Digging for victory, self satisfaction and pride.......

A slender breath of winter's crisp air,

 I stop and turn to see who's there.

Brushes my neck with the lightest of touch

no one but the breeze so rare and nonsuch.

Tilling the earth with heart and spirit,

 unfolding the soil and all that is in it.

Breaking the sod weighed down by the year,

preparing the ground for Spring grows near.

Alone on the allotment with just God and the birds,

 lost in my silence, thinking only in words.

The Sun on my shoulders and Mother Earth by my side,

digging for victory, self satisfaction and pride .

Taking a break from the toil I stop and ask why,

then look up from the ground at the big Norfolk sky.

Watch that Buzzard soaring high, wild and free

and I'll know why, because you see that bird is me.

M. Thomas

There is no doubt about it, I have a lot of catching up to do down t' allotment. At least two months behind on the digging because of the 'full house' during the Thursford show months. That compounded by the failure to keep on top of the weeding during the preceding summer months. 

So you might think I feel that the allotment is a burden not worth pursuing, another chore and a commitment too far. You would be incorrect as I really do enjoy the toil. There is something so primitive about growing food from seed and at the same time so civilised. A patch of earth and a handful of seeds was the first step to the modern farming of today. 

For the first time since having the allotment I took a vacuum flask of tea down there as I planned to work for several hours. It was a gloriously sunny day, the winter sun was low but my patch is in a sunny position and the warmth counteracted the chill of the south westerly breeze.

After a few hours I pulled out from the shed the faded green patio chair that I inherited with the allotment. I placed it near the shed in a position that afforded me a 'Grand view' of the allotment.

I poured the tea into the funny little cup that doubles as the Thermos' lid then from a separate container I topped it up with fresh milk. There is (I am told) a persuasion out there that fill their flasks with the tea and milk combined! I know! I am sure that this is just an urban myth as there cannot be such philistines in such a civilised country as this.

So I sat there and contemplated for a minute or two. 

It was so peaceful and the clouds were forming wisps many miles in length in what is generally described as a 'Norfolk Sky' (vast). The Tornado planes occasionally ripped through the sky but otherwise it was just the odd Robin singing or the territorial call of a pheasant.

First question was which day of the week is it? Mmmm, Wednesday I decided. Gosh, two and a half years ago I would have known exactly what day of the week it was (*) and I would have been up to my armpits in all things Supermarket. 

For a moment or two I glanced back into those manic days, no single incident or store but my head filled with the constant hubbub of the tills, the constant alertness to any and everything and the claustrophobia of the work place.

I stole my self away and came back to reality, the reality of today, the here and now....  and it was good.

I compared the two worlds and quickly realised that they are incomparable for what I did then was another me but a job that was very worthwhile and had purpose. That was all very cool.

So what about now? Well, as I looked at this seemingly petty little allotment it dawned on me that here I am both producing food and serving it up too. 400 breakfasts, 300lbs of preserves and over 70 meals for which I have used my potatoes, parsnips, tomatoes ,onions, leeks, carrots, kale, broad beans, rhubarb, figs, apples, raspberries, strawberries, loganberries, blueberries and blackberries.

Not to mention the Pumpkins!

Oh and our own cut flowers for the guest rooms and cottage.

These have come from my garden too.

I realised then that actually I am still highly productive but my business is all about the provenance of the food I serve my guests. Along with the local sausages, the locally reared and smoked bacon, the locally caught crab I am able to serve the freshest of home grown veg.

And as I have tried to portray in the above poem there is a sense of enjoyment, satisfaction and freedom that I get down at the allotment which is so fulfilling it is almost spiritual.

Of course that will last right up to my next delivery of half a ton of cow's muck!

(*Editors note: he may have correctly identified what day of the week it was - on this occasion - but he doesn't know what year it is.....make that three and a half years!)





11,487

Happiness and merriment with a nod of recognition that somewhere in the mix there is Jesus....

 "Christmas travellers braced for storms disruption and violent homophobic attack at Norwich..."


This, I thought, was the local paper's prediction for our Christmas ahead. That's a little pessimistic I mused and perhaps the homophobic attack is a little too specific. I was reading the local paper's web pages and it was a second or two before I realised that they were trying to tell me two separate headlines, firstly the weather prediction then secondly the attack in Norwich.

Despite this isolated grammatical ambiguity it is fair to say that the EDP (Eastern Daily Press) newspaper is probably the best regional paper that I have seen on my travels. It covers the entire East Anglia region and according to Wikipedia it is the only regional daily paper that out sells the Sun.

In the end the second bout of stormy weather did not materialise choosing instead to batter the south of the Country ....   again.

