The news this week, April 20th

It was so nice to step outside the door at the weekend and not feel that we were still in the grip of winter. The really cold easterly winds finally stopped and a warmer airflow came up from the south.

Saturday was warm, but we had some quite heavy rain during the afternoon and then Sunday was beautiful.

I took advantage, once the shopping was out of the way on Saturday, to get out in the garden and plant some more seeds. The sunflowers which had been planted the previous Saturday had germinated within five days and were now showing strong primary leaves. I didn’t want them to get too leggy so they were put outside with the sweet peas. We have them on the decking at the bottom so they can be taken into the summerhouse if there’s a danger of frost and we’ve done the same with the ivy-leaf geraniums that I grew from cuttings during the winter. Four of the eight cuttings have produced really strong plants.

On Saturday morning, I sowed cosmos (a smaller, more compact variety than the monsters we had last year), nasturtiums and cornflower. They’ve all gone in individual pots in the summerhouse where it’s a little warmer.

By the time I’d pottered around with these tasks, the sun had disappeared, it had grown a little colder and then began to rain, so I retreated to the kitchen for some test baking. I’ve agreed to make a wedding cake for Max and Inna. They’re having cup-cakes for guests, but will want a cake to cut for a photo and I said I’d make a victoria sponge - always one of Max’s favourites.

I don’t just want to make a regular victoria sponge and Margaret has been suggesting various options during the week (mainly involving butter icing). Anyway, in the morning, I’d bought extra eggs and some roll-out icing which I’ve never used before, so it would be interesting to see what I could do.

I thought I’d make a regular mix and cook it in a larger tin to see if I could get a bake that’s the same as usual, but in a bigger shape. It worked really well and I ended up with an eight-inch square sponge that was about the right depth to form one layer of a sandwich. So what I can do is bake two of those to make a larger sandwich cake and then ice it and perhaps create a smaller second tier. Decorate with cut-out hearts and a couple of figures and it should make a nice cake.

I wasn’t as well prepared as I’d thought and when it came to icing, I had no icing sugar (to prevent the roll-out icing sticking when I rolled it) and no apricot jam to brush the cake with to ensure the icing stuck. I rolled the icing out on greaseproof paper and Margaret brushed the cake with melted raspberry jam, but only had enough to do the top, not the sides. She was adamant that we should just ice the top, but I wanted to give it a try doing the sides.

It was a real problem to roll the icing out in a large enough section to cover the cake and to make it thin enough so that it wasn’t too sweet and sickly. I finally got it right and after another small debate with my technical adviser (Margaret was sure that I’d need marzipan) we were ready to apply the icing. Margaret was supposed to hold down the pop-up handles on the cake board, but when I moved the icing, she hadn’t got them down. The icing hovered over the cake for a minute while she tried to get hold of them and then fell apart in my hands. Margaret said it was my fault for not telling her and I said all she had to do was hold down the handles, but no matter, we’d just re-roll the icing. Actually, the extra practice was quite useful and second time, the icing went on quite nicely and I was pleased that I was able to cut out flaps so it folded over the sides quite nicely with a neat join. I thought it looked quite good, but Margaret was critical of the uneven top and said I’d definitely need marzipan to give me a proper smooth surface. It was time for my “no marzipan is ever coming near my cake” speech.

The cake cut well and it tasted nice. My sister had some on Sunday (as did I) and then I took a pile into work on Monday. Margaret e-mailed to say that she’d had some and the icing was disgusting, it had gone all gooey and that marzipan would prevent this (she’s not dropped the marzipan campaign) but we’d all had some at work, some more than one piece (Lawrie and probably Davina) and everyone agreed the icing was fine. I’m not sure if the cake box we have at home had caused the icing to sweat or not, but it was OK at work, not too sticky at all.

So this weekend, the plan will be to make a complete cake and have a go at icing and decorating. It could be a long day on Saturday! I’ll then keep the cake for a couple of days and see how well it cuts. There will be cake galore on Monday evening and a decent amount for work to try on Tuesday.

