Mussels and Scones: a Cornish spring

...so I got distracted.  Sometime I might tell you about him.  I have actually been writing a blog post, but it's very long, currently imageless, and about my confusion over Ireland and Irish history.  I'll finish it at some point and post it for everyone to skip.  In the mean time, spring leapt up and came crashing into consciousness.  Easter. Sunshine. BOOM.  Amazing.  I went to Cornwall for a week to walk the dogs and eat yellow food (Simnel cake and ice cream lemon meringue pie) and watch Jeeves and Wooster and get drenched to the skin without freezing and paddle in the sea to the perturbation of the canines and commune with the llamas and get adored and attacked by turns by the cats and have all my family around for approximately four hours and eat too much chocolate and generally get excited about the turning of the English seasons.  It was great.

Something I've been meaning to do for ages has been to pick mussels off the beach and cook them myself.  The Cornish coast is ideal for this - it's a rocky shore, but there are are some quite deep beaches which means that there are rocks exposed only for half an hour or so at low tide and also the water is relatively warm.  I think it's those two things which lead to the wild mussels down there being nearly as big as the farmed ones which are under water all the time.  I didn't pick anything that was much smaller than my thumb, and that was easy to do.

There are a couple of beaches I've had my eyes on for a year or two actually, to pick mussels from, but circumstances like the tide, the weather and not having a bag with me have hindered me a bit.  This time, however, I finally got around to it on Holywell beach.  The dogs were bemused as to why we were spending 20 minutes standing around by some rocks when there were a whole load of interesting bits of seaweed on the tideline, not to mention bunnies in the dunes.  Rocky noticed me pulling things off the rocks.  I think he thought that they must be like blackberries, which he loves and picks for himself whenever he can.  He tried to pull off a few for himself but decided that they were better to roll in than to eat.  Kiri used to eat barnacles off rocks, it's true, but never managed mussels...

Mussels are easy to cook.  There are schools of thought about whether you need to soak them in salted water with flour or oatmeal overnight before you eat them or not.  I did soak them, more because I didn't want to eat them until the next day than anything else, and they were pretty grit free so I have nothing much to add to the lore on that.  I ended up with a mixing bowl full of molluscs - I guess something in the region of 6 or 7 pints or two ish kilos, but that's just a guess.  Enough to make a good sized starter for five, anyway.  The only time consuming part of the whole process is cleaning them.  You have to go through the bowl and pull of the 'beards' or 'byssus' by which they attach themselves to the rock and scrape off the barnacles (which introduce grit,), and throw away any that don't close when tapped.  I guess that took me 40 minutes or so.

I then chopped about 8 shallots and a couple of cloves of garlic and softened them in olive oil.  I added a wine glass full of white wine, a bay leaf, some black pepper and the clean mussels.  I clapped the lid on and left it for five minutes, by which point all the shells had opened.  I transferred the mussels into hot bowls and stirred some double cream (optional) and a large handful of chopped parsley into the juices.  After heating through, I poured this over each portion of shellfish and served the lot with hot french bread.  It's possibly my favourite dish to eat ever.

My next ambition with mussels is to cook them actually ON the beach - picking them and then barbecuing them until they open, and then dipping the meat into garlic and parsley butter.  Heaven.  My next wild caught shellfish plan revolves around trying to catch some crayfish in the old mill stream that runs across my parents' garden...

I had an American in Cornwall.  I needed to illustrate what a cream tea is, which meant I made scones to serve with strawberry jam and clotted cream.

I firmly believe that there is little point in scones beyond vast quantities of strawberry jam and clotted cream.  If you can't get good versions of both, don't bother.  Handily, the West Country is brilliant at both.  The scone recipe I used came out of the 'The Dairy Cookbook', which is older than I am and only still has covers because the bookcase holds all the parts of it together.

It has recipes for all the old fashioned things (provided they contain dairy) that one actually needs now and again and which new books rarely contain.  I think you can probably read the recipe in the (rather dark, sorry) photograph, but I edit it very slightly:

350g self-raising flour (or plain flour with 2.5 tsp of baking powder)
1 tsp salt
2 tsp baking powder
2 tbsp caster sugar, plus extra for sprinkling
75g butter
175 ml milk, plus extra as needed and for brushing

Jam and (clotted) cream to serve

Preheat the oven to 230°C, with two or three large baking sheet inside.  Sift together the flour, sugar, salt and baking powder several times to ensure they are well combined.  Rub in the butter until the mixture looks like fine breadcrumbs, and then add the milk a little at a time until a smooth dough is achieved.  Knead lightly (scones are in theory better the less you handle the dough) until smooth, adding more milk if required.

