A Pocket Wilderness

One of the odd things about living in Cambridge as part of the post-graduate community here is that I’m friends with surprisingly few Brits who still live here. As many of you will have noticed , K is South African and my dear neighbours are Australian, and I might add that a high proportion of my fellow medievalists are from the US or Canada. These lovely people are frequently heard to comment that Britain is not an island with much in the way of wilderness, and their voices adopt a somewhat wistful tone as they remember the vision of an empty road stretching off in to the distance, not a roundabout in sight. Now, I cannot help but agree that Britain as a rule lacks the kind of endless empty spaces of South Africa/USA/Australia etc, especially south of the Humber (I am still such a northerner at heart). But it is also true, I think, that England is also full of secret ‘pocket wilderness’, little patches of desolate, beautiful, wild spaces that have somehow escaped the press of people and houses which are so evident in most places.

With the aid of a car and an increasing number of years spent living in East Anglia, K and I are attempting to discover some more of these pocket wildernesses. On Saturday, we were privileged to find such a one less than two hours drive away, on the North Norfolk coast. To tell the truth, I have always felt a bit embarrassed that I have not visited this part of the world before. We are less than two hours drive away, and goodness knows enough people have recommended it to me . Even the difficulty of finding a decent enough Saturday, weather-wise, rather ceases to be an acceptable excuse after about six months. THIS Saturday, I insisted. The weather was good, work had been moderately kind to us and we had enjoyed an utterly crashy, I’m-not-leaving-this-sofa-if-it-kills-me Saturday the weekend before.

It was absolutely amazing. We went first to Titchwell Marsh RSPB reserve, because I had heard of it and because I had a member’s pass so we could get free parking. Beautiful reedbeds, marshland and salt flats stretching out under the wide sky, dripping with avocets, teals, shovelers and gulls. I got to spend a pleasing amount of time playing with the shiny camera K bought me for Christmas.

A snipe obligingly posed in front of a hide, causing me to drop my lens cover.

The reserve itself wasn’t much of a wilderness, however. Far too many chaps wearing about twelve telescopes arranged about their person (and I shall not comment further on such folk, except to say that there were ridiculous numbers of lesbians there. Quite astonishing. How had I never noticed this tendency in my birdwatching phase as a teenager?).

The reserve wasn't much of a wilderness, but the reserve opened out on to a beach. The beach was an English wilderness if ever I saw one. Ten minutes walk up said beach saw us well out of the range of other people, and our only companions were the sandlings running in the surf at the water’s edge.

The place was eerie. A low mist hung over the sea, barely discernible except when we realised that it wasn’t actually possible to say where the sea stopped and the sky began. We got quite a shock at one point when a large animal appeared to be suspended in mid-air; it turned out to be a grey seal bobbing up for air. The waves were very long, light swells, lapping insistently at the shore. The afternoon sun made the sand fade into the sky further up the beach, and the only sign of human presence was a village in the far distance. The overall impression was that the edge of the world was just over the horizon, not far beyond the seal. It was a far cry from my familiar beaches of Yorkshire and Northumbria, where red-tiled fishing villages trickle down right to the shore and the coast is interspersed with high cliffs. Even better, tourists haven't really discovered East Anglia yet - the entire region receives about four pages in the Lonely Planet Guide to Britain (and yes, most of this is Cambridge), and is that isn't a recommendation, then I don't know what is.

All in all, a day out I would recommend to any one, especially if they end the day with fish and chips at Wells-Next-the-Sea. The first fish and chips since abandoning my eight years of vegetarianism - that is a blog post in itself.

Hello again

Now for some reason it has started occurring to me that I would like to start blogging again, so I have decided to succumb to this urge. After all, a girl needs her distractions during the final months of a PhD. Also it is nearly time to start planting seedlings again, and I do so love talking about seedlings. Before I move on to seedlings, though, I’ll give you all a quick flavour of what I’ve been doing since October.

I’ve written some fairly meaty chunks of PhD and taught several undergraduates while early medieval history is really quite so exciting.

I've applied to quite a few jobs, which has resulted in a lot of exhaustion and frustration but unfortunately no job yet

(These two are the reasons why this blog has been quite so dormant)

I spent three weeks enjoying myself in Africa over Christmas and New Year. I spent a lot of time driving through Namibia and Botswana in one of these...

Yes, I know, very environmentally friendly. It doesn't stop me wanting one of my very own though. I took to dirt-road driving like the proverbial duck to water. Note the cow on the road. The only surprising thing here is that there was only the one cow, and that it was not accompanied by large numbers of goats and donkeys. Driving on a main road in Africa is a lesson in learning to stop quickly.

As well as cows, goats and donkeys, I also saw lots of these.

Which made me very happy.

I then spent two weeks in Cape Town, where K and I got engaged!! This made me even happier :-) I have a very, very, very pretty engagement ring.

I strained all the sloe gin and elderberry schnapps. Some of the sloe gin miraculously made it through three sets of customs and was delivered to K's family for Christmas. The rest is sitting more-or-less untouched on the booze shelf in my kitchen, since in an inexplicable moment of piety and enthusiasm I decided to give up alcohol for Lent. Updates will follow after Easter.

I did lots of knitting. More on this later.

I did much less gardening (soon to change, I hope).

I marvelled at how cold the winter was. We had some good snow here in Cambridge (although not when returning from a three week holiday to find it has been below freezing for a week).

All in all, life has been good.

Hiatus

I looked at my blog this morning and realised that it has been nearly three weeks since I wrote my last post here. I'm not quite sure why - I just haven't really felt like it, and the last thing I want is for this blog to become a chore in any way. I've been pretty distracted from veg