Sunday was a really nice day, so I was able to really enjoy being outside. We took the dogs to the park in the morning and there were lots of dogs there, so plenty of hounds for Gravel to play with. Holly is less keen to greet other dogs and is more focused on chasing and bringing back her ball. Gravel is much better and looks really well. He did blot his copybook by running off through the trees and down into the ditch at the edge of the park. He came back pretty dirty and then Holly and Mia (the Falcos’ labradoodle) thought they’d check it out and so all three dogs disappeared. Mia is a large white dog and came back with four dirty boots, while Holly and Gravel would definitely need a bath. To give them a longer walk, we went round by the runway and then cut through back into the village by Miss Green’s old yard, which is now full of geese and ducks and is always a popular walk for two bird-loving springers.

After dog-washing, I sowed some cornflower and night-scented stock directly into the ground, put some more cosmos and cornflower in pots and also did a bit of weeding. Finally, I wanted to get my dahlia tubers out of winter storage in the garage and start them off in pots. I think slugs destroyed several plants last year by biting out the growing tips, so if I start them in pots I should avoid this hazard.

I’ve inspected the tubers several times and when I last looked in late February, they had appeared a little dry. I packed them with damp compost and covered them up. When I looked on Sunday, several had started to sprout and some of the tubers had grown long roots into the compost. I’ve put some in the summerhouse and some upstairs in smaller pots where I just had single tubers which had broken away. I think they’ll be OK.

I have my motorcycle out of winter store and it’s been good to ride it to the station in the morning. The new rear tyre is working well; the old one was so squared off that it really cornered badly, trying to stay upright and then dropping into a bend too quickly. It’s much better now and riding the bike home really cheers me up. I needed it on Monday as signal problems between St Neots and Peterborough caused our train to stop at Biggleswade for about half an hour. Some people abandoned the train to get taxis, but we were on the move again in time to get to Huntingdon at the same time as some of the taxis (so Gordon told me the next day).

No such problem on Tuesday as I was staying over at Sam’s. He wasn’t working on Tuesday and so had made sea bream parcels of tin foil to cook the fish with ginger, chili and onion. It was served with brown rice and broccoli. He goes to a lot of trouble, but I wasn’t really hungry enough to do it justice. It’s nice to stay at Sam’s or Max’s in the week as it breaks up my week and saves me a long commute. Sam’s house is quite convenient as it’s five minutes walk from Walthamstow tube and so my journey to work can take me just over half an hour, which is great.

While at Sam’s I had a text from Tom to say that Lucia had been offered a place at LSE to do her PhD. I think he’ll be pleased to get back to London.

Wednesday was the day of Margaret Thatcher’s funeral and there were big crowds in London, although I was tied up in the office all day, except for a lunch in the Queen’s Arms with Darius, so I saw none of it except on TV. There were major security concerns, especially as a couple of bombs had been detonated by the finish line in the Boston marathon, killing three and injuring many more (including a runner who had both legs blown off and a three-year-old boy who had gone to watch his dad. The bombers were identified on CCTV and yesterday (Friday) there was a gun fight where a policeman and one of the bombers were killed. The other bomber escaped, but was arrested overnight. The were from Chechnya, a country that was part of the Soviet empire and which has been fighting a bitter war of independence. It’s a muslim country, but odd that people from there would want to target the US.

On Thursday, I worked from home because I had a hospital appointment with a specialist. The good news was that my lumps were just cysts; the bad news is that they might get bigger and removal would be painful and require a general anaesthetic. The advice was to do nothing unless they caused me pain and discomfort and that’s what I’ll do. In the evening, we went to the Dog in a Doublet for a meal and it was quite good (more of that later).

The weather has been good right through the week, with very little rain in the east and very strong winds through the middle of the week. We had a fen blow (a dust storm) during the week and in Elgin on the Moray Firth, the council had to send out workers to clear the roads of drifting sand. We went to the Moray Firth for a day when we were on holiday and the beaches and dunes are beautiful with fine white sand. It was quite windy that day and I can remember the fine sand blowing up from the dunes where it was dry.

Aunt Margaret, my mum’s youngest sister, died on April 7, aged 81. She had suffered from a heart condition and had then contracted cancer. Her husband George had died in 2011 and I guess that had hit her really hard. They were married in 1951, so were together for almost 60 years. I would have attended the funeral, but had three or four meetings at work that I needed to attend. It’s been really, really busy this year.