Roll out the dough to around 1.5 cm thick and cut rounds about 5 centimetres across.  Brush each with a little milk and sprinkle lightly with sugar to give a crunchy sweet top to each scone.  Transfer them to the hot baking sheets and bake for 10-12 minutes until well browned.  Cool on racks and eat while still warm, with jam and cream.

Cooking for Christmas

I've been in Cornwall for the last ten days, walking and playing with the large number of pets my family possess. Sometimes, this involved danger:

This photo was taken as Tolly was exploding out of his box towards me. I have plenty of scratches, but he had a whale of a time. He LOVES boxes. You only need to point one out to him and he's straight inside, and he'll stay there for AGES. If you torment and tease him, usually all that happens is that he pokes a paw out. He'll rarely be driven to move.

I also reaffirmed my status with my dogs - taking Rocky to beaches makes him one happy spaniel*:

And Cornwall can be breathtaking. Liz was staying with me for the first few days, so I had an excuse to walk the whole way around the Roseland peninsula...

...AND Sennen Cove, right down by Land's End. I think this is the Longships Lighthouse, flung out beyond the end of the peninsula...next stop America, kind of thing:

After Liz went, I had been planning some Get My Life In Order time. That didn't really happen. Cornwall always does this. It's so far removed from all the things I have to think about and plan and organise and sort that planning to get Life Admin stuff when I'm there is a bit hopeless. I was going to write Lists and personal diary entries and book plane tickets and things. In fact, I didn't. I walked the dogs some more and read some trashy novels. I got a break. Sadly, this didn't make anything magically get done before I got back to something approaching the real world here in St Albans.

My mum asked me to do some of the Christmas cooking. I think she thought she was asking me a favour. I love doing this kind of thing, and I had the most marvellous excuse for it. She has some ancient Christmas recipe books, and getting them out is a talisman all by itself. This one has notes in it dated 1984, the year I was born. She was making things from it with a month-old baby in a cradle somewhere. I love the eternity of Christmas. It's reassuring in its regularity and reliability. The traditions are a comforting thing to have nestled in the winter, and it's an excuse for fantastic music which never hurts.  I never do this cooking, my mum does.  Sometimes I've made mincemeat when I know I won't be home for long, but never the things that are so much for the day itself.

Mincemeat is actually a very simple thing. Delia has a peculiar recipe that involves cooking it, which from all reports I've heard doesn't work at all. This one, above, works perfectly. I've actually got a jar of the batch I made last year still left - it'll almost certainly be none the worse for an extra twelve months' maturation, and I'll make a batch of mince pies sometime after Advent actually starts. For the record, mid-November is NOT the time for mince pies.  It's such an ancient thing, dating from the fifteenth century.  It's doesn't involve meat in the same way that it did then, unless you don't use vegetarian suet and the recipe has changed in other ways too, but it's still identifiable.  It's good to feel rooted to something.

I made a Delia Christmas Cake, skipping out glacé pineapple because I don't like it.  That's one of the reasons I love this cooking...  I made Christmas puddings, and hovered around them for the six hours they steamed for.  My hands were sticky with chopping cherries and candied peel.  The kitchen smelled of Calvados.  I even remembered to make a wish while I stirred the pudding mixture.

And so the wheel turns and we carry on...

Even if I wish it would do that more slowly, sometimes. 

*Even if he IS out of focus. We were in a cave - it was raining. It didn't hinder the small dog's enjoyment of sand.