All in all it was an odd Christmas weather wise as apart from that extremely high tide at the beginning of December it was a surprisingly dry couple of months. This was good news for me as I offer to take guests to the Thursford Christmas Show, so they can have a glass of wine and don't have the worry of finding the venue that is situated in a remote village. This year every single guest took me up on the offer and as a result I frequently found myself standing by the entrance waiting to meet them at the end of the show.

This was not a chore as I quite enjoyed standing there amongst pine trees covered in thousands of Christmas tree lights (the pine trees, not me) whilst VERY Christmassy music tumbles out from secluded woodland speakers, all very Disney like. It was also interesting seeing how far some of the coaches had come from, this year Glasgow and Cornwall were the winners.
If you are touched with the cynical gene and/or can't take a little Christmas 'cheeseyness' then I would advise that you don't go to Thursford and perhaps you should stay at home and watch a few guys on TV getting cheap laughs by chucking a few expletives at you. However if you feel that Christmas is about happiness and merriment with a nod of recognition that somewhere in the mix there is Jesus and you also appreciate great (and I mean GREAT) singing and dancing in true old fashioned variety performance style then Thursford is definitely the place for you.

So every other performance I found myself waiting at the entrance to collect my guests in a venue deep in the Norfolk countryside 7 miles from the nearest small town in a village with a population of just 200. Then my challenge was to spot the two or four faces of my guests, most of whom I had only seen for about an hour previously, amongst the 1,500 audience exiting the venue. I am pleased to say that I lost no one! I waited there 25 different nights during November and December and it only drizzled with a little rain once, all the other times it was totally dry.

So the last two months of the year bring a lot of business our way and with the evening meals and the trips into the show they are the most intense of the year. But the year is now done, 2013 finished and with no guests over the New Year we have time to reflect on what we have achieved. At this point I will hand over to Alison for the scores on the doors as she lists some of those key statistics like how often the cesspit was emptied or suchlike....

Mike.

2013 at The Old Bakery in numbers and other such trivia

• 209 nights of B&B stays (105 in 2012, 53 in 2011)
• August was once again our busiest month with 42 nights of stays (out of a maximum of 62 ie 31 nights per room is maximum capacity). This compares with 23 in 2012 (in one room).
• February was the only month in which nobody stayed; although in January we only had a one night stay.
• 158 nights of stays in The Bakehouse cottage compared with 113 in 2012. We didn't have any Thursford cast members stay as we have done in the two previous years as we are trialling it to see if we save more on the cost of heating oil and electricity compared to the rent we receive.
• We've served over 400 breakfasts and at least 70 evening meals during the year. 59 evening meals were cooked and served in November and December for our Thursford guests.
• Popular additions to our supper menu this year have been Norfolk Haggis and during the summer, Crab salad with home-grown new potatoes. One couple had our Cromer crab salad three nights out of their stay of four nights!
• The allotment and our garden have provided us with lots of fruit and vegetables that we've used in our meals: potatoes, parsnips, tomatoes ,onions, leeks, carrots, kale, broad beans, rhubarb, figs, apples, raspberries, strawberries, loganberries, blueberries and blackberries.
• We've now bought over 300 jam jars in the last couple of years and have lost track of how much jam, marmalade and chutney we've made - but it is a lot!
• Our most frequent visitors have stayed with us four times (in the space of  one year).
• We have 35 nights of B&B stays already booked for 2014 and only 5 of these nights are from new guests.
• Our entry on Late Rooms went live on 4 July and before we even knew it was live we had our first booking for the next night and two hours later a second booking for the 6th of July.
• Since going live on Late Rooms we've had 42 nights of bookings and already 13 nights of bookings from people who stayed once with us via Late Rooms and who are now booking direct for further visits.
• 36 reviews on Trip Advisor and 5 on Late Rooms and all rate us as excellent - woo hoo!
• This year we've gone international with guests from Canada and Belgium in the B&B and from Holland in the cottage.
• We've also had a number of guests from Norfolk staying here again this year.
• Two different families have cycled here this year, one young family from Norwich and the other from Hertfordshire en route to the North Norfolk coast.
• Percy(the pheasant) has been back to visit us again in the last few months (we'd missed him).

Mike has been running things here since April when I started work in the NHS and has worked like a Trojan especially since we went live on Late Rooms.

We hope that in 2014 we will continue to build on the success and reputation we've built over the last few years. Our first priority needs to be to book us some time out throughout the year to help us keep up our energy and enthusiasm levels so that we can do it all (and more) all over again.

Wishing all our readers a very Happy, Healthy and Prosperous New Year :)





11,323

There's a storm front coming (mood indigo), White water running and the pressure is low..... Billy Joel

It was a cruel irony that whilst a couple in Hemsby, Norfolk were attending a fund raising event last Thursday 5th December to fund stronger sea defenses for their houses just a few yards away their own house was beginning to slip into the sea itself. The couple rushed to the house and with the help from all of their neighbours they managed to salvage some of their belongings eventually giving up and abandoning the house when they saw that the kitchen floor was cracking. Then, once out side all they could do was watch their home slide down the eroded coast and crash into the sea leaving them on the patio with the few items salvaged and a thin facade of brick which was once their back wall.