Colville Place revisited

View from the top floor. My great
grand uncle would not have seen
the BT Tower, of course!

I have said before how many really nice people I’ve met and e-met since I started doing family history research.

• Susan Wilkes in the Black Country (a distant cousin of Margaret’s) gave me useful information about the Robinsons and also passed on the story of family members killed at Pelsall Colliery when the pit was flooded by water from older mine workings.
  
  
• Simon in Florida contacted me. We’re related somehow, but not sure exactly how. He’d traced his family back to Great Budworth in Cheshire and had been so touched to see a plaque on one of the buildings there saying it has been Rayner’s tailor’s shop. I was only the second living Rayner he’d come across. We shared the frustration of the different interpretations of the surname across the years - Raynor, Rainer, Rainow ... it’s a long list of clerks, clergy and census compilers who can’t spell Rayner (or perhaps it was the Rayners who couldn’t spell?).
  
  
• My cousin Jennifer’s husband Mike has done much good research which he’s shared with me, helping to unravel some mysteries about Richard Gibson Little, my grandfather. We’ve spent some interesting time speculating about illegitimate children and parentage.
  
  
• I had a nice note from Graham Evans in Canada who contacted me about our common Mitchell ancestors from Hales and Stockton in Norfolk. Their family had an oral account of life on the farms; the hard work, but their happy lives and their can-do attitude.
  
  
• Best of all was a communication with a distant cousin Ann Seymour in America who was a relative of Zachariah Burrows (my 2x great grand uncle). With their help I was able to trace his journey from Burston in Norfolk to Clearwater in Upper Canada and on to the pioneers of the new state of Nebraska. Ann also sent me a copy of a letter written by Ann Burrows, my 3x great grandmother, in 1843 to her son in Canada.

There have been lots of other discoveries, many tinged with sadness, like the story of Margaret’s dad’s first wife, who died from septicemia after pricking her finger on a rose thorn (thank goodness for penicillin these days), children in workhouses and orphanages and even a family member surviving five years in Dachau concentration camp.

What’s also been nice (and I plan to do much more of this when I retire) is to actually visit places. There’s something wonderful to be able to tread in the footprints of your ancestors, it gives you a terrific feeling of connection. It’s not always easy to do that; houses are demolished, roads and housing estates built and land uses change beyond recognition. The Liverpool of my great grandparents was largely obliterated by German bombs during the Second World War and what Hitler started the town planners and developers of the 1960s and since have finished off. In rural communities like Norfolk, it is even harder. Often the village would not have house numbers or even street names. The early census returns just showed everyone who lived there. In Stockton, my ancestors were listed as living “in the woods” (which makes them sound like elves) and later in one census as “Stone Cover Woods”. Wandering around the parish of Stockton, I came across the Stockton Stone and realised that they would have lived in Stone Covert (with a T) Wood, which helped me place them.

As my ancestors left the countryside and moved to the city, I was able to trace a couple of people to locations in London, including Harry Mitchell, my great-grandfather's younger brother, who in 1901 was living with his uncle, cousins and three lodgers in Colville Place off Charlotte Street (now very fashionable Fitzrovia) but in those days described as the Parish of St Pancras and a much more cosmopolitan area. I wrote about this in my blog Visiting the Past.

I thought that was that, but a few weeks ago I got an e-mail from the new owner of the house to say that he’d read my blog and would I like to have a look around. He’d been researching the history of the house had searched the address and found my posting. We both share an interest in our history and the history of places, so he was able to tell me a little more about the place. It was built in the 18th century, so is well over 200 years old and it was bomb damaged during the Second World War, which is what I suspected because there’s a little park next to it and the end gable contains the remains of a fireplace of what would have been in the house next door.

The owner knew that it had been extensively damaged and repaired and because of this it was not listed, like other houses in the street, but was in a conservation area, so he was having to seek planning permission for a variety of work, including replacing the old Crittall steel windows (certainly not an original feature) and replacing them with a Georgian style more in keeping with the Regency period when the house was built.

