Sunday, we went to Surrey, to look at planes being noisy. Ear-tearingly noisy, but at the same time very impressive. Lots of flying very close to each other, so their wings are almost clipping, and two women standing on the wings of twisty-twirly propellor planes to demonstrate a budget airline’s seating plans and emergency exits.

Thinking about it now, the last time I went to an airshow was in 2000. I remember, because we were in Jersey and it was the year of the Sydney Olympics with the impressive opening and closing ceremonies.

So on Saturday we camped out on rugs and foldable chairs and soaked up the unseasonably good sunshine, slapping on the factor 50 as our skins recoiled in shock at the unexpected weather. It wasn’t quite enough to dry out the ground, which had been churned through a week of setting up in the drizzle and rain, and so we all went home with muddy feet, but that didn’t dampen our spirits.

Monday (bank holiday), we buzzed up to Lowestoft for lunch, and then went out geocaching to drop off a travel bug we picked up in Chelmsford on Saturday. For the first time ever we got to a cache and found two other geocachers there, who came over to say hello and explained that they weren’t outsiders so we could safely hunt for the treasure without giving the game away.

We found it quite easily, but that didn’t stop them sitting there and watching, perhaps hoping we’d go wrong somewhere down the line. But as soon as we pulled it out and opened it up they hopped back on their bikes and rode off. Spoilsports.

So we dropped off the castanets we’d been meaning to leave in a cache since last November and picked up a talking book – Murder on the Penzance Express, which seemed highly appropriate as we’re heading down to Penzance next weekend.

We had been hoping to drop off a travel bug of our own, which we’d set the mission of heading around the UK following the coast and waterways, but ended up coming home with it because we couldn’t find a suitably tacky keyring to accompany it on its travels, so we’ll probably end up liberating it somewhere in Cornwall, and give it a new mission – to travel around the coast until it gets back to Lowestoft, then we can pick it up again closer to home.

We talked to some cows on the way back. They were such camera whores.

Two weeks. Unless I’ve been travelling, I think that’s about the longest it’s ever been since blog posts on here.

It’s been a frantic fortnight, though, with busy days at work, and every evening taken up either with writing or sorting out the house.

Things are moving along nicely there now. The bathroom is finished (bar the floor), the kitchen is almost done, and the out-house is full of cabinets for the second kitchen, which still need fitting. After that, the kitchen and bathroom floors need doing and the loft needs boarding, and then it’s pretty much done.

It’s taken six months, and there are still some little extras that need doing, like installing water buts, moving a fence and building a shed, but there all outdoorsy and can wait.

The garden is going great guns, and so far we’ve had about £55 of veg from it. The broccoli is far greener and more vivid than anything you see in the shops – even when you’ve cooked it, which is good, as it’s also quite a haven for caterpillars, and often you don’t see them until you’ve already cooked it, got it on your plate and speared it with a fork, no matter how carefully you clean them.

But we’re still having fun. Yesterday we headed out to Highwood to see the deer, and although we didn’t catch a large deer like the first time I went and found myself surrounded by 40 or more, we did manage to get pictures of a monther and father pair with a youngster leaping through the crops.

And today we’re heading off to Dunsfold for Wings and Wheels, which will no doubt be another photo opp. Tomorrow – who knows. We’re planning on Lowestoft and may end up at the power boat racing, so I can see this weekend being a good one for stretching the camera’s legs.

Rich flies

I haven’t done it in years, but today we went to the beach and flew a kite. Just a little kite in yellow and orange with fluttery green tail strings; it looked quite weedy beside the huge black and grey canopies being held aloft further along the pebbly shore.

Neither of us having done it for 25 years, it took some working out how we should loop the string, and for a while it didn’t fly at all, but tied itself in knots and balled up in the face of the wind. But some trimming and cutting, rearranging and re-tying sorted it out, and soon the terminally catchy kite-flying song from Mary Poppins was stuck in my head and we were up there with the best of them, fluttering noisily in the North Sea breeze.

Once you get it up there, of course, you can’t do a whole lot with a cheap and cheerful kite. It didn’t do stunts, and it had just one string, but it still felt somewhat bizarre and a little bit special to be in control of something so far away, and so high above you.

I think we might fly kites again.

