It took me 2 hours 40 minutes to get from Paris to London last night. That’s about 311 miles.

It took me 2 hours 50 minutes to get from Chelmsford to London this morning. That’s about 35 miles.

Ipso facto, Paris sits well within the London commuter belt.

The Eiffel Tower

Apple seems to take the Paris show far more seriously than London. I remember last year how there were Apple people here prowling the smaller stands to see what people were talking about. This year they’re even patrolling the press room. Admittedly not closely enough to see what you’re writing, but it’s interesting to see them there.

Unrelated to that, I also got offered £100 cash to attend a briefing today, taking place next month. That has to be ethically questionable. Fortunately it’s not core to what we cover, so it’s quite justifiable to turn it down on the grounds of relevance, rather than pointing out to the would-be briber than cash offers can only bring impartiality into question.

Paris has turned quite chilly, and I’ve pulled out the jumper I almost didn’t pack. I walked up to the Butte past M Collignon’s grocery to look out across the city, and acted as interpreter between a couple of Americans and their waiter. They were grumbling about the quality of their food, even though she was only having onion soup with chips, perhaps for dipping.

They did thank me, but they were intensely irritating so I had to leave, and ended up riding the metro down to Trocadero to try and take some pictures of the tower for something Al is working on back in the office. Unfortunately the keyring sellers were so proficient at walking into the shot that I couldn’t get the kind of pictures I needed and the image above, while entirely unsuitable, is the best of the bunch.

September means Paris in this industry, so here I am again, testing my rather dodgy French on the native speakers. They seem to be largely understanding what I’m on about, which is encouraging.

I’m staying in the 8th, which turns out to be perfectly placed for just about everything. Easy to get down to the Expo, easy to find food, well-placed for a walk at the end of the day. Certainly better than Bastille, where we stayed two years ago, and wherever it was we were last year, when we had to change trains four times to get to the show.

That walk eventually took me as far as City Hall, St Michel and Cite, where they’ve finally finished cleaning the towers of Notre Dame after about five years in patchy scaffolding. It’s a brilliant light cream now, and was very much worth the effort.

Quince Jelly

The tomatoes really are coming on quicker than we can manage now. You can take off a dozen new fruits every day, and still have another dozen to do the next day. We’ve run out of things we can make with them.

So this weekend we’ve been picking and eating them, mainly in sandwiches, and turning our attention sweeter pleasures.

There’s a quince tree in the front garden, which has been ripe for picking for almost a month. Quince is a funny fruit. It’s not attractive, it grows itself around the branches of its tree, its sticky, and it doesn’t smell too good. You also don’t seem to be able to buy them in the shops, so you really do need to have your own bush, or know someone who has one to get your hands on some. All that aside, it does make a very sweet jelly that’s a wonderful pinky red in the jar.

Quince in the pan

We took a little over 2kg from the tree, washed and halved them, and then boiled them in three pints of water for an hour and a half. By then, they were mushy and soft, the pips had come out and the skins had rolled themselves off. We scooped them from the jam pan into a muslin pouch, stretched out over a tripod stand and left to drip out into a mixing bowl until the next morning.

That gave us about three pints of syrup – almost the same as the amount of water we put onto the fruit, and added a pound of jam sugar for each pint. Putting it back in the pan, we boiled it up until the sugar had all dissolved, then added the juice of a lemon and kept up the heat until it reached 105 degrees.

At that temperature it starts to set, so you syphon off half a spoonful and drop it onto a saucer. Two minutes later, when it’s had time to cool, you run your finger through it and, if it crinkles up with a skin, it’s ready to be put into jars. We got 10 half-pound (8oz) jars from it.

Our other makings were far easier, and much quicker. We bought a can of Ma Mada marmalade. It’s not actually marmalade, but bitter Seville oranges cut into pieces and marinaded in water and pectin to make it set.

Marmalade

To make things a bit more interesting, we finely chopped some fresh ginger and stirred this into the mix, along with three quarters of a pint of water and four pounds of sugar.

It very quickly starts to turn into what looks like marmalade. The sugar quickly dissolves, and you only need boil it for 15 minutes or so before doing the finger-through-jam-on-saucer trick above (although getting it to the boil takes a little longer).

From that single 94p can of fruit we got 12 jars of orange and ginger marmalade, or 8oz each. That should keep us going through the winter.

I’ve been to more than my fair share of launches over the last 12 years. Some lavish (first-class flights, a week in Japan, and dinner with a geisha); some not so (four journalists and two dozen product pushers at the London Dungeon – somewhere you don’t even want to head on a day out, never mind for work). There are few companies, though, who can put on a low-budget event in a nondescript location and have everyone – everyone – turn out to hear what they have to say.

At the moment I can think of only one. Apple.

Yesterday’s iPhone launch took place at the Apple Store on Regent Street. A shop. No being flown off somewhere exotic. It was as low-key as any Steve Jobs keynote, with just him and the CEO of O2 sitting on stools at the front of the room. No intro, either – Jobs just walked in, wearing his trademark black top and blue jeans, and started talking.