The storm itself was not ferocious but the seas destructive force was generated by a combination of a 'spring tide' whilst 80 mile an hour winds blew inland whipping the waves up at the same time as the air pressure was unusually low.

The High tide that ensued was as high as one that occurred in 1953 but then the damage caused was devastating with the sea reaching some two miles inland. Over 24,000 homes were damaged and more than 300 people died. The disaster initiated a whole host of sea defenses to be built  and here in North Norfolk for the most part they prevented damage of such a scale this time around.

There is an old sea wall around the village of Cley which on it's own would not have held the sea back but a newer sea wall a little further out did protect the village from flooding.

Here Alison is standing on top of the newest sea wall and you can see just how close the sea came to pouring over the top of it. For starters you need to understand that the water to the left is not the sea but water left after the sea had already breached the sea wall that is visible in the far horizon of the picture.

So having broken through there and flooding all the salt marshes between it then rose up against this sea wall. All that brown debris, dead reeds etc is the flotsam left behind as the tidal waters rescinded and represent the high tide mark. In the bottom right hand of the photo you can see that the water came to within inches of flowing over the sea wall.

This detritus was dumped the length of the high tide mark around the coast and there was a lot of odds and ends stranded amongst it. We came across boats, pontoons, a dead Mallard was laying right next to a drowned hare and this large egg lay in amongst it, amazingly unscathed.

We surmised that it was a Swans egg that failed to hatch and was washed up when the old swans nest was lifted by the flooding waters. Obviously my Zoom lens was just placed next to it so I could demonstrate just how large the egg was.

A little further out there was a secondary sea wall which unfortunately had several breaches along it's length. Our path being cut by holes as wide as 10~15ft in the defenses.

To proceed we had to climb down the sea wall and navigate a path at it's base before climbing back up to continue on our way. We had done this several times and on the last breach right at the base  and just as I was about to pass some reeds I was suddenly startled by this beastie looking up at me. I hadn't noticed but I had inadvertently put myself within two feet of a young Seal. It was the movement of it's head that made me jump and realising what it was and not wanting to be bitten I shinned back up from whence I had come toot suite.

It appeared that the sea wall was breached and thousands of gallons of water had passed through it sucking this poor seal with it. Now remembering that the water to the left of the photo is not the sea but simply sea water trapped in the marshes and that the sea is at least a half a mile away now then you can understand that this poor creature would be severely disorientated.

He looked in good health but wary and so Alison and I headed back to report him to the local wildlife Trust so they could notify the correct people.

They reckon that the flooding washed away over 400 seal cubs from their colonies around the Norfolk coast.
This being really dangerous for the young cubs that had not been fully weened yet.


We drove along a 'closed' road beyond Cley to get to the wildfowl center so we could report the seal and whilst some of the road had been cleared of the tidal debris there was still a patch very much as it was left by the sea.

Just to remind you that this is the main coastal 'A' road, the A149 now reduced to a simple mud track. No buses were running along it today!

This mess was the same in many other places below are two views of Blakeney's quay side road and in the second one you can see how well they have managed to clear the highway.

 

Blakeney's sea wall was punctured in many places too and literally miles and miles of grazing land was flooded.

 The gap above bled into the fields below and as far as you can see to the horizon should all be fields or reed  beds. This water has no where to go and could be sitting here for a long time. The reeds are used for thatching and I wonder if it shall effect the price of thatch.

 Boats were left high and dry on top of the sea wall. Everything being topsy turvey as also in the photo below the sea should be on the left of the wall and the fields on the right.

A helpful sign designed to warn motorists who park on the quay side also serves another dose of irony for the stranded yacht on top of the sea wall.

A few days later came the excellent news that most of the seal cubs seemed to be back in the colonies as parents were being reunited with their offspring. The pup below would definitely have died if he had not found his mum.

There were some deaths of course and the gulls are quick to make capital out of them using their sharp bills to attack the carcass of a cub whilst other seals choose to ignore them......

These two seals appear to be very happy, seemingly with big grins on their faces, glad to be back with the colony again at Blakeney point. We took a trip out to see these guys on Friday and whilst there were several hundred on the beach there are an estimated 1,200 in the dunes above which is really something to smile about after the devastation.

This little fluff ball was enjoying basking in the warm 10 degrees C, whilst there was a cutting wind for us humans confirming to me that I had less blubber than I thought!


So that was our take on the aftermath of the highest tides for 60 years, many villages flooded and businesses there too. They all have their work cut out for them but most suggest that they will be up and running again soon. We wish them all the best and hope that the insurance companies have some compassion.... Ha, ha, listen to me.. how naive!