The first batch of tomatoes

Today was an exciting one, as the first batch of tomatoes was finally ready for picking. It’s a lovely thing to do, as the vines smell so good when you snip them, and of course you get the bonus of a colourful bowl of fruit, too.

In terms of the whole crop, I didn’t take much – just 335g of the yellow Golden Sunrise, and 200g of the Gardeners’ Delight cherry tomatoes – as the other are not yet quite ripe, but that was still a bowl of 30 or so by the time I was done, and the taste is extraordinary.

They are so tomatoey they almost turn your mouth inside out, and it catches in your throat, all of which is far nicer than it sounds. If the rest of the crop is this good, it’s going to be difficult going back to shop-bought ones in the autumn and winter.

Was it worth it, financially? Absolutely. Organic cherry tomatoes on the vine at Sainsbury’s are presently £7.96 per kilo, so just this first 200g, worth £1.59, has paid for the entire crop of 500 or so tomatoes already, without the others having yet been picked (or even, in most cases, ripened).

The closest equivalents to the yellow tomatoes I could find were yellow cherry tomatoes at Ocado, which are £7.16 per kilo (although currently unavailable). That would make today’s 355g haul of yellows worth £2.54.

So, in total, today’s snipping of the vines was worth £4.13, which is a very good start to the crop indeed.

I’m having some problems with nibbling nasties on the plot. Something is eating my lettuces, and it certainly isn’t me.

Here’s what most of them look like:

And here’s what one once-fine specimen now looks like:

That was taken a couple of days ago, and now the tiny remnants of that plant have totally disappeared. And yet whatever is eating them is impossible to see. I’m putting down slug pellets, and the plot seems to be slug and snail free, so they’re obviously doing their job.

I’ve seen one single caterpillar, but that was at the other end of the garden so I don’t think it was the culprit, and although the sun brings out a confetti shower of pretty white butterflies they spend their whole time excitedly fluttering around the broccoli and sprouts, and don’t seem even to have noticed the lettuces.

They’re going crazy for the sprout leaves, but seem to be leaving alone the heads of broccoli, which are now coming on faster than we can eat them, much like the beans did.

So I’m left scratching my head. Unless one of the neighbourhood cats has turned vegetarian and is sneaking in at night to nibble my greens, I can’t see or work out what is munching the lettuce.

If I can’t find and stop them, there will be nothing to eat with the tomatoes, the first harvest of which is scheduled for Friday.

A Year in the Merde was one of the funniest ‘Englishman abroad’ books for years. It started as a word-of-mouth self publishing project in Paris, that eventually found a publisher and then went word of mouth through the UK two or so years ago. I must know four people who have read it, which for anything other than Harry Potter is pretty good going.

So it was predictable that there should be a follow-up. Merde Actually it is.

The title is a pun (apparently) on Love Actually, the film, as it’s all about the fictional Paul West’s attempts to find love while opening his English tea room in a Parisian suburb. It’s an obscure link. Nonetheless, things start out well. His tales of courgette and fruit picking in the south, bad French driving and overbearing mothers in law are laugh out loud, but as he leaves the south and returns to Paris, things start to go awry. And not only in his fictional life.

It seems that Paris sucks all of the comedy out of the piece. The prose remains flowing, but the scenarios are plodding and dull, and although there are asides aplenty that do just enough to keep you wondering what might be coming up next, they are rarely delivered upon, and soon your interest in the central character is gone. For a book written in the first person, that’s a fairly serious problem.

I plodded to the end of it. My 20-page-a-day habit slowly declined to 10 and then five as it became little more than a time-filler while waiting for tubes, and by the last page I wasn’t sad to be putting it down for the last time.

Paul West should have been a one-book character, and Stephen Clark, his creator, should have turned his attentions to a new project rather than a follow-up or, if the money was too good to turn down, at least left his character out in the countryside where he was funnier and more endearing.

But then Mayle’s already done that one.

I’d give it two out of five, and that’s for the first third of the book. If it had been like the second half the whole way through it’s unlikely I’d have read it at all.

Freshly-pulled beetroot

Another two first-time harvests this weekend, after five and a bit hours of shovelling five tons of shingle from the front drive to the very back of the garden.

First was broccoli on Friday night. You cut it off as individual florets, rather than taking off the whole head in one go as they do for the supermarkets. That way you encourage further growth down the stem. Only trouble was, we didn’t have any short knives to hand as I still haven’t unpacked everything yet (having not moved in). So, we had to take to it with the bread knife, which while effective, wasn’t as accurate as it could have been.