Deep South

I'm in Cornwall, in the middle of nowhere again. The weather's not that pleasant, but it's nice to be here. LOVELY to have my pets around too...the kitten has grown even more - proper sausage cat now. Cleo his mother appears to be becoming more relaxed all the time, though she's still hissing and spitting at the dogs. Rocky is friendly and beautiful as always, though he's beginning to show signs that he's not the baby dog any more - big shame, he was a fantastic puppy. The new Labrador (Cassie) is beautiful and such a sweet little creature. She's quite shy, but full of love once she gets over that. Full of beans, too. Kiri always was, but I'd forgotten what it was like to have what amounts to a puppy around. There's still the possibility she might have puppies - she escaped with the Jack Russell from up the road on several occasions while in season. I think we're all hoping she might be pregnant...would be SO much fun. Won't know for a few weeks yet.

The blackberries are all ripening, but if the weather continues this wet they'll rot on the branches. I took the dogs walking on Polly Joke and the dunes behind it earlier, and dawdled along eating them. Cassie loves them, too - she was picking them herself! Apparently she's already eaten all of the ones in the garden. I'd like to get out and pick some, but they aren't quite ready down here and I suspect they'll just rot on the branches in Cambridge even if I COULD find time to go out for them in the next couple of weeks.

I've been prepping for my big barbecue tomorrow all day today. I've made The Best Brownies Ever (something arrived at with much taste testing and long suffering work colleagues...), two heat levels of a new caramelised onion tomato relish I'm experimenting with, the rosemary cracker bread from the Smitten Kitchen blog (I have a growing obsession with food blogs...) AND I made mushroom risotto for tea. I'm going to post the risotto recipe, because it the only one that's mostly mine that I've had a chance to taste yet! I love risotto. Simple to make. Comforting to eat. Endlessly variable. Contains rice. I like rice. My recipe has a few nods towards authenticity, but I wouldn't want to serve it to an Italian. They will know better. It's just a nice thing to eat on a weekday evening.

For 3

250g Arborio/Carnaroli risotto rice
Half a cup of dried mushrooms (porcini would be great)
1 glass of white wine
One large red onion, finely diced.
2 sticks celery, finely diced
Butter and olive oil, for frying.
500g dark gilled mushrooms - the better the mushrooms, the better the dish - chopped
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
Good vegetable stock - homemade, or a good brand. You can use hot water if required, it would be better than cheap stock, which mostly seems to taste of salt in my experience. If you're less finicky about where your meat comes from than I am, good chicken stock would also work. Make sure it's hot - keep it in a pan on the side, or only mix what you need for each addition with water from the kettle.
Black pepper - you shouldn't need salt because of the cheese
A good handful of grated parmesan. About 2 cubic inches of a block, at a rough guess.

Soak the dried mushrooms in enough boiling water to cover before you start all of your chopping. Gently fry the onion and celery in olive oil until soft but not coloured - this will take a full 10 minutes, so you can chop the mushrooms while it cooks. When the veg is soft, add the a dessertspoonful of butter and allow it to melt, then add the rice and stir to coat. Fry for a few minutes until all the grains are well coated and the pan has heated up again. Add the wine and stir until the rice has sucked it up. Remove the dried mushrooms from the water and squeeze them out. Add the mushroom water to the pan and stir again until the rice has taken it up. Start adding the stock around a ladleful at a time, stirring between additions and only adding the next ladleful when the previous one has been taken up. The stirring massages the starch out of the rice, giving you a creamy sauce. Meanwhile, fry the mushrooms in another dessertspoonful of butter and a slug of oil (oil for heat; butter for flavour!). Allow their juices to run out and then evaporate off, concentrating the flavour. When the dark liquid in the frying pan has more or less gone, sprinkle in the garlic, stir, and turn the heat off. Keep adding stock to the rice until it's around 3 times the volume it was when you started - taste a grain of rice. It should be al dente, with a tiny bit of crunch to the middle. If it's too hard, add more stock and keep on cooking... When you reckon it's done, add about two thirds of the grated parmesan and stir. The sauce that looked a bit watery will magically become silky and slightly gelatinous. Add some good grinds of black pepper. Chop up the now reconstituted dried mushrooms from earlier and stir them in. Stir through the fresh garlic mushrooms and warm through. Serve on warm plates, with more parmesan and black pepper to throw over, the rest of the bottle of wine and a green salad on the side. Ace.

So it's been a while...

I've been busy...sorry. Not sure doing what exactly. Stuff. Turning the garden into a garden. Looking after the fish and the rats. Going to Cornwall. Seeing the last of my beautiful beautiful Kiri dog, who died suddenly last week, aged only 9. That kind of thing.