The trapped sea waters may take a little longer to clear the fields and reed beds but for now these new lakes are pulling in more bird life and giving new perspectives to the views across the marshes.

These flooded fields were in some cases the bigger long term plan anyway as the conservators had made a decision to let the outer sea wall naturally erode and allow nature to develop on it's own. The wildlife would change but it would still be protected and the view probably would end up like this one has already.



 
For my part I am exploring new views to photograph. Like the one below where the sunset is now reflected by water where there was once fields.

11,090

Do Daleks discuss discourse with a definite defined Dalek dialect dialogue?

One of my guests told me yesterday that he knew he was in Norfolk when he saw a lady stop at the 'Give Way' markings on the side road outside our house. The appearance was that she was about to make a right turn as she was near the centre of the road. Having stopped she undid her safety belt, got out of the car and casually sauntered across the road to the letter box where she then posted a letter before slowly returning to her abandoned vehicle and finally completing her right turn.  .....NFN*

Try doing that in Brent Cross and you'll soon have a lynch mob after you.


It is not that unusual, along our main street, to see two cars driving in opposite directions and as they approach each other slow down eventually coming to a halt and then with windows wound down they have a little chat for a few minutes. The conversation only being terminated when another car approaches the road block, then off they go again. No one beeps their horn, why would they it's NFN.*



We had a stall in the local arts and crafts fair in the village this weekend. A few months back we also had an exhibition of everything arty or crafty that had been produced in the village itself. It was truly amazing how many people had something that they had made and such a vast array of items from a homemade cuckoo clock to wickerwork and even beautiful doll houses. So much talent in such a small village!

~I took some of my photographs along and Alison her quilts. It was an exhibition and not a sale but one of the other exhibitors came across to me at the end and asked how much was the photo of the trawler because he really loved it. I said £10 and he ummed and arrred and said he would be back to buy it later. He never returned and I assumed he thought it too expensive.
   So three or four months later Alison is running our stall at the craft market when he comes back and says once again how much he admires my photo of that trawler and that he will definitely buy it "some time soon". Well I really don't know what else we could do to assist him in this process, He was there, Alison was there, our cash 'float' was there and even the bloody picture was there and I know he had the money because he had been selling things all day. What else could we do?

Once again another typical trait of Norfolk folk, dithering. Very NFN*.



Norfolk local radio isn't anywhere as near as bad as the Alan Partridge character portrays BUT that's not to say that it doesn't have it's moments too. Some time ago, on a Sunday in the car, I tuned in to what appeared to be two old....   very old guys chatting away inanely in very heavy Norfolk accents about the dullest of dull things....

"Wha ye upta 't weekend Jethro?"
(What are your plans for the weekend Jethro?)

"Ooo r'm eading oot on a lang ol' journey t other side of tha couny t pick up a coople of Speckledey Pols". 
(Oh, I am heading out on a long old journey to the other side of the County where I aim to collect a couple of Speckledy [a type of hen] Pols [Point of Laying]).

And so it went on. Alison was getting furious at me because I wouldn't change channels you see it wasn't just a short bit of banter, no far from it, this was the show. It should have been called Two old men that talk about nothing of any importance for two hours. A bit long winded I know but it would do what it said on the box. You know when you go to those rural museums and someone has made it his life's work to record and capture all the old dialects and when you listen you wonder why they bothered because you can hardly understand a word they are saying, well this was like a live one of them.


"Arrr, well Ermine glaaad ye asked meh tharr, arm arff ta get me car waash'd at ... "  (some place unknown to me).
(Ah, well Ermine glad you asked me that, I'm off to get my car washed at.........)

"Oarr, I ear thy do a good jaab thar don't thy, all don by pols by 'and."
(Oh,  I hear that they do a good job there, all done by"......


Well at this point I thought they were going to wash his car by using the said Pols that Jethro was looking to collect from the hen breeder. I envisaged a Croat washing a car with a chicken, then I realised he meant Poles..... as in Polish, you know, people from Poland!....

"all done by 'Poles', by hand.")

Well humour is an odd thing isn't it, very personal. So while I was trying to drive the car in tears of derision Alison found absolutely nothing funny in it at all and just found them irritating to the point of distraction. This ambivalence just served  to make the whole thing that much more funnier to me and in the end the channel was changed.....       I was not consulted :(

Now, talking of Dialeks

So when the chance came recently for myself to irritate half of Norfolk with a personal and fairly boring story I naturally jumped at the chance. I happened to hear a request a few weeks ago on BBC Radio Norfolk for any stories from anyone with a connection to Dr Who over the last 50 years as they wished to share such stories with their listeners over the week of the Doctor Who anniversary.

You had to be prepared to be recorded and heard on air.

Well, I thought, I have gotta be at least as interesting as Jethro and Ermine ANNND perhaps a little more coherent!

And I had a story to tell too.

