Great Railway Journeys.

I’ve always wanted to travel through Europe on the Orient Express. Just imagine, getting on a train in Paris and getting off in Istanbul, wow !

Apparently it started in1883 and after leaving Paris, it would steam through the Alps, Budapest and Bucharest to Constantinople, “Packed with grandees and unheard of luxuries such as soap by the washbasins, reports swiftly came back of its exquisite food, excellent wine and impeccable service.”

Unfortunately the nearest I got to that this year was a trip to Birmingham recently by train, brought about because the bad weather prevented us going in the car.

The “experience” started in the ticket office when I had to inform the ticket vendor that I was on medication for high blood pressure, and he wasn’t helping matters coming out with those sorts of  ridiculous prices. Adding insult to injury, he suggested we take out a Senior Rail Card to bring down the cost, without having to ask our ages !

The journey itself started out reasonably well, but as I settled back to let the ‘train take the strain’, I slowly became aware of a repetitive knocking sound which had me thinking a wheel bearing had gone on our carriage. I was just about to reach for the emergency chord when Mrs N pointed out a certain ‘yoof’ across the aisle with ear phones in, from where the noise was emanating.

After a brief stop to change trains, and take out a mortgage on two ‘Medium Lattes’ that turned out be coffee with shaving foam on top, we resumed our journey.

As we approached  Sheffield station  we noticed a large contingency of Railway Police, some with dogs, herding a crowd of football fans along the platform, and guess which train they were getting on ! So we had to endure the next 40 minutes being serenaded with, ‘who ate all the pies’ by a group of  ‘merry’ men ominously blocking the aisle as there were no seats, and spilling lager everywhere.  Thankfully, they left at Derby and we continued to our destination in relative peace.

And why should we put ourselves through any of this misery, you may ask?

Well this happened to be very special journey indeed. It was to meet the newest addition to our family, baby Grandson Isaac who was born just the week before, and it sure was worth it.  Let’s just say, It may not have been a trip on the Orient Express, but it was certainly one of the Great Railway Journeys of our lives.

Vin de Framboise

That’s Raspberry Wine to you and me, but doesn't it sound  so much better in French.

At the beginning of last year I noticed errant raspberry runners coming up on my plot, from my neighbours’.  He’s a nice man and was very apologetic about it, even offering to come round and dig out the offending tryffids. But I told him not to worry, I am a Yorkshireman after all and the thought of free raspberries would adequately compensate for having my space invaded.

So I let them do their thing, and come the following autumn  had a decent crop of large fruit positively dripping from the canes. The only thing is, there wasn’t much taste to them, so much so that even the birds left them alone !

I’ve grown a summer fruiting variety before that had a wonderful taste and made delicious jam, so I was disappointed with these. But what to do with them ? Jam was a possibility, but to be honest we’ve made it in the past and in reality used very little, so I thought I would give wine a go even though I’m a beer man myself.

It wasn’t hard to make, a little faffy maybe (is that a word ?), and it definitely looked the business in the demijohn as it settled out to leave a crystal clear ruby-ish red liquid.

Yesterday was the day that Mrs N’s protestations about having demijohns as kitchen window ornaments, finally peaked, and so I bottled the wine.

Obviously we had a little taster, and I could definitely detect a cheeky nose of raspberry as the glass approached my lips. Unfortunately the taste was another matter, and as much as I'd like to wax lyrical about it having a fruity body, it didn’t, and I found it a little insipid.

It’s saving grace however was its appearance, and if I were to be awarded a mark for artistic merit in a wine making competition, and receive anything less than a 9.5, I would blow the judges un grand framboise as I made my indignant exit.

Alley Alley Aster.

Remember when as a child you watched those first snow flakes tantalisingly start to fall, and wished with all your heart and soul for it to keep going. We had a rhyme for the occasion, and our little street gang would all look up to the skies like a bunch of Jehovah’s Witnesses on judgement day, chanting “Alley Alley Aster Snow Snow Faster”.

Not exactly a Keatsian eulogy I know, and I’ve no idea who Alley Aster is, but we believed that if said repeatedly and long enough with increasing volume it could affect the weather to our advantage.