Job's going quite well, actually. Been in Southend today for a meeting, which was really good fun. I'm just debating whether or not working in an industry I'm quite interested in with people who are lovely makes up for the fact that it's really not very well paid. The arts are great and everything, but the things I enjoy about this job are nothing to do with the arts - they're the data analysis and the solving problems for people. So I don't know. I'm certainly going to stay here for a year or two, because less than that would be silly, but I'm really not convinced I'll be staying. Who knows.

I'm off to Ireland in a couple of weeks with Elaine and Carl and Christian and some other friends of mine and Carl's...looking forward to it. Might head down to Cornwall for the Bank Holiday at the end of May, but that just depends.

I'm also rediscovering how much I adore crime dramas. Especially the old ones where the slightly crooked but good hearted copper beats crime to the annoyance of authority. So excuse me, I have Frost to watch.

Cornwall is far.

Llamas are awesome, kitten vicious but gorgeous, cat vicious and nervous but coming round, little dog wonderful, big dog poorly, family all alive, accidents on the A303 irritating. Going to bed in a sulk. Possibly with sitcoms. Maybe I'll update sometime soon. Probably good for me.

Cats.

This is probably Graham's fault. The one of Cleo's less good, but I quite like the shapes. Too dark and too far away.

Steve Fossett

steve fosset 2
Originally uploaded by hazelsheard

Just a quick note to tell you about Steve though. This was a rather lost racing pigeon we adopted for a while at the theatre - it was there every day, and had to be picked up and removed from sheds and control boxes on a regular basis. We dubbed it, rather tastelessly, Steve Fossett. It particularly liked sitting on the sound desk, under the cover, where it would reset all the levels. Silly creature. It did eventually leave, though we hope not inside a fox.

I need a new top post.

minack 2
Originally uploaded by hazelsheard

Besides, I need to talk about Minack. I don't think I ever explained what I was going to be doing with myself this week - maybe I did, but it must have been a while ago. The Minack, as you can see from the picture, is an outdoor theatre perched on the cliffs on the South Cornish coast, between Penzance and Land's End. It's a funny venue in many ways in that the scenery is so spectacular that whatever you put on the stage is more or less dwarfed by it. Design is difficult because the setting intrudes itself onto your piece - in an ordinary theatre, you have a black box which is effectively a blank canvas for whatever you choose to do with it. Here, that's just not the case. They get a lot of Shakespeare, because it's the sort of space that can lend itself very well to that sort of show. G&S, like we were doing, fits equally well. I'm not sure that anything postmodern would have much in the way of success - it would need one hell of a designer to make it work.

This time around, for a change, I was being a sound minion. Was good fun, actually, though it rapidly became clear that I'd picked the most labour intensive of positions for this show. Obviously, because it's outside, we have to bring in our equipment every day. It's also open to tourists in the daytime, so we can't leave things like microphones out because they'll get nicked. This meant that we had about 45 minutes moderate to heavy lifting every day, before we moved onto the lighter but more time consuming task of changing all the radio mic batteries and testing transmitters, receivers and capsules. The latter was quite fun actually - as the single singing noise person (Tamsin and I vetoed the term 'noise boys'. Half of us were girls.) I got to sing into the mics from the desk, confusing tourists who heard me coming out of the band speaker and couldn't work out where I was, or standing on the stage belting. It's REALLY hard to pick something to sing when someone just says 'sing something'. Quite entertaining though. Salvador accused me of never singing anything that's not in a minor key. I realised that I don't really KNOW anything not in a minor key. To cap it all, the Minack opens the house TWO AND A HALF HOURS before the show starts, because a lot of people bring picnics and watch the sun on the sea before the show starts. This means that for a show that starts at 8, the house opens at 6:30. In order to get our prep done in time for a soundcheck, our call was 3pm. For the matinees (2.30pm), our call was 9am. This was a little painful, since on matinee days we got in at 9 and left at around 11, since we had to do a get out every day as well. Madness.

Having moaned a lot so far, it was actually awesome. My back won't recover from its unaccustomed heavy lifting for a while, but it was still awesome. I now have a reasonable idea of how sound works and how you achieve what you're trying to achieve. I'd like to do some more minioning, but I'm not sure when I'll next get the chance - unlikely in St Albans, anyway. If I don't use what I've learnt this week I'll forget it, which will be annoying.