So dear reader here is the link to my one and only radio appearance. Sadly it doesn't match the two old boys in time as it only lasts 3 minutes or so.

 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01lzcpf

Some seek fame and some have fame pushed upon them (Sorry Shakespeare not quite the real quote).

I have no idea how long this clip will be available, perhaps they'll stick my voice in a rural museum as an example of some one who has nothing very much to say. Although they may get a better capture of life in the early 21st Century if they record the mind numbing waffle spewed out by dumb brain dead zombies on their phones on a train.

The producer of this Dr Who documentary can only have been in his late twenties and when I explained that I didn't know which episode they were recording but I remember that Jamie was there (Fraiser Hines) then he immediately, straight off the top of his head said that he could tell me that it was The Evil of the Daleks in 1967 because that was the only time that Jamie appeared with the Daleks.

It was 46 years ago, nearly a 1000 episodes later and about 25 years before he was even born, that has to take geekism to another level!

Even more annoyingly this is one of those series missing some episodes from the BBC archives and me and my brothers systematically destroyed the scripts!!        Oooops.

I've no doubt that we are now on some Whovian {Doctor Who Fans, Sue} HIT LIST......

EXTERMINATE,  EXTERMINATE, EXTERMINATE,  EXTERMINATE, EXTERMINA.........

*NFN = Normal For Norfolk

10,887

The story so far.....

In 1977 things were changing, Disco was was being savaged by Punk, the Queen was celebrating her Silver Jubilee, The King of Rock'n'roll died, whilst our Glam Rock king, Marc Bolan was driven into a tree by his partner. Things were all a little topsy turvy then, the Government were kept in power by the Liberals, the Firemen went on strike and Manchester United lost their Manager, wait a minute.......


AND we were only on our fourth Doctor, Tom Baker.

In and amongst this mayhem a wet behind the ears 17 year old kid was offered and took his first full time job working in a Supermarket in a suburb of Birmingham. I was lost, a little lonely, shy and had absolutely no life plan. Within the next 18 months there would be massive strikes, bread shortages, 3 day working weeks and to top it all the Sky Lab was about to drop out of orbit and nobody really seemed to know quite where it would hit the earth. All I really knew was that a 'Hard hat' wouldn't be up to the task!

Frankly that Autumn when I started my first job just seems like light years away now but rest assured that there are still kids out there in villages, towns and cities throughout the country and, I guess, throughout the world going through the same process with the same fears and concerns for both their futures and indeed the future of us all.

However life went on and time passed by, we didn't run out of oil as they predicted and I put my head down and knuckled on and 30 something years later after marriage, kids and several cats I resigned and ran away to Norfolk with my wife Alison to open our little holiday business.

And once again it was all a little bit scary and unknown, but this time I didn't feel lost, I wasn't alone, I probably couldn't be accused of being shy and my life plan was finally drawn up.


We opened in a modest way with just one B&B room so we could generate an income whilst we created an attached holiday self catering cottage and then a second (and final) B&B room.

We chose to break with the 'safe' life in Corporate land to try to steer our own destiny even if it meant a less affluent one. Not quite Barbra and Tom from The Good Life but certainly on their side of the fence. We obtained an allotment and have grown much of our own vegetables, make & sell our own jams, Alison teaches patchwork in the village hall and I've started to sell some of my photographs.

The B&B, we thought, would generate a small amount of income to keep the wolves from the door.
However plans were made to be scuppered and very early on the hand of fate slapped us in the face as Alison was 'displaced' from her job at HSBC which required her to either look for another job within the organisation or face redundancy. This was not part of the master plan as there is still a mortgage to pay off and the B&B and cottage on their own could not cover this.

So shit happens and whilst we had a healthy concern about how we now progressed one thing was for sure Alison wanted to take the redundancy and get out of the bank and find work more locally based so she could enjoy The Old Bakery and what we were building here.

Time moved on and Alison now has a temp job (although by the time it is due to end it will have been going on for a year!) at a local NHS trust helping me at weekends and some mornings before going in to work and helping serve dinners after work. Meanwhile our hospitality business has steadily grown year on year and the workload too.

We have won an award for our breakfasts and obtained separate 4 star ratings for both the B&B and the Holiday cottage as well.

Alison has also spent the last year completing a diploma in Coaching and Mentoring. After about 200 hours of study and practice (or at least that what she tells me she was doing) she has passed and can now describe herself as a professional, qualified coach. She's started working with a local journalist to write some press releases to publicise coaching retreat weekends which she'll launch in the spring. The idea is to get people to come to us to stay in peaceful surroundings with great food and spend some time being coached either in the chapel or out on the beaches or in the woods of North Norfolk.

Oh and when we get a spare five minutes (or more like five days) we'll be putting together a course on 'How to Run a B&B' based on our experiences of the last few years and Alison will coach them once they've completed the course as they set up their own B&B.