The house had been occupied by an old lady and so needs quite a lot of work doing to it. Rooms have been knocked through, but the layout would be largely the same as when my ancestors lived there over a hundred years ago. There’s a cellar, ground floor, first floor and second floor, so four storeys in all, which are connected by a steep and winding staircase (quite tricky to negotiate until you are used to it). I was surprised by how slim the house is. Once you’re through the front door, you’re more or less at the back, but it is lovely and light inside. The new owner will live there with his wife and it will make a lovely spacious house for two people or a small family. My great uncle shared it with an uncle and an aunt, two cousins and three lodgers (a waiter, a hotel worker and a musician). It must have been quite tight at times, even saying people didn’t have as many clothes or possessions in those days.

At the back is a large brick and slate outhouse. All the houses had them, but some have been demolished and some converted into garden rooms. The owner wondered if it might have been a workshop for my plumbing ancestors and they may well have used it for that purpose. The uncle was listed as working on his own account (self-employed) and from home. Also, it's not unlike the wash-house and toilet of the house in Manchester Road, Lostock Gralam, where I grew up.

Inside the outbuilding at the back of the house.

It’s interesting that a property that was once a relatively modest home and high-density living is now a really fashionable and desirable part of London. The view from the windows that I had would have been quite similar, but also quite different for my ancestors - much more smokey for a start and they definitely wouldn’t have been able to see the BT Tower poking its head above the rooftops opposite.

In my previous posting, I reported the house had been advertised for sale at £1.8 million. The new owner was keen to tell me that he hadn't paid that much for it. I said he was interested in the history of places, so he may well discover more about Colville Place. He told me that his current home (in Primrose Hill) was the place where the first 999 emergency call was made from. The occupier had seen a man climbing over a fence and suspected a burglary. There's an interesting piece on the 999 service in Wikipedia.

Above and below: views along Colville Place from the first floor of no 18.

The news this week

Last Saturday, I got in my second batch of seeds - all sunflowers of different types which we hope will provide a nice show of cut flowers for Max and Inna’s wedding on August 3. I grow sunflowers every year, but I normally put them in a bit later for a show of colour in September. I’m getting these in early in the hope that we can have a good show a month earlier.

Lucy has also planted some in London and she was able to get hers started in their conservatory, so we have a back-up plan. Amazingly, my seeds have already started germinating and we’ve had them outside on warmer days to stop them growing too quickly. Hopefully, this weekend, I’ll be able to sow Cosmos, Cornflower and Nasturtiums.

On Sunday, we drove across to Kilworth House where Max and Inna will get married. It’s the first time I’d been there, so I was interested to see what it was like. It’s a large place, between Market Harborough and Lutterworth, with lots of mature redwoods in the grounds and a lovely large south-facing orangery (not sure if it was ever used for oranges) where the wedding and reception will be held. There’s a cellar room for the evening dance and lots of other space. 

I shudder a little at the cost of being married these days. It’s a far cry from Northwich Register Office and a buffet at Lostock Club. We were there for a taster session to allow Max and Inna to choose the menu for the wedding breakfast, and Michael and Marina joined us so we were a party of six. I have to say the food was all very good, although it was the strangest dinner I’ve ever had. Each person had a different meal and we were to eat a small portion and then pass it on to the next, so that everyone tried everything.

So for starter, I had stilton and onion tart, chicken terrine, asparagus and feta, mushroom salad, hot smoked salmon and one thing I can’t remember. For main course, I had pork chop, steak, pasta, risotto, guinea fowl and one thing I can’t remember. For pudding, I had banoffe pie, chocolate mousse, mixed berry crumble, cheescake, cheese-board and one thing I can’t remember. Margaret took a picture of every dish and put them on Flickr!

It’s a good hour’s drive to Kilworth and on the hills to the east of Leicester in what would have been Rutland, there were still lots of deep snowdrifts lying next to the road. It’s amazing that it was so much worse just 20 miles away and the wind must have caused huge drifts. In places the snow was still two feet deep.