The show itself was pretty good, even given it was G&S - really well sung from both principals and chorus. The violins (viledins) were a little ropey, but the rest of the orchestra was damn good, too. Full and appreciative houses is always a nice touch. No major disasters from anyone's point of view, I think. There were a few quibbles about direction before show week, but when aren't there. It was a first class cast and they pulled it off.

It was a great group of people in general, actually. It was nice to get to know a crowd of the techies I didn't really know before, and to catch up with the ones I've not seen for ages. This year saw a lot of entertaining breakdowns, like the one that involved the towing of Pete's car from Bodmin and the Breaking of the Tow Rope. The Mills van that had been towing Pete's car also suffered, on the switchback bend near the theatre. Nice. Dominic's car also went. I suppose you could even count the petrol/diesel debacle and the Clio's bustness that affected MY car situation, too. Christian managed to run his battery down by running his laptop off it for too long, and ended up stranded in a field until he got hold of some jump leads and a handy person to give him a boost. We laughed though...

Anyway. I drove back up on Sunday in convoy with Christian, so we could share the Tamsin and it could keep us awake. We'd checked into a youth hostel after the get out in the hope of getting enough sleep to cope, but it was still a bit touch and go. That drive has to be one of my less favourite driving experiences. Since I got back, I've mainly been sleeping - a very necessary activity. I have boiled three pans of gravel to fill the big aqarium I'm transferring Azrael and Boris to and bought a new filter for that. I've asked my brother if his boss could give me a job and sent them a CV. I've just sent the brother the CV to print off at work, since I haven't got space to set up my printer until he moves out, and anyway it's in the roof. This will mean I can take that around the agencies this afternoon. I've decided I need to buy that mac pretty damn soon because my external hard-drive has started playing silly buggers and I want to get stuff off it asap. I need a tame student for that, though. I will see if I can mail order it via Andy later in the week, I think.

Long list of stuff. I'll stop procrastinating about the spec letters to random people in random theatres of the 'give me a job please' type. Has anyone got a copy of yesterday's Guardian?

Busyness, sort of.

Well. Much chaos. Excuse the messy desk - it's tidier now, but Tolly was trying to help me type. Cleo had her op, which went fine, though she's less than impressed at having to wear a lampshade and take pills. Tolly's been the funny one though; he's been absolutely all over us, demanding attention and playing and all sorts. I think he's been quite lonely, especially to begin with when Cleo would only hiss at him any time he came near her. He's been chasing down newspaper and flies and all sorts of things, not to mention my leg and my fingers. The one I like best is below (though they're all much of a muchness), but there are more here, here, here and here. He's a silly kitten. Sorry about the messy room - I was busy tidying at the time, and Tolly was assisting, by deconstructing the newspaper.



We went to see the LLAMAS on Friday night! They're SO COOL. The two we're probably getting are called Pepper and Brandy - Pepper's dark brown, and Brandy's a mix of ginger and cream with a skewbald face. They're boys, and will be somewhere over 18 months old when we get them. That won't be til Autumn/Spring, because we need to fence the place properly and build them a shed and the like. YAY LLAMAS. We'll need to do a fair amount of handling of them, and train them to take a head collar properly so we can walk them in the woods. LLAMA WALKS. YAY!!!!

I've been staying at the Village Hall in Paul with the Pinafore cast for the last couple of nights. I went with them to the Meadery in Penzance on Friday night, post llamas. (People have been asking me about whether I was REALLY late because I was at a llama farm. I could say yes. How cool is THAT??) This was a very silly evening all round - films again here and here. This was not the half of the debauchery that went on. Very entertaining.

I spent Saturday making Becky Thomas a birthday cake, of which I'm actually quite proud - large and pink and filled with strawberries and butter-cream. Excessively sickly and very pink, but that was the specification. I sang with them in church in Paul this morning, too. Nothing MASSIVELY exciting - Stainer's I Saw The Lord - but it was really nice to be singing with a big group of big voices. I didn't stick out! Yay! And so many men, and I didn't have to sing tenor, though I did sing second alto, which is actually pretty similar, because there were more sops than altos. Nice. I'm heading back with them tomorrow to see Twelfth Night at the Minack, and then to deliver timps on Tuesday, and then to see the talent night and cook ANOTHER cake on Wednesday. Lots of drifting about Cornish roads. I'm beginning to think I should just stay there all this week, but it seems a bit harsh on my family and I do want to see my animals.