So here I sit looking back at the 17 year old remembering all the old haunts that I had worked in, some 40 supermarket branches. So many weird and crazy things have occurred in that time a few of which I have documented through this blog over the last few years.

We happened to go to Coventry a week or so ago and whist there I persuaded Alison to let me try to find a few of those odd haunts of mine. We drove around that ring road several times whilst I struggled to get my bearings. In the end we gave up trying to find two of the stores and headed off to a third in a mining town called Keresley.

My memory was poor and we drove around several times before we finally found what I recalled to be a small village stores in the middle of a mining village. My memories offered that of a nostalgic sense, not unlike the feeling that you get when you watch that lad on the Hovis bread advert pushing his bike up Gold Hill in Shaftsbury. But memories can be fickle and as most of the time I didn't know what day of the week it was I guess it is of little wonder that the image of Keresley in my tiny little lost in a world of his own brain just didn't tally with reality.

Back in a blog in March 2012 I recalled a little about my time there......

When we at last found the collection of 6 small shops most of them were boarded up. My old store is now a church and the estate did not appear as I remembered it. It was a Council owned estate filled with larger than life people each with a miner at the head of the household. As I looked at it today it seemed to have lost that 'life', I wondered where all the people worked now the pit had closed, probably in one of the shiny Malls in Coventry itself. The huge winding gear wheels were always in sight at the top of their tower but not now, no they now live half sunken into a patch of grass by the side of the road as a monument to Keresley's heritage. A sense of melancholy came over me as I stood and looked at this sad row of half empty shops,  perhaps it was the icy cold rain whipping my face or the realisation that actually the good times really were not that good, which ever it left a bleak feeling inside. I think my memories just lost their virginity. That nostalgic warm glow blew away as did we, leaving nothing but a distant memory in the rear view mirror of a lost boy on an unknown path about to start a 34 year career in a business that he would never quite feel suited him.




10,802

Preserving Time.

The Apples are falling and there is a chill in the air for sure Autumn is back and along with it harvest time. We have once again been very busy at the Old Bakery converting our produce to jams and chutneys. Also freezing whatever else we could.

There is a garden store room at the back of the house, it is dark and it's flint walls keep the area fairly cool thus enabling me to store our apple crop, onions and Marrows for a reasonable time whilst we prioritise the other produce preservation.

Our Apple tree despite being hit by a late frost still produced over 120lbs of fruit. This is an excellent variety called 'Lord Derby' which starts off as a cooker then slowly matures to a sweet eating apple. In the next week I really need to start making apple sauce and slicing and freezing them for the winter crumbles that we serve our guests through November and December.

Then there were the grapes from the vines. I really worked hard on these this year. As a novice I turned to the wonders of YouTube for advice. This was helped by the fact that our office opens straight out onto the garden and so I could make quick trips in to look up on the PC how to prune and thin out.  

I had instructors from all over the world teaching me and as a result I obtained quite a crop. However despite this good advise I don't think I was harsh enough in thinning out the individual grapes within the bunches (although I easily removed at least five hundred grapes) and so ended up with a crop of fairly small ones.

They gave the garden a Mediterranean look and were spectacular against the red roof tiles and blue skies. I made a point of ensuring that there was a couple of bunches and just a few vine leaves artistically hanging in front of the Cottage's kitchen window to give a little exotic feel whilst the guests washed up.

Regardless of the small size of the individual grapes I picked the lot, about 14lbs worth deciding to make grape jelly from them.

Having found a suitable recipe I had to boil them down in batches as there were far too many for my preserving pan.

They may have been small but the taste was exquisite as they burst in your mouth sadly though the skin was tough and had to be irreverently ejected along with the pips. So it was either jam or juice and as jam is propbably the more stable of the two that is what I went for.

So boiled down, then the juice filtered through a muslin bag and reboiled with the sugar I produced 11 jars of Old Bakery Grape Jelly to join the preserves stall that we have set up in our porch.

Our 'Shop' was looking really depleted only a month or so ago but with all the homemade jams, marmalades and chutneys we are open for business again.





We are, however, getting a little concerned because we are selling so many we believe that at this rate we will run out of stock early next year.

Still hopefully the Apple sauce and also the Mincemeat that we produce will help stretch it all out a bit longer.













Another product that I have over produced on is the humble Pumpkin. I planted 2 packets of seeds and some old seeds that I saved from a pumpkin last year in some seed trays. The only ones to germinate were the seeds from last years pumpkin. I got 5 plants and so planted them in the allotment and ended up with 27 pumpkins to my surprise.

Whilst these were not the biggest averaging the size of a small football don't be fooled by the carrot in this picture as it was really, really large and extremely tasty too.

So I used the three biggest to make soup (my absolutely favourite soup flavour), I saved two of the  smallest  for decoration in the house and stuck the rest on our front wall with a price on each one.