In the evening, it was a bike-fest on TV with MotoGP from Qatar and British Superbikes from Brands Hatch. Now I have Sky and Eurosport, it’s going to be hard finding any time at the weekend during the next six months.

On Tuesday, I had a doctor’s appointment to assess the result of the ultra-sound scan on my (ahem) lower abdomen. It wasn’t a big surprise (as the ultra-sound operator had shown me the best pictures). Andrew said I had about eight lumps, five of less than 2mm, but three bigger ones, including one of 35mm. He said he’d refer me to a specialist and I got an appointment through on Thursday for the following week.

My motorbike has been serviced and has a new MoT; and with an improvement in the weather and lighter nights, I’ve started riding to the station this week. It’s nice to be back on the bike and, with a new rear tyre instead of the illegal, squared-off rubber I had on previously, it turns in so much nicer. I only managed 800 miles last year, so I’m hoping for more use in 2013. Of course, as soon as I wheeled the bike out, it started raining, but I’ve managed to dodge the showers so far. I don’t mind it being wet on the way home because I can dry my oversuit overnight. If I get wet in the morning, it has to go into my panniers wet and would be horrible to put on to come home - all damp, cold and clammy.

Me and Maggie Thatcher

Margaret Thatcher, the first woman to be Prime Minister of Britain, died this week, she was 87.

That’s not a bad innings, but for much of the past decade, she’s been almost totally out of public life due to a series of strokes which has left her partially paralysed and with serious memory loss.

It’s a sad end for a woman who was the strongest, most charismatic leader the country has had since Winston Churchill, but we are all enfeebled by age and infirmity - something to look forward to!

I remember Thatcher being elected. I didn’t vote for her, but I didn’t vote for anyone in that election. I’d just moved from Warrington to Peterborough and then moved house in Peterborough and my vote hadn’t caught up with me. I could have sorted something out, but I really wasn’t that bothered.

I’d been through a shit year, the so-called “Winter of Discontent” when half the country had been on strike, inflation was as high as 15 per cent, the bins weren’t being emptied for weeks and even bodies couldn’t be buried because gravediggers had downed tools. It was an extraordinary time. It really did feel as if the country was about to collapse. I’d been on strike for six weeks during the winter and I’d been one of the officers of our union chapel, so management hadn’t taken it well. When we returned to work, I was being treated with all the joy of a turd floating in a swimming pool.

I moved to Peterborough to try my luck down there and, like the good trade unionist I was, I viewed Thatcher (and the Conservative party) as the enemy. I guess that during the next decade I grew closer to the Conservatives as I started a family, wanted better schools, to pay less tax - I stopped trying to kick the establishment and instead become part of it.

My three children were born under Thatcher, we saw her fight a successful war - the Falklands (costly but necessary, as one former colonial power prevents another from doing what it spent the previous century and a half doing itself); we saw her privatise state monopolies like British Telecom, The Gas Board and The Water Boards; we saw her take on and defeat trade unions, including the mighty National Union of Mineworkers; we saw her sell council houses to tenants and create a nation of property-owning working class people.

There was much more, much of it divisive, but that was inevitable as the changes being pushed through were massive. Was it Thatcher who was devise or the trade unions, the IRA or the Soviet Union who opposed her government. She rent the Tory party on Europe and on poll tax she thought she’d make people care about local government by making them all pay for it, but the press and her own party turned on her and she was forced to resign after 11 years as Prime Minister.

I think she left the country a better place; she did what needed to be done and didn’t always win popularity as a result, but Lord knows what Britain would have been like now if we hadn’t had her.

In 1979, if you wanted a telephone, you contacted the state-run provider British Telecom and they put you on a waiting list. You could wait for months to be connected and often you had to share a line with someone else. In Manchester Road, we had a telephone for my dad’s business, but it was a party line (shared) with another house. We had our own numbers, ours was Northwich 3352, but if the other house was on the line you could hear them if you picked up your phone and you couldn’t make a call. If you wanted to buy a gas fire or gas cooker, you had to buy it from the Gas Board showroom - it was a different world.

This afternoon, I was across in Ilford to see a customer - Archant London. Ilford is one of their main London offices, a busy centre from where (in new offices in the High Road) they produce a range of weeklies. It’s a busy newsroom, which is nice to see, and on my way back on the train to Liverpool Street I was approached by a young man who asked me if I’d heard that Margaret Thatcher had died.