Sometimes it worked and we’d be rewarded with enough snow to go sledging down the roly-poly hill, so called because in dryer weather you could do a roly-poly down it, hoping you didn’t go through any dog muck.

Anything would do as a sledge, a bit of old lino, a redundant milk crate, or if you were lucky, a ‘real ‘ one made from some old wood with six inch nails, that would have the elf  ‘n’ safety police round today.

Pulling sleeves down over numbed hands, we’d have snowball fights with the enemy kids from the next street, who had some good shots and if you weren’t careful you’d cop for one right on your lug ‘ole, leaving it throbbing for a good ten minutes.

Arriving home, looking like a drowned chimpanzee with sleeves trailing to the floor, you’d get a clout on the other ear for not coming in and putting some ‘proper’ clothes on. “You’ll get double pneumonia you will my lad!”,  my Mother would say, with a dire warning not to put reddened feet  too near  the fire, for fear of getting the ‘hot aches’.

Sadly, when it snows these days such childhood nostalgia gets washed away in a tide of pragmatism, and now I despair at not being able to get things done down at the plot for example. Oh, and when I did that triple lutz the other day, whilst clearing the footpath yet again, I could have strangled that bloody Alley Aster!

At a cinema near you.

It was  Mrs N’s birthday yesterday, and seeing as she absolutely loves Les Miserables which was being shown at the local cinema, we went to see it.

“ Bloody hell, how much !” I exclaimed, as the girl at the ticket office told us the price, and was just about to point out the irony of the film being about the oppressed poor and all that, when a glowering look from the birthday girl persuaded me to keep quiet.

The film was to last 158 minutes and being of a certain age, I thought it wise to pay a ‘visit’ before we went to our seats. On entering the Gents, I nearly broke my neck tripping over a step stupidly situated just behind the entrance door. It’s quite an old cinema, and I wondered how many countless people over the years must have used those very same expletives.

Taking our seats early, I passed the time before the film started telepathically guiding late-comers to seats well away from us, and muttering about punctuality. There was only one near miss when an old lady hovered for a breathtaking moment looking at the seats directly in front, until a shout of “Barbara, we’re over here love”, thankfully had her heading off in another direction.

Eventually it started and at first I was quite impressed, but not being one for  films soon descended into apathy and nodded off for a while as it did drag on a bit. Mercifully, after 98 minutes precisely, the interval came and I paid another ‘visit’ just in case, only to trip over that  step again! Well, 98 minutes is a long time at my age you know, both mentally and urologically.

The second half was much better and whilst managing to stay awake long enough, witnessed some very moving moments, songs and performances. It’s a pity they felt the need to rely on some big names whose singing abilities left a lot to be desired. She of Mama Mia fame as lovely as she is, trilled away like a canary on acid, and Russell Crowe should really stick to disemboweling other gladiators.

All in all though it was very good or should I say c'est magnifique, and as we munched our way through a bag of Raspberry Ruffles and Chocolate Eclairs, my eyes did water a couple of times. Once when I accidentally bit my lip, and the other when I tried crossing my legs, and nearly did myself a mischief . Well that’s what I told Mrs N, when she saw me wiping my eyes.

The Birds.

I’ve never been that interested in orny orni birds, but I do like to look after the ones in the garden, and so can regularly be seen putting my fat balls out for them on a cold winter’s morning.

Also, I’m ashamed to say, I’ve become hooked on a computer game called ‘Angry Birds’over Christmas, on Mrs N’s new Kindle that she got as a present. When I first saw the title, I did wonder how they could possibly make a game about drunken women having a punch up on a Saturday night, until I discovered it was about lobbing explosive cartoon birds at pigs heads!

Well, the other day I’d just completed level three with a new highest score, when those dreaded words rang out that send shivers down my spine, “We need to get on with some decorating”, she said.

Mmmm, perhaps now’s a good time to put the game down, get off my now fatter a**e because of the Christmas excess, and pay my first visit of the year to the plot, I thought. She was a ‘not too pleased’ bird, rather than angry as I left.