One by one they sold as every now and again a car would drive by then turn around and come back to buy one. Once again Mike's market stall was in business. I had a cunning ploy to make people think that they were selling faster than they were thus making them think Oooh, I'd better buy one now before they are all sold out. When I placed them on the wall I carefully left a space every now and then to give the image that an odd one had sold in the neat row. I know this trick worked a treat (did you see what I just did there?) because Alison came in and said wow you sold some already!

Going back to the ones that I kept back, I used an idea that Claire gave me and by cutting the top of a small Pumpkin you can make a nifty little vase for you autumnal flowers.....

Here I have used Dahlias that we grew from seed, Hydrangea flower heads and vine leaves from the garden as a base.

I'll be doing the harvest festival soon!!

All home grown.





A final thing that I have sussed out is that I can get £1 for a medium size pumpkin before Halloween. If I try to sell ALL of my pumpkins before Halloween then I can buy a pumpkin at least TWICE the size after Halloween for exactly the same value £1. Thus for every pumpkin I grow I can make TWO pumkins worth of soup!

Now they don't teach you that kind of economics at school.

More home grown (therefore free) jam, The Old Bakery Apple & Blackberry Jelly, a real authentic Autumn jam this. I think we produced 15+ jars of it.


A final indulgence. I take photographs as a hobby but have started to sell them and have happily found that I have a market for them thus giving me more confidence in producing more.
I paint and draw with less confidence and I also feel the urge at times to jot down a little prose, again with less confidence.

However on reading one of my past blogs I came across the following poem from a couple of years ago and for the first time 'I' felt that, actually, it was quite good. So I bring today's blog to an end with my own poem.....

The ticking of the clock

And despite Summers hazy lazy relaxed days,

Autumn takes over, slowly, subtlety in so many ways.

As indiscernible to perceive as the movement of a clock

whose hands steal our time away seemingly as still as a rock.

Don't be fooled by the resurgence of the rose,

It's colour and scent the essence of the garden prose.

Don't be fooled by the Ladybirds, Butterflies and Bees,

They'll all be gone soon and the message they send is but a tease.

The apples are dropping onto the dew dampened lawn,

whilst the herbaceous borders are looking weary and forlorn.

The Brambles are rotting and the silken cobwebs glisten in the cold sun,

It will not be long now, the signs are there that Summer is all but done.

So mow your last cut and prepare to battle the carpet

of brown, red and yellow leaves that will fall to mark it.

For Autumn is coming with more gust than you'll know

and tomorrow you'll be lighting your fire and comforting in the glow.

But don't be despondent all full of gloom and piteous sorrow

for there is always something to look forward for tomorrow.

The dappled sun through the conker coloured trees

and even the freshness of the oh so sharp breeze.

Filling that awkward gap between the yellow of the sun

and the cold frosty snow when we know winter has begun

Autumn serves us well and allows us to manage our seasonal shock

for whatever happens there is no stopping that slow, ticking hand of the seasonal clock.

M.Thomas

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Perhaps sir would like a side order of Mealworms?

"Oy, YOU!, Oy YOU, Mr. Manager, you shouldn't allow it, it's not f***ing right, who knows what s**t they've been walking in, you shouldn't let em in. Why don't you stop em coming in eh?"

It would be true to say that these eloquent missiles of Mass Communication certainly played a part in my decision to leave the Super-marketing world. In my time I think I have had the F word thrown at me in just about every context that possibly exists. Starting from the low base of how I should go some where to reinforcing the said promise that I would indeed be kneecapped on the way home that night.... "I have friends in the IRA" The shoplifter shouted in his strong Irish accent.


Sometimes it is an honest, if somewhat derogatory, slur on my good name said from the heart with real passion. Having seen a male come into a store I felt obliged to watch him. He was smart enough on first glance but had on crappy trainers with no socks. Oh and it was only my personal opinion, I know, but his hair could have benefited from a week long dunk in the sheep dip pen.
       What I have done there is called profiling and is often what the police are criticised for because he may well be an innocent guy going about his everyday business. True he may have been, but sadly the majority of the people that I 'profiled' in my time went on to either commit a crime or attempt to.
      This guy was no different and my gut feeling that there was something, just something not quite right about his demeanor was to be proved true.
      He went straight to the nappy section picked up a pack of our own label nappies then walked right around the outskirts of the store and just as I thought he was about to run off with them he walked along the checkouts and up to the Customer Service desk. Thus giving the impression to the customer service member of staff that he had just walked in with the nappies. He then proceeded to explain, ever so politely, to customer services that he had bought them a few days ago and that they had a problem with the sticky fasteners, could he have a refund please. He had slightly opened the pack on his tour of the store.
     