And no real news, either. That O2 had bagged the iPhone was the worst-kept secret in IT. All we really needed to know was the launch date and price, and we could have got that by email.

Yet everyone – everyone – was there. All the national newspapers. All the magazines and websites, no matter how tenuous their connection to all things Apple. Ranks and ranks of TV cameras, and even outside broadcast trucks so they could report back live to the studio that yes, as everyone knew, the iPhone is coming to the UK, and actually it’s not all that expensive.

There were even members of the general public outside the store (closed for the morning) pressing their cameras up to the windows to take pictures of us inside.

That Apple has achieved this is impressive and laudable, but I’d be surprised if anyone – even Apple itself – could really say why or how it’s happened. The company isn’t known for courting the press, and indeed it often seems that its interest is in maintaining a healthy distance than it is in keeping chummy.

For the moment, though, it makes it an exciting time to be working for a magazine whose main focus is that company’s products and customers, but the concern is whether Apple can maintain the momentum. Apple is undergoing a renaissance. These are its modern glory days, its second coming, but having seen the great players like Palm and Creative lose their one-time magnetic appeal, you have to wonder when – or if – the same thing will ever happen to Apple.

Under Jobs I doubt it will.

Ultimately, the Bourne Supremacy was a superior film.

There’s a great quote in the current edition of The Week, given by Doc Mtusi from the Zimbabwe Finance Ministry to Cape Times:

The unpatriotic hoarding of food gives the impression that we have a problem, which clearly we haven’t, except in the South African media’s mind. We do not call it starving, we call it fasting. Fasting is actually good for you. Lots of famous people have fasted for the benefit of their people. Gandhi, for instance. In our case, the people themselves will be encouraged to fast, thereby strengthening themselves against the onslaught of colonial imperialism. We have no objection in principle to people eating. Those of us in government all eat, but only because persons in our important positions have to. What we mst guard against is the belief that people have the right to break the law if they are hungry.

The Eden Project

It’s late at night on Sunday, so work tomorrow, after two weeks of complete Internet and email detox. I’ve just downloaded several hundred messages that have been sitting in my inbox for the last two weeks as I’ve been buzzing around the winding Cornish roads, then packing boxes to move house, baking beetroot cake, picking my first crop of carrots, tidying the plot, turning a 6kg harvest of yellow and red tomatoes into 24 jars of chutney that will be ready to eat by Christmas, planting travel bugs (which are already making their way around the country), uncovering geocaches and forgetting all about the normal week-in, week-out mundanities of life.

It’s been wonderful. Apologies to anyone whose email has just been downloaded and will be read over the next couple of days. Apologies to anyone who has visited the site in the last two weeks and been disappointed by the lack of updates. Apologies to anyone who receives a pot of home made chutney this Christmas.

The tiniest carrot ever

Everything we’ve grown and eaten from the garden has been nice so far, but I’ve doubted that in many cases they were better than what we could have bought from the shops. The strawberries (all 24 of them) were more strawberryish, and the smaller tomatoes have all been very intense. The broccoli was more green than anything we have seen in the shops, and the cultivated blackberries are fatter and jucier than anything you see growing wild.

This week, though, we pulled our first carrots, and they are, without doubt, the best carrots I have ever tasted. They are so sweet and juicy that I know if I’d eaten these as a child I’d never have hated them so much.

I can’t wait until we eat the rest of the run but, on the other hand, I want to eek them out so they last. Carrot dilemma.

(This post was back-dated)

What do you do with 6kg of tomatoes that need using sooner rather than later? Chutney, of course.

Unfortunately the onion crop hasn’t come to much, so we bought a dozen medium-sized bulbs, and sliced them and the tomatoes into a large jam pan, then set them to reduce at a medium heat.

Now we were led to believe that it would take about 40 minutes for them to reduce down, which seemed to be about right, so we took the estimate of a further 40 minutes to thicken after we’d added the sugar, salt, cayenne pepper and paprika on faith. That was a mistake.

Every hour or so we spooned a little out onto a plate to see how runny it was, and it was only after four hours of bubbling away that it was holding together. It tasted great, but it won’t be ready to eat for another month or three at the least, while it mellows and matures in the jars.

Potting it was fun in itself. We sterilised a couple of dozen 8oz jars in the oven, then filled them using a wide-mouthed metal funnel, slipped a circle of waxed paper on top of the fruity slop and then stretched wetted cellophane over the top, secured by a little rubber band. The lids will be screwed on tomorrow when it’s fully cooled.

So what went in? Well, 6kg of yellow and red tomatoes (and a single green one), 1kg of onions, 700g of sugar, a pint of vinegar, 50g of salt, 4tsp of paprika and half a teaspoon of cayenne pepper. We adapted it from The Foody.

(This post was back-dated)