Not long after arrival I was  joined by a visitor looking for a free snack. No, it wasn’t old Bob cadging my chocolate digestives again, it was a Robin redbreast. Now I’m not one for superstitions, apart from avoiding walking under ladders or breaking mirrors, oh and having to put my left shoe on first (don’t ask), but the sight of a Robin I take as a good omen. So I’m hoping this means that next year will be better one on the allotment, after the blight ridden wash-out we had last year.

A good omen ?

Then I went to get the fork from the shed to do some digging, and was met by a real angry bird. It was a little wren that must have been roosting in there, and as I opened the door it nearly scored a hundred points just missing my head as it flew out screeching. It's Karma again, I'm telling you.

Sadly it soon started to rain, again, so I reluctantly had to abandon the digging and return home. “ I think I’d like it in Magnolia”, she said.

Dangerous Liaisons.

I’m letting you all into a little secret here, by saying that I erm, rendezvoused with a certain young lady recently, and it’s not the first time either.

We meet at regular intervals throughout the year, because she’s so good with her hands, and listens to all my woes whilst running her fingers through my hair.

What’s more, Mrs N doesn’t mind a bit and actually makes me go to see her, as she doesn’t want to do it anymore, like she used to until a few years ago.

There is a down side however, as it costs me 6 quid every time I visit, and a 50p tip if she’s exceptionally good. But I suppose that’s not bad for a decent haircut in this day and age.

One of the main reasons I go to this particular hairdresser is that she knows I have an allotment, and as she grows things in her greenhouse, it gives us something to talk about.  The trouble is, she thinks I’m an expert and it always turns out like a session of Gardener’s Question Time.

“ My tomatoes wouldn’t go red this year,” she said the other day, “what do you think I did wrong ?”

I haven’t a clue, I thought, but I did tell her of one young woman I’d heard off, who tried watering her tomatoes in the nude, to make them blush.

“And did it work ?” she giggled.

“No it didn’t, but her cucumbers grew by four inches”, I replied.

Now here’s a warning, don’t tell your barber any jokes whilst they’ve got the tools of their trade in their hands, because she was now laughing so much that the scissors were menacingly going all over the place.

That, and the fact that she’s probably the fastest hair cutter in the west, had me in serious fear of leaving the place looking like Van Gogh !

With it being Christmas, she offered me a free bottle of Budweiser as a thankyou for my patronage throughout the year, but I don’t really like these new fangled beers. So not  wanting to upset her I accepted it, in the true Yorkshire spirit of never to refuse anything but blows.

It came in quite handy as it happens, because being straight from the fridge the bottle was cold enough to use for cauterising the blood coming from my earlobe.

Merry Christmas everyone.

Tom

Less is more.

In an effort to avoid using farmyard manure because of the dubious qualities of some you can get, I religiously compost everything I can down at the allotment and also from the garden and kitchen.

When I say religiously, I don’t mean I say a prayer over the compost heap every Sunday morning, when I take stuff down. Though, I have been known to ask my maker to not let there be any rats under the old carpet covering, when I take it off.

No, I mean that every scrap of compostable material that we produce, including lawn cuttings, leaves, paper towels, cardboard and even blog bog roll tubes are diligently saved for the heap,

It all adds up to a very big pile at the end of a season, positively spilling over from my pallet bins, like some classical cornucopia of decaying matter.

But where does it all go, because when I come to use last year’s, the pile will have shrunk to next to nothing and I’m lucky if I get a couple of barrows full from it. Once again, at digging time, I’ll be left looking at those great steaming piles of manure belonging to my allotment neighbours, with green eyed envy and ever diminishing standards.

Whilst wheeling some of my precious material in the barrow the other day, I saw old Bob looking over the top of his manure pile.

“You want to get some of this stuff on it ”, he shouted over, casting a disparaging eye at my pitiful barrow load, “best cow s**t for miles”.

As he hadn’t actually seen me get the barrow load from the compost heap, and so didn’t know exactly what it was, I decided not to be out done.

“Ah but this is very special stuff ” I told him,

“Oh, what’s special about it then ?”, he asked.

“It’s from a bull and because it’s more concentrated you don’t need use as much”, I told him, with as straight a face as possible.

(Sorry about the picture quality, the camera was shaking for some reason)

For a fleeting moment I had him, then the penny dropped.

“What a load of Bulls**t”, he said, and ambled off to continue with his digging.