He was a freelance journalist working for Radio France International and I wondered at first if this was a scam or spoof. He wanted to know what I thought of her and if I’d mind giving him a quote. He only wanted 20 seconds, so he could stitch together a vox pop and I was happy to oblige. I was spouting on about history when he shut me up, said thanks, have a nice evening and moved on into the crowd outside Liverpool Street. When he’d gone I thought of three or four cracking sound bites - too late.

The last thing I expected to see today was a Russian submarine

It’s a short week because of Easter Monday, so everything is getting compressed into four days and we’re all extremely busy.

The sales team is at half strength following re-organisation, redundancies and a round of resignations from people who were left too grumpy to work by the whole process.

I’ve got three or four big projects on the go and one of our major rivals for entertainment listings has ceased trading, so we are very busy talking to their former customers to try to bring them on board.

One of them is the Kent Messenger Group. I had a meeting with them a couple of weeks ago, gave them a proposal and they wanted a follow-up meeting at their offices to discuss further. In the morning, I had a 10am meeting with a new smart-phone app company at the Hilton in Paddington, so after that I took the Circle Line round to St Pancras to catch a train into Kent.

There are now lots of trains down into Kent from St Pancras. The high-speed link they put in for the Eurostar service and the new lines to take people to the Olympics at Stratford have really opened it up. You can get a slow train from Victoria or London Bridge or go from St Pancras and catch one of the high-speed Javelin services which go down to Faversham and Dover.

I had to go to KMG’s Medway office and that’s a part of the England I don’t know very well. Basically there are a number of towns clustered around the Medway estuary - Rochester, Gillingham, Chatham and Strood (I may have missed one out) - and they are known, unimaginatively, as the Medway towns.

The nearest station to the office was Strood and the offices looked to be about a mile away. I got to the station at 1pm for a 1.30pm meeting, so I might have walked, but there was a taxi outside (with no driver), it was blowing a freezing wind and there were flurries of snow.

I asked the chap at the kiosk if you had to call for a taxi and he said no, the one outside would take me; the driver had just popped to the toilet (impressive knowledge!). I bought a Twix from him as a reward as I’d not had time for lunch and waited for the taxi driver. It was clearly a no 2 as he took a good 10 minutes to arrive and he was a bit of an odd bod, nice bloke, very chatty but a bit odd. He told me his taxi would only be a few minutes quicker than walking because I could have cut down a road that was buses-only where he would have to go all the way round. The Kent Messenger office, like so many newspaper offices these days, is not in the centre of town, but on an industrial estate on the edge of Strood and (according to the taxi driver, who was born and inbred in the area) it was on reclaimed land that had been bog when he was a young lad. He told me he liked the cold weather because you didn’t get sweaty when you walked, he didn’t like rain or snow because it got on his glasses, I learned he was a ‘Gills’ fan, I learned about the deregulation of taxis by Gillingham district council, I was offered a critique on the quality of traffic information by local radio stations (BBC was the best, but it kept saying Chatham high street was closed due to roadworks and it wasn’t) and I was promised that when we got to the KM offices I’d be able to see the DJ from KMFM through the window.

That’s a lot to get through in a 10-minute taxi ride and I feared at one stage that he wasn’t going to let me out of the cab, so keen was he to have someone to talk to. I was very disappointed, when we got there, that we couldn’t see the DJ through the window (he’d driven a short distance past the entrance door to pull up alongside the DJ window). The driver was mortified - they hadn’t cleaned the windows, you normally could see the DJ and he tuned in the radio to check that it was on air. When he turned it on, there was a BBC Kent traffic report, so I had to listen to that because that was the one he was telling me about, but they didn’t mention Chatham high street, and then he tuned to KMFM and yes it was on air.

The last part of our conversation was conducted through the open door with snow blowing around as I made a tactical withdrawal from the cab.

My meeting went quite well and one of the people I saw was their IT manager, a chap called David Butler, who worked with me at Northcliffe Electronic Publishing some 15 years ago. He’d been made redundant by Northcliffe, but had got a job with Kent Messenger soon afterwards. He’d not really changed much.

I had time for a brisk walk back to the station and I was staggered to see (as I came across a view of the estuary, that there was a large submarine moored there, possibly beached because it had a distinct list to one side. It was the last thing I’d expected to see that day and I took a couple of pictures on my phone.

This internet site: http://www.medwaylines.com/blackwidowsubmarine.htm tells you all about it and also has some better pictures. It’s a former Russian hunter-killer class sub (diesel powered) that had been moored in the Thames, then in Folkestone and now on the Medway. It had been intended as a tourist attraction, but it was definitely not attractive in its current state.

Coldest Easter on record

My project to document my garden through the seasons during 2012 was quite an interesting exercise and provides a number of references for the year. My entry, alongside images for March, said it was unseasonably warm and reached 16 deg C on March 11.

Not the case this year. Average March temperatures have been just 2.5 deg C, it’s been the coldest winter since 1962 and the coldest Easter on record, with snow recorded in London on Easter day.

I think last Easter, we had some of the boys home and we had a barbecue on the patio. I went outside to do some gardening this year and my hands were frozen within an hour. I wanted to get the big border tidied up and I’ve only got about halfway down it. Even though it was cold, the ground had dried out on top, so it was workable and I managed a good chunk of weeding, also removing a very large clump of Solomon’s seal plants that had rather taken over.

What I couldn’t do was plant any seeds outside. I’m keen to get sunflowers in so that some could be ready for Max and Inna’s wedding in early August. I’ve started some sweet peas off in the house, but they are pretty hardy and won’t mind it being chilly if they go outside in a week or two. If I did sunflowers, it would be much too cold for a half-hardy plant; we really need to get this cold spell out of the way.

On Saturday, Pauline and Chris came for dinner and brought Jasper the labradoodle along. It’s just over a year since they lost Gremlin, so it’s nice that they have a new dog. Jasper is growing fast - he’s almost as tall as Gravel - but still quite unruly. He will make a very nice dog when he calms down a bit and becomes more easily trained. He’s very food-focused, so I’m sure you’ll be able to teach him anything if you have a biscuit in your hand.

I made a cassoulet, with gammon, chicken and sausage. Sam had made one in France and I thought it would go down well. There was far too much and so we have another three or four portions in the freezer to go with the three portions of butternut squash risotto I made on Friday.

On Sunday, we went to see Sam and Lucy for lunch and took Holly and Gravel along. I think Sam was keen to see how Gravel was doing. Springer Spaniels are good travellers - we just put them in the car and they sat happily in the back all the way down to London and all the way back. I’d given up chocolate for Lent and so enjoyed a chocolate Easter chicken for breakfast on Sunday, followed by a three-course lunch at Sam’s (including a meringue with cream and lemon curd). I’ve been keeping a food diary and trying to stay under 2,000 calories per day, so Sunday was a bit of a blip! Gravel and Holly sniffed every inch of Sam’s house and garden. They have a nice enclosed rear garden, so we could just let them out from time to time. Holly liked the fact that she could see people walking past on the street and would have happily stood in the bay window all day woofing at passers-by.

I thought Monday might have been cold but sunny; it was just cold - colder than ever. I had a wee potter outside, but it was nice when Max and Inna arrived and I could come in and chat. I made tartiflette for dinner, so it was another bad day for diets. Max helped me put it together and then we went to the Rose & Crown for a couple of beers leaving Margaret to take over putting it in the oven.

It’s a jolly nice dish and went down very well. Max and Inna will stay a few days and then head to Leicester to spend some time with Inna’s parents. Next weekend, we have a couple of wedding-related tasks. Margaret is going to Kilworth on Saturday for some kind of recce to do with flowers and then we’re there again on Sunday with Michael, Marina, Max and Inna for a tasting session to determine their wedding menu.

A rare trip to Queensgate

On Friday (Good Friday) we made, what is for me, a very rare trip into town.

I can’t think when I last went into Peterborough to go shopping or look around - no wonder businesses are struggling.

I wanted to buy a couple of things - some headphones so that I could listen to my Michel Thomas Total French on my iPod on the train and also some new casual shirts.

Margaret also wanted to look at some dresses that she’d seen on the internet. She wants a new dress for Max and Inna’s wedding. Her friend had offered to make her one, but Margaret has not taken her measurements (as promised) and was making some lame excuses for not having done so: my sister should have done it, but it was a bit complicated; she’d been worried about Gravel; the Moore Stevens e-mail server had been down ...

Well, the dress hunt didn’t go well. We stopped off in John Lewis and they didn’t have the dress that she’d seen online and so couldn’t try it on. No doubt John Lewis has got wise to the fact that women see a dress on a website, come to their store to try it on and then buy it online. If they’ve any sense, they’ll monitor websites and take all dresses that are featured on the internet out of the store.

It didn’t put Margaret in the best of humour, but that job done, we went upstairs to buy some headphones. I’d toyed with the idea of getting some noise-reducing headphones, but I couldn’t find any and the ordinary headphones seemed expensive enough. I selected the cheapest I could find, but then went for the second cheapest because they had proper ear pads, not ear-pieces. They actually seem OK, so I’m looking forward to trying them out sometime soon.

Next it was ground floor for some shirts. This was going to be more difficult because I didn’t want to buy a shirt made in China (I don’t approve of their record on human rights, especially Tibet) and I didn’t want to buy anything from India or the far east - I can’t support 12-hour days for 10-year-olds, so it had to be something from Turkey or the poorer parts on Europe (Portugal). The chances of finding anything made in England are next to zero.

It clearly wasnt going to go well. The nicest shirt (from Hackett) was £90 and from Vietnam; Barbour (a brand name I wouldn’t have expected to find on a shirt) were good, but made in India; Tommy Hilfiger and John Lewis were Chinese ...

I decided to have a look in Beales, which used to be Westgate House (the Co-op) and, initially things didn’t look any better. We did eventually find some shirts that probably were made in England, but they looked like shirts that James May (the Top Gear presenter) would wear - awful! In the end, I found some nice quality ones from a company called Vedoneire that was selling British-made jackets. It didn’t say where the shirts were made, but they were cheaper than John Lewis and they were good quality.

Why on earth you can’t buy a shirt made in Britain anywhere in Peterborough is beyond me. I wouldn’t mind paying a premium price for something that is good quality and that I could be sure hadn’t seen made by slave children in a despotic country on the other side of the world. Time was when gloves were made in Yeovil, knives in Sheffield, hats in Stockport and plates in Stoke-on-Trent. These days, even really well-known British brands like Barbour and Hunter make their goods overseas and they use all kinds of marketing tricks to convince you that you’re buying a home-made product. “Designed in Britain” is a favourite; Hackett pins British icons to its Vietnamese clothing with phrases like “The Boat Race Collection” or “Mayfair Range”. It’s children’s clothes are call “Little Britons” - it should add “made by little Chinese.”

We needed a new kettle because our old one was leaking and we’d also decided to buy a new toaster. Oddly enough, a toaster is one thing you can buy that’s high quality and is made in Britain and it’s also a brand that’s suddenly become hugely fashionable. Dualit toasters have been made since 1945 and they’re famous for being repairable, you can buy new elements if they burn out and all the other bits and pieces are so rugged that a Dualit toaster should last you a lifetime. The company is now cashing in on its iconic reputation for toasters by making every other kind of kitchen appliance, none of which say “made in Britain” because none of them are. Well, we bought a Dualit toaster and a matching Dualit kettle (which is very nice, where-ever it’s made).

While I was wandering around Beales moaning about Bangladeshi sweat shops, Margaret was wandering around the dresses section moaning about nothing fitting her. I said that her friend had offered to make her a dress and she should get that offer back on track, so when we got home I took the measurements (which was complicated, but which I think I have got right) and Margaret resolved to call her friend in the week.

As luck would have it, next day we bumped into the friend in Whittlesey and so Margaret was able to tell her what we’d done and promised to get the measurements to her in the week, arrange a trip to London to buy the fabric and get her first fitting sorted out. That is one dress that we know will be made in England!