhere inside my machine they are tucked away and that some brilliant person will be able to find them for me.  The police seize computers and manage to extract information from them, so I am sure someone, somewhere will be able to rescue my 3500 photos ... at what price?  But that will have to wait until 2011.  Apart from that, there is a load of design/artwork that took me hours that has also disappeared in a puff of smoke, and tons of other stuff which I can't remember but will when I need it.

And after all that messing around, any mail sent on my .mac address just gets thrown back in my face - I don't exist, address not recognised, error 20009987333, whatever ... so until the snow melts perhaps I will go to the geeky Apple site and see if there is help to be had.

Stupidly courageously got the car out last night to drive to the pub as I had run out of cigarettes it's the only place where you get a mobile 'phone signal and catch up on the days excitement - who had/hadn't been to work, who had crashed their car, whose heating had broken down, usual sort of stuff.  Funny how 4WD cars are regarded kindly when the weather is rough!  Although down here at least half of the cars are 4WD, so no-one is rude about mine!  I was slightly nervous as the roads through the village are in fact lanes with passing places and stone walls on either side seem to be de rigeur - not ideal on snowy, compacted driving surfaces.  However the motor behaved well and we got there and back without transforming it into a Mini.  GW has to go to town today as he has run out of heart pills (quite an important thing to have around when you need them) so we will see if we get there and back without transforming the car!