     Obviously at this point I felt it was time to step in and after a frank discussion in which he made it quite clear that I was a fornicating liar and continued to slur not only my good name, but my Mothers (sorry Mummsie) my Fathers and indeed my fathers, father (again sorry Dad). This big fuss just gave my colleagues time to come and assist and all credit to the police they did him for attempted fraud.

This ripe language was not saved as a special treat exclusively for the management, no far from it. Some of the things and 'helpful' suggestions that have come out of some peoples mouths towards the checkout staff would shock a fisherman's wife!
Often they think they are being witty and like to share their Oscar Wilde wit with a volume that could drown out 40,000 Sunderland fans when they have just beaten Man. Utd. I know, I know, it'll never be able to be proved.
      I swear that every single person that told one of my staff exactly where they could stick the bottle of white lightening, after a sale was refused, thought that they were the first to be so 'clever'.

I think Oscar had a quip that summed them up....

        "Some cause happiness wherever they go;  

 others whenever they go!"

So back to the guy that I started with who was complaining more for the attention that he received from the audience of other shoppers whom he thought would be interested but of course he was wrong and they weren't in the least interested.

"Oy YOU, Mr Manager why don't do something about it!" The problem that had commissioned this crusade was that a 3~4 year old child was sitting in the Supermarket trolley. Obviously this is unhygienic and clearly something we ask parents not to do for two really good reason. Firstly it is just gross, I can remember watching a lady being served some meat from the butchers counter whilst her child sat quietly in the trolley. Neither of them aware that her blessed little angel was producing a delicate little waterfall of child wee, all over her shopping and then cascading to the floor.
Secondly as soon as they stand up they make the trolley highly unstable, you'd be no safer if you were trying to swap seats midstream with a fat man in a canoe. I have seen several trolleys go over and the resulting head injuries are quite unpleasant. So this guy was preaching to the converted on this one.

"I quite agree sir", I quickly disarmed him.
"Well wot you gonna do about it then? why don't you stop them coming in?" he asked.
"We're always happy to hear suggestions on how best to do this, what would you suggest?"
"Well you should 'ave someone on the front door stoppin' them".
"When?" I challenged him.
"All the bloody time" he kindly clarified.
"So to stop the problem you suggest that we employ staff to stand at the door waiting all the opening hours to tell the odd person that turns up to remove their child before entering the store." 
"Yep" he agreed.
"So we would employ two full time members of staff and one part-time to cover their holidays so that every opening hour of the day would be covered in case we missed an offender. Total cost to be added to every ones shopping bill approximately £30,000 a year."

To give him credit he thought about this for quite some seconds and came to the conclusion that this would possibly be using a sledge hammer to crack a nutshell.

"Well you should have bloody signs up on every trolley and at the front door."

"Sadly people never seem to read signs" I proposed.

He was not too impressed at this and having invoked some more of his fruitier language he made it quite clear to me that if we had signs on the trollies and at the door this would be a simple way to cure the problem.

Bless him.....  "But sir, there is a sign on the trolley that you have got in your hands right now and you have obviously not read the sign at the front doors either, as I said people just don't read signs."

He grumbled under his breath that he hasn't got time for this and as he disappeared up the greengrocery aisle he just shouted back "It ought not be allowed, you should do something about it...."

I thought a small remote control battery on every trolley could send a short sharp shock to the child and perhaps any other customer of my choice, but figured I'd never get it past health and safety.



All this is really just to ease you into today's topic......

Norfolk Signs.

Norfolk has an abundance of home made signs many of which make me smirk. These are just a few.....

Listen, I know it is childish school boy humour but I can't help saying to the kids that I'm going to go to the Cock and Pull it.

It is always nice to see that some one has made time to warn people about animals crossing the road and I think this one says it with a smile.

There is a politeness about this one. It is in a 30 mile an hour zone but they clearly thought that the more personal approach would be helpful.


The next sign takes this a step further and whilst it is a formal road sign it is done in that most delightful of Norfolk vernacular.  To me the sign sums up in one simple concise phrase the whole of the Norfolk way of life......

The next sign is a bit of an enigma to me as I'm really not too sure what it is trying to tell us...

The question being is it the Truck Stop that is cheap and clean or indeed is it the Tea that is cheap and clean? Did they used to sell dirty tea and felt obliged to put a sign up to show how well they have moved on, somewhat like the 'Under new Management' signs.

Most of these roadside signs stay in position all the time and sadly on this occasion there was no tea either of the clean or the dirty varieties and even the Truck Stop had vanished too, perhaps it was their tea break.


However, my favourite of all the Norfolk signs was on a chip shop near Salthouse and simply read;-

FISH

AND

CHIPS

AND

LUGBAIT

I went to take a photo of it only to find that it had been removed. However I think the flash new sign still leaves me wondering if the Lugbait is on their Fish & Chip menu especially as orders can be taken!

Perhaps sir would like a side order of Mealworms?

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