Weasel’s rambling adventure
There’s a local farm shop we like to go to – it is actually attached to the farm and the meat lives there. The farmer’s wife makes the best steak and kidney pie ever, so Uncle B tells me. I don’t eat organs. She makes them on Wednesdays, but last week they all sold out before we got there.
So this week he phones up and reserves two pies. Yes, we had pie reservations.
On the way to pick them up, we got stuck in a traffic jam. A rural traffic jam means one of two things: road work or an accident. It was an accident. Trailer jacknife started it, if I had to guess. By the look of it, nobody was hurt, but it was a giant mess.
So we came back the long, long way to miss it. It was a road we haven’t been down for some years. Had we been a couple of weeks earlier, it would have been white with hawthorn and mayflower. It was still a beautiful drive.
We passed a pair of swans on the banks of a stream. Fields of potatoes and wheat. We nearly smacked into a couple of cars ourselves (what is it about twisty backroads that makes locals the world over drive like loonies?).
Last time we were down that road, we found a lamb on the verge of escaping the fence into the road, so we turned up the drive and had a chat with the farmer. This felt quite wicked and subversive, because it was lockdown and we weren’t supposed to talk to strangers. We all had a laugh about it. We weren’t even six feet apart!
Anyway, we made it home with his pies (I got a wickedly expensive piece of cheesecake, for my part). And I hadn’t taken a single picture.
So enjoy this picture from June of 2020. This great rambling thug of a rose is, can you believe it, even bigger this year. The smaller white blossom you see to the upper right is an elder tree, that has now been completely covered in roses. And that was my Wednesday.
Posted: June 19th, 2024 under food.
Comments: 5
Comments
Comment from Uncle Badger
Time: June 19, 2024, 7:59 pm
Believe it or not, there’s a garage somewhere underneath that rose (for the gardeners among you it is the variety Rambling Rector). And yes, it is bigger this year. Two years ago it was pruned to about a quarter of that size.
And now, I’m off to eat my steak and kidney pie with some of the new potatoes I dug up yesterday If I get any trouble from Herself, I simply brandish one in her direction. Think of Dracula’s reaction to a crucifix…
Comment from ExpressoBold Pureblood
Time: June 19, 2024, 8:29 pm
I just watched a documentary on the place of the English longbow in history. Do you have any yew trees about?
Comment from Some Vegetable
Time: June 19, 2024, 11:58 pm
What a lovely day in a lovely place
Comment from Uncle Badger
Time: June 20, 2024, 9:29 am
Mostly, the yew trees are in churchyards for some reason ExpressoBold. They’re pretty much ubiquitous in old churches. Apparently, there are almost 1,000 of them that are each over 500 years old in English churchyards alone. Some are over 2,000 years old.
That’s even older than I feel.
Comment from ExpressoBold Pureblood
Time: June 20, 2024, 11:12 am
Amazing that the yew population survived the demand for that wood to make the English longbow… a yew over 1,000 years old must be in a relatively inaccessible location.
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