Erk. I'm SO tired, despite all I've done today was the service this morning and lying on a beach reading all afternoon...

True Cornish.

Hemmick sunglasses
Originally uploaded by hazelsheard

True Cornish lazing, that is. I went walking with my dad on bank holiday Monday, with the dogs, while my mum went diving from Hemmick beach. This picture is taken from somewhere along the South Coast Path above Hemmick beach, through my sunglasses. The sun wasn't low enough to take it without, even at the fastest shutter speed. It's an odd effect - when I look through the glasses, the colour doesn't all leach out like this. If anything, the glasses intensify it. The sepia's quite pretty, but I could have done that with a filter on the camera itself, I think. Also note the awesome spider web we found. They put ponies out to graze the cliffs at quite a lot of places round the cliffs, but this was the first time I've actually seen them.

Cornwall's not a happy place to be on a sunny bank holiday though - everywhere was rammed. Hemmick is down a very steep hill and on a road where the wing mirrors of an average car touch on BOTH sides. When people park in all the passing places and you have to reverse straight up a very steep hill and the road is that narrow, it's an issue. People are dumb.

I went to see the Minack crowd yesterday. I pootled around watching them rehearse for a bit, and then took Salvador to Tescos. I ended up staying for dinner and catching up with people, and then in the pub playing silly card games. Hopefully this time I'll remember the rules of mafia - I really should, it's awesome. Had a great evening all round, even if I did feel a bit spare part-y. I'm going down again tomorrow, on commission from Becky Thomas to bring her ingredients for a birthday cake.

I finally got the eye test today I've been needing to get for ages. I'm entirely unsurprised to be given a prescription for glasses for driving - short-sightedness is usefully hereditary. Grr. Ah well. TV and driving only, as yet, so could be worse. My right eye still feels weird, I think from the glaucoma test where they puff air at you. Anyway. I'm stupendously poor at the moment, so had to talk nicely to my dad to get him to pay for them. Meh. I have to work harder at getting a job...I just can't bear to. I have sent a few emails to a few people about work experience/placement type things, but I've not really looked very hard and I haven't sent the begging letters I need to. I'll try and get a Stage when I'm in town tomorrow, though I'm not sure where to look. I do know that the other person who went for the Donmar job didn't get it either...which I'm not exactly pleased about because it was an equally perfect job for her as it was for me and I would have been pleased for her if a little jealous, but it did make me feel slightly less inadequate. Meh.

Took the cats to the vet today - Cleo has a lump on her stomach which the vet pronounced to be a massive umbilical hernia and which needs almost immediate operation. She's apparently extremely lucky that it's not caused her any problems as yet, especially considering she's been living wild. The kitten has a gender...definitely male, as I was fairly sure. The family seem to have accepted my naming of him as 'Tolly', short for Ptolemy, which goes nicely with Cleo. And Tolly is a perfect slightly silly name for a truly bananas cat. I'm sure he's getting bigger already, and we've only had him since Friday. He was completely unfazed by the vet - he was contentedly playing catch with my fingers through the bars of the box when his mother was being examined, and wanted desperately to explore when it was his turn. He did squeak very indignantly when she stuck a needle in him though, but who wouldn't?

I think Cleo will hate us again tomorrow when she has to go back to have her operation; hopefully it'll blow over soon enough. It's hard to reconstruct her history. She plainly understands and is comfortable around humans, because if you catch her in the right mood she'll play and sit on your lap and generally be very friendly. At the same time, you couldn't look after that cat as a pet and love her as she appears to have been loved without doing something about that great lump on her tummy that's been there since she was a kitten...can you? And surely people in this country and in this day and age don't just put a cared-for pet out to starve if they can't afford or don't want to be bothered with doing anything about it? I think when she finally calms down, she'll be a truly lovely animal, which makes it even harder to understand how anyone could do anything like that to her.

Anyway. I need to sleep. Meh.

Snuffles...

