The Garden

The early wetness gave me a different garden this year. My runner beans are useless, but my broad beans are huge. Also I have lovely lettuce but virtually no heads on the cabbages. I had a glut of strawberry but no soft fruit to speak of. Everything is late because of the early cold weather, so now in August just getting broad beans galore. Even the flower garden is odd with some lovely flowers I have not seen before who have been attracted by the particular weather this year and flowered profusely.
Apples look like they will be good, although I have one tree whose leaves are brownish in patches and is hardly fruiting, cannot tell if this is a disease or a nutrient lack.
Last year I had a lot of outdoor tomatoes, this year nothing, they are grey and sickly looking I think from the cold.

Musings on bacon fat

I was cleaning a pan of bacon fat the other day and it was hard work even with lots of soap it just clung to the pan. It made me remember that in my childhood we used to eat bread fried in that with breakfast. The French do not suffer with cholesterol or heart failure and yet they eat more bread than we do, but once you go to France you realise why...they eat it raw without butter. Essentially butter or any solidified fat is just the same as my bacon fat. British people slather bread with it, cover potatoes with it. But my parents lived to be 90. So is it really that we just don't work like they did so we suffer. That if your an eskimo who lives at minus 40 and works outdoors everyday you can eat blubber which is high in cholesterol and get away with it as your body is just burning it all the time from work?
My neighbour Don is 74 and works hard every day on his land. He recently bought an expensive sit on mower but hes never used it and I asked him why his response "i jist dinna want to get soft", he's right.
We either have to stop eating fat or work its a simple as that.

France - Antibes and Royan

Our family trip to these two areas was one of contrasts. Royan is in the South West and is clearly a place where the French holiday. It is very nice, sophisticated and French. We thourouighyl enjoyed our trip to a place that specialises in mussels and oysters. Our take away was sunflowers and grapes, as these are what you see in all the fields.
Antibes is one of the best of the Cote D'Azur towns. Its got all the big yachts, its got crowds and its got people until midnight. But its also got Picasso, and ancient streets cobbled and nice with a good market and in the evening lovely views across to Nice.

Wet with flies

We had a two week vacation in France and came back to wet days with surprisingly lots of aggressive flies in the garden. Last year we did not get bothered as the East coast of Scotland does not suffer from midges. But these flies are very aggressive, trying to get in your eyes and up your nose, its horrible. I had to wear a hoat and scarf as insect repellant does not bother them. Garden is growing well, but weeds are going rampant due to our absence. More work.

Railway Tracks

There are hundreds of miles of disused railways in the Scottish Borders but very little of it is available to the public. In Canada ALL disused railways are turned into atrractive cycle and walking routes, some of them hundreds of miles long and even have dedicated guest houses. It is a shame that much of the old Borders Railway is so heavily covbered in bush that one cannot walk it. There are small stretches, one recently opened in Gordon, and outside of Melrose, but these are a tiny fraction of what could be done. The land is public owned, but large landowners use it as their own and do nothing to encourage walkers. People use it to dump rubbish and its a shame.

Why We Left Trinidad

I have not spoken on the site about why we left Trinidad and moved our family and children 3000 miles to Scotland. This is what the BBC says about Trinidad -

"Trinidad and Tobago - a major trans-shipment point for cocaine - has become ridden with drug and gang-related violence. This has clogged up the courts and has fuelled a high murder rate and much of the corruption that is reputedly endemic in the police. It also threatens the tourism industry".

We reached the point where we never felt safe and it began to wear us down. My wifes family was held up and robbed at gunpoint on a trip to the beach, we were burgled, and we had incidents that led us to believe we were being targeted. We lived a very nice lifestyle, much better than now, but we learned that personal safety is a bigger thing than anything else. We feel safe and happy here.

Borders Food Network

There is a web site that gives reviews and details of eating local food in the Borders. It has some good places and is worth a browse. I am not sure about the places listed, for example the one in St Boswells, as I lived there and never found a place called "The Whitehouse", also they seem very out of date. But it does have some good places Like Burts in Melrose. My take on it is that its self promotional, i.e. not very accurate as who would say about themselves that they are rubbish? So some are good such as Oblo in Eyemouth, but some are not so good such as Giacopazzi in Eyemouth who tells everyone he is the best and has managed to convince some people until they eat at Fords in Berwick and then one sees Giacopazzi is second rate. But there is not much about Borders food so this is worth a look.

website of the borders foodnetwork