Anyhow, all-told it yielded 200 grams of edible florets, which we had for dinner with some more of the home-grown potatoes. Value? Not enormous. Sainsbury’s sells 300g of broccoli for 99p, so it was 66p all told, proving once again that home growing is more about enjoying what you’re doing and knowing where your food comes from than it is about money saving.

The beetroot, on the other hand, was far more profitable. We pulled four roots, each about the size of a tennis ball, and twisted off the leaves (you don’t cut them, or else they bleed). These totalled 600 grams, which with Ocado selling organic beetroot at £3.38 per kilo, roughly works out at £2.03. Already that’s more than the whole crop cost to grow, as we got 51 seedlings for £1.99, and around 30 of them were strong enough to make it into the patch.

They were delicious. We boiled them for just under two and a half hours, and then peeled off their skins and ate them while they were still luke warm.

I do need to find out how to make beetroot cake before the whole crop is pulled, though, as I promised Rich I’d make some. I’m also rather keen to try making borscht…

Our broccoli in the steamer

Squash saplings

We’re starting to run low on beans. We took another 580 grams from the runners and 225 grams from the French on Wednesday, and while there are a few slim pickings left on the runners, the French are pretty well exhausted.

I think that’s down to growing them in pots rather than the ground, as the beans growing in the allotments I cycle past each morning are still in full flower and don’t look like they’ve even started cropping yet.

So it’s good to see that their replacements – the dwarf French beans we planted a couple of weeks ago – are making sure and steady progress. As with the first batch of beans, they took a few days to appear, but now that they have they’re streaking ahead, with three poking out of large pots, and two coming up out of the plot, where they’ll have plenty of room to stretch their roots. There are four others in the plot that have yet to appear.

Meanwhile, my concerns about the sproutability of the expensive squash seeds were unfounded, as all 12 of the dozen we planted are now up and out of the compost, sporting two strong leaves. I’m wondering, now, where I’m going to put them when it comes time to plant them on. Hopefully by then my lettuces will be ready for pulling, but I’d more or less earmarked their spot for the cabbages that are coming on nicely in the greenhouse. They’re looking a bit leggy at the moment, so I’m thinking they really do need to be moved sooner rather than later.

Dwarf French Beans

Senate House, from he BT Tower

Today was a strange one. I’ve been invited to three Christmas ‘do’s in the last couple of weeks, but BT trumped them all but holding its one at the top of the BT Tower.

I’ve been up before (see here for a description of the inside of the tower from my last visit), but as it’s not open to the general public, the chance of a repeat visit isn’t something you turn down. Plus it’s so close to the office that if it ever fell down the top of it would land on my desk.

So I wandered down around lunchtime and rode London’s fastest lifts to the 34th floor (1400 feet per minute, with sounds to match) where everything had been coated in fake snow, Christmas carols were tinkling gently, and a dozen serving types were wandering around with mince pies and turkey. All quite surreal with the sun shining brightly on London almost 600ft below.

Anyhow, Will and I duly walked a complete circuit around the tower’s top floor, asking the necessary questions and scribbling notes, and then gave in to the fantastic views through the windows. It really does give you the best possible view of London – far better than you get from the top of the London Eye.

Regent’s Park looks beautiful, and it’s clearly so close to Hyde Park that you have to ask yourself why you never realised just how green London is. In the opposite direction is the city, and beyond it Docklands, and it’s clear how all of London’s tallest buildings have been corralled in the east, in much the same way that the Parisians have put all of their tallest buildings to the furthest west of the city in La Defense. The only exception is the sore-thumb Montparnasse Tower, which clearly sprung up rampant bramble-like when they weren’t looking.

Dotted here and there on all sides are the arch over the new Wembley Stadium, the revamped Eurostar terminal at St Pancras, the British Museum and Senate House, Battersea Power Station, the Houses of Parliament and a healthy cluster of masts, towers and television antennae.

Sadly they don’t give you a certificate to prove you’ve been up there any longer, or the chocolate BT Tower they gave us last time I went up (although from memory that was quite nasty, so it’s perhaps not a bad thing), but it is still the best thing you could ever hope to do in London.

Although most people can’t do it at all.

Centre Point and the London Eye

Regent’s Park and Primrose Hill