I'm in Cornwall now, having driven down from Cambridge yesterday. The drive was actually fine, in that the traffic wasn't too bad and neither was the weather, but I was pretty dead by the time I got here. This cold is turning out to be a pretty nasty one, though I suspect that anyone other than me who hasn't been running around so much or sitting in any damp caves in wet clothes would probably not find it so icky. Davina and her boyfriend Neill (Davina's an English student who sings in choirs and does theatre...we have connections) stayed last night before heading down to Minack today to see the Philip Pullman plays, which was nice. Davina played the piano for a couple of songs for me for a bit, which was awesome - I don't get the chance to have them accompanied that often. We then moved over to the CD player and sang along to Handel's Messiah...I like THIS sort of karaoke...stuff just has to be at least 70 years old, and then I'm in with a fighting chance.

The dogs have been all over me since I got back, which is always lovely...I miss them SO much when I'm not here. Rocky especially won't leave me alone - he nearly slept on me yesterday. Quite hard sleeping when you have what feels like half a ton of very solid spaniel on your feet. Kiri's a bit more sedate most of the time, but even she's really affectionate when you just come home. She's trying to make us believe she's getting on for an old lady, which she entirely isn't, she's all of 8 and a border collie. YAY dogs.

Today's excitement, though, was new cats! We went to the Cats Protection shelter and had a look at what they had, but nothing really fitted exactly what we wanted. They did, though, have on their waiting list a mother and her kitten. The mother had been a pregnant stray, and the rest of the kittens had already gone to homes, but the general idea was that these two would go together. Our last pair of cats was a mother and her kitten, and they cordially hated each other, so we're not sure these two will really get on in a year or two, when mum decides baby should have found its own patch. We've got room enough that it's unlikely to be a problem though. We don't know the sex of the kitten, so haven't named him yet, but mum's called Cleo. The smart money's on the baby being a boy though, so I want to call him Tolly, short for Ptolemy (yes, I'm an English student. Ptolemy Philadelphus was Cleopatra's son. He wasn't the famous one (there are getting on for 20 of them), and he was never a Pharaoh, though.). Not sure for a girl. Looking it up, Cleopatra's daughter by Anthony was Cleopatra Selene, so maybe Selene would be the answer. That will depend on what the family think.

What photos there are, are here, but they're not great as yet. The kitten's a nutter, chasing around and hunting people's fingers and mum's tail and generally making use of the many excessively sharp points at his disposal. He's (I can't say 'it's'...) adorable though. Cleo has spent most of the afternoon that she's been sat on the windowsill in the study staring outside, desperate to go out, or growling at the dogs when they knock on the door. She's purred tentatively when someone's caught her at the right moment, but she's not really keen yet. Hopefully she will get used to the idea that we're OK when we feed her enough, but at present it's pretty clear that she's been a stray long enough to HATE being cooped up inside. Sadly it has to be, at the moment. She's absolutely beautiful, though - my pictures don't do her justice at all. I'll have a go with the SLR at some stage and see if I can do better. She's a real dark tortoiseshell, the complete opposite, really, of Tiggy, though Tiggy did have a kitten with very similar markings. Kitten's pretty too, with a little white bib and belly, white socks at the back and little white bits on his front paws. YAY CATS.

The other news is that the man who owns the llama farm came down this evening to look at our space and tell us what he thought before we get llamas. Apparently, he's thrilled with the space (I was asleep through this...evil coldy illness), but we need to sort the fencing. I think the general idea is that we'll eventually have four, but we'll start off with two probably in about six or eight months' time. Which means my mum is going to set the island up for ducks sometime in the next few months, probably after she's been to the wildfowl show in November, which means early spring. Menagerie is growing...woohoo!

I uploaded the very few pictures I took in Edinburgh, beyond the statue in the previous post. I was pretty pleased, actually. The evening light in Scotland is lovely because it's so far north, and this particular evening it was so clear you could see the hills on the other side of the Firth of Forth. The skyline lends itself to this kind of picture, too, just in the middle like that. A lot of Edinburgh is big, Georgian, and square, but leaning towards the gothic - so there are lots of turrets and towers like you see here. The stone is also a particularly attractive honey-coloured limestone, with black slate roofing. They whole effect is great!