It is a busy time in the garden right now as the May weather has provided perfect growing conditions.
Kim is busy looking after the perennial and shrub beds and preparing summer bedding for later displays…
My job is the vegetable plot where I am growing potatoes, beans and peas, tomatoes, onions and courgettes. All coming along very nicely indeed.
After a couple of hours labour each day, it is time to sit back and enjoy…
I mentioned this in a previous post – Bridlington is the lobster capital of Europe, landing over three hundred tonnes of North Sea lobster a year and this staggering amount is more than anywhere else in Europe.
According to the Government’s Marine Management Organisation, lobster fetches the highest average price of all species landed by the UK fleet at over £10 per kilogram, they account for only two per cent of the weight of shellfish landings, but twelve per cent of the value. Which is why Bridlington, which lands almost no actual fish, is Yorkshire’s most lucrative fishing port. The shellfish it lands is worth £7.2m more than all the fish and shellfish landed at Grimsby and Whitby combined £4m of which is accounted for by lobster.
As we completed the beach walk and entered the town via the harbour I thought that I might find a fishmonger and get some lobster to take home.
This proved to be rather more difficult than I imagined. Almost all of the lobster is exported to Europe because in the UK we don’t eat a lot of lobster and they certainly don’t eat a lot of lobster in Bridlington because it is just too expensive for a town teetering on the lower end of the UK deprivation scale – 5 out of 10, so just below average.
I found it difficult to even find a fishmonger and when I did the lobster for sale looked rather pathetic, not like a premier display of sea food that I was hoping for so I quickly abandoned the idea.
Instead I thought that we mind find a seafood restaurant and have some lobster for lunch. We found a likely promising place on the harbour and scanned the menu in the window. Plenty of fish on offer but by the lobster choices was a hand written note – not available today. That was the end of the quest for lobster in Bridlington.
So instead I will have to tell you about my disastrous lobster meal in La Rochelle in France twenty years ago in 2003.
To set the scene I have to go back five years when I was there on a business trip looking at Semat Refuse Collection Vehicles and the company salesman took us out in the evening to a restaurant called Andre’s, a top class sea food restaurant on the harbour.
Back to 2003 now and with the family I was showing off and booked a table at Andre’s with the intention of eating lobster. Everything was going to plan, I ordered, Sally my daughter, selected crab and Jonathan, my son, went for the steak and then the evening fell rapidly part.
The waiter came to the table and introduced me to a live lobster for my approval. I wasn’t expecting that and neither was Sally who immediately burst into tears. This really spoilt the evening, no one wanted the lobster after that and I had to eat the whole thing myself and most of the crab as well. Jonathan carried on as nothing had happened and made his way through his steak dinner.
For a few years after that every time Sally asked for money for this, that or the other and if I said no she would recall the expensive incident and just look me in the eye and blackmail me with the line – “Dad, do you remember – €50 for a lobster!”
On the final day at Skipsea Sands Holiday Park we drove north of Bridlington to Sewerby Hall, a Grade I listed Georgian country house set in fifty acres of landscaped gardens. There is a very good herbaceous garden that Gertrude Jekyll would have been proud of but it was too early in the year to see it at its absolute best.
The Hall itself was interesting with rooms decorated and furnished in keeping with the period, a film show, a dressing up room and some interesting reconstructions and story boards.
When we had finished with the Hall we walked three miles to Bridlington, this time along the North Beach. We planned to stop for a drink but there were some black clouds beginning to form so we walked the three miles back to Sewerby Hall in about half the time that it took to walk the opposite way.
This was our fourth time at Skipsea Sands Holiday Park and we agreed that it could well be our last but never say never again and who knows? It costs less than £10 a night to hire a holiday home (caravan) at this time of year. Maybe we will be back again same time next year.
Posted in Europe, Food, France, History, Portugal, Travel
Tagged Bridlington, Bridlington North Beach, east Yorkshire, La Rochelle, Lobster, Seweby Hall
I begin with a question. What is the longest uninterrupted stretch of beach in the UK? I mean the longest stretch that can be walked end to end without having to leave it at any point to get around estuaries, rivers, cliffs, ports or towns?
To be honest I don’t have the answer, I have Googled it and there is no help but I am willing to wager that it is the Holderness coast in East Yorkshire. It stretches all the way from Bridlington harbour to Spun Head at the mouth of the Humber estuary and it is possible to walk the entire distance without ever leaving the sand. Few people know this because it isn’t in Cornwall or on the South coast and celebrities don’t make TV programmes about it. Is it just me but does anyone else get fed up with programmes about bloody Cornwall.
It stretches for a distance of thirty-seven miles.
I am more than happy to consider alternative suggestions of course.
I couldn’t manage the full thirty-seven miles in one day but today we planned to walk a seven mile stretch from the caravan park at Brampton Sands to Bridlington, a distance of about seven miles or so, give or take a yard or so.
We set off just after high tide. The weather was wild but not cold, big seas, a blustery wind that tugged at our shirt buttons and the occasional threat from a rogue wave that was in apparent denial that the tide was going out and not coming in as it swept in and rearranged the pebbles with a clattering sound like the percussion section of an orchestra.
For a mile or so there was no one else sharing our beach, deserted sands, pill-box remains fallen into the sea, a splendid lonely isolation as we walked on between the rapidly eroding cliffs on one side and the wild angry sea on the other.
Along the way we came across a colony of Swifts who had build nests in the cliff face. I say cliffs but this is soft mud not solid rock. Anyway they were going and coming at great speed and you will have to take my word for this because they are so fast that I was quite unable to catch a single picture of just one of them. They are the fastest land bird of all, flying at a speed of seventy miles an hour in level flight.
After leaving the nest a young bird spends up to four years in the air without coming down, they eat and sleep on the wing, they fly five hundred miles a day and most impressive of all they also mate in the air. To put that into perspective the only way a human can get a shag while flying is to join the mile high club on a Boeing 737.
A little further on we chanced upon some Oyster Catchers busy dining among the pebbles, they let us approach but not get too close before taking to flight but thankfully they were not as quick as the Swifts.
And then there was a problem. We came to a field drainage outfall that due to the recent heavy rains was in full flow, maybe two or three inches deep and about five yards wide. Maybe this was a turning back point? No, surely not!
I ventured forth and attempted to jump the fast flowing watery streams, I made the first and the second but then got carried away and quite forgot that what I could manage forty years ago I cannot manage now and took one optimistic jump too many and landed ankle deep in ice cold water with a resulting wet boot.
Kim was a lot more sensible and took time to collect rocks to make a stepping stone path and fifteen minutes later when she was eventually satisfied with her construction efforts daintily crossed over and we carried on. I manfully kept quiet about my wet foot and soggy sock.
After an hour or so we arrived at Bridlington South Beach, as good as any beach in England in my opinion, a fabulous stretch of golden sand, busy I guess in the Summer months but quite deserted today. Just a few dog walkers. I really liked it. I didn’t like the dog walkers.
From there we passed to the harbour, I was hoping to buy some Bridlington Bay lobster. I told you about that in a previous post.
Ten years ago today we were staying in the delightful town of Santillana del Mar in Northern Spain.
There is apparently an old saying that Santillana del Mar is The Town of Three Lies, since it is neither a Saint (Santo), nor flat (llana) and has no sea (Mar) as implied by the town’s name. However, the name actually derives from Santa Juliana (or Santa Illana) whose remains are in the kept in the Colegiata, a Romanesque church and former Benedictine monastery.
Posted in Cantabria, El Cid, Food, History, Natural Environment, Spain, Travel, World Heritage
Tagged Cantabria, Cantabrian Mountains, Culture, Jean Paul Satre, Life, Santillana del Mar, Spain Festival
I decided to take the opportunity to seek out more ruins and set off to find the site of the Mausoleum of Mausolus, the origin of the word mausoleum and one of the original Wonders of the Ancient World. This was once a magnificent forty-five metre high marble tomb, decorated with statues and friezes and built in the third century BC as a burial chamber for King Mausolus of Caria.
In my previous post I talked about the Spalding Tulip Festival and it reminded me of one of my favourite Tulip stories…
… This is not a botanical story but one of linguistic misunderstanding…
The name Tulip was first applied to the plant by a man called Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq who was a Dutch ambassador in Turkey in the sixteenth century and was also a great floral enthusiast. One day he was talking to a sultan and he noticed that he was wearing an attractive flower in his head wear.
When I say talking what I mean is that they were communicating with each other in the way that people do when they can’t speak each other’s language with lots of funny faces and wild gesticulations and misunderstandings.
I digress here and give an example from my own experience…
Now, I know that like most English people my grasp of foreign languages is not that good but this experience in the Spanish city of Palencia was quite bizarre.
“Catedral?” I enquired and the poor man (victim) that I had selected just stared back at me with an expressionless face as though I was a visitor from another planet. So I tried again but this time, remembering that upside down question mark thing at the beginning of the sentence I tried to sound a bit more Spanish, “¿Catedral?” but his face went so blank that I though rigor mortis had set in. I have to say that Catedral sounds a bit like Cathedral to me so I don’t know why this was so difficult but his solution was to call someone else over who was an obviously educated man who spoke excellent English and with optimism I tried again “¿Catedral?”
To my astonishment he immediately adopted exactly the same blank face as the first man so I tried again in various different accents and voice inflections. “¿Catedral?” “¿Catedral?” “¿Catedral?” Nothing, Nothing, Nothing. I really cannot understand why this should be so difficult. If a Spanish man came up to me in Lincoln and asked for directions to the Cathedral – however he might pronounce it, I am fairly sure that I could make out what he was asking for. Eventually I gave up, added the h sound and just asked in English for directions to the Cathedral and amazingly I immediately made myself understood and the man smiled and said “Ah, Catedral!” which, I am fairly certain is exactly what I said in the first place.
To continue…
Busbecq was curious about the flower and pointed to it and enquired its name. In Turkey the name of the flower was a Lale (prounced lalay) but the Sultan thought he meant what is the name of his hat so he told him it was a Tulipan or turban and Busbeqc, who completely misunderstood, acquired some bulbs and sent them back to Europe with the information that they were called Tulipa.
A good job that he wasn’t wearing a pork pie hat or tulips would be porkies!
Now, this is important information in case we have another vegetable supply crisis.
All parts of tulips are edible and the bulb can be substituted for onions (although they are a little more expensive and less flavourful). The Dutch ate tulip bulbs in the hard times of World War Two even though the petals have little taste but could be used to garnish a dish, chop a few petals and throw them in a salad, sugar them to decorate a cake or use the entire flower for a fruit bowl, pinching out the pistil and stamen in the middle.
Incidentally the tulip is the national flower of Iran and Turkey where it is still called the Lale.
The history of the Spalding Flower Parade stretches back to the 1920s when the sheer number and variety of tulip bulbs grown throughout the area surrounding the market town became an annual feast of colour.
The crowds that came in created many problems for the town and coaches and cars caused chaos on the narrow lanes around the fields and this continued to happen until in 1948, the Growers’ Association became involved in organising a Tulip Week. With the help of the Royal Automobile Club, a twenty-five mile tour through villages and country lanes was planned to show the best fields.
Posted in Arts and Crafts, Europe, History, Holland, Literature, Natural Environment, Postcards, Travel, World Heritage
Tagged Amsterdam, Life, Photography, Spalding, Spalding Flower Parade, Travel, Tulip Fields, Tulip Summit.
The island of Rhodes is one of the most interesting and has been inhabited for six thousand years and due to its geographical position on the major Mediterranean Sea trade routes is situated at a natural crossroads between Europe, the Middle East, and Africa and this has given the city and the island many different identities, cultures, architectures, and languages over its long and varied history.
Posted in Arts and Crafts, Beaches, Cathedrals, Europe, Food, Greece, Greek islands, Greek Taverna, History, Knights of St John, Literature, Travel, World Heritage
Tagged Culture, Dodecanese Islands, Holidays, Knights of St John, Lindos, Photography, rhodes, Travel
I began this series of posts about Entrance Tickets in April 2014 and this was one of the early ones. I cannot really explain why but I have always kept my Entrance Tickets and they remain safely stored in a travel memory box.
The series of posts cannot go on much longer however. I am running out of material, not because I no longer visit places when I am travelling but because so many places no longer issue paper tickets. Booking is done on line and instead of a ticket there is a QR code on a mobile phone to swipe through a scanner.
I like the feel of a ticket, I like told it between my fingers and judge the quality, this one at Cordoba was especially fine and then I like to carefully put it in between the pages of my guide book to make sure that it doesn’t get creased.
I think that this is rather a shame. Places generally need to be booked in advance with an allocated time slot. It is no longer possible to wander up to a entrance booth, hand over cash and receive a nice shiny Entrance Ticket in exchange. Somehow it takes the spontaneity out of city break travel, everything has to be done according to a timetable.
Posted in Africa, Arts and Crafts, El Cid, Europe, History, Postcards, Spain, Travel, World Heritage
Tagged Andalusia, Antequera, Cordoba, Culture, El Cid, Parador Hotels, Photography, Reconquista, Travel
The Talyllyn Railway is a narrow-gauge preserved railway in Wales that runs for nearly sixteen miles from the town of Tywyn on the Mid-Wales coast to Nant Gwernol near the village of Abergynolwyn. The line was opened in 1866 to carry slate from the quarries at Bryn Eglwys to Tywyn, and was the first narrow gauge railway in Britain authorised by Act of Parliament to carry passengers using steam haulage.
Posted in Beaches, Childhood, Europe, Food, History, Literature, Natural Environment, Postcards, Travel, Wales
Tagged Catell y Bere Wales, Little Railways, Llanuwchllyn, postacrds, Talyllyn Railway, Towyn Wales, Welsh weather
Have Bag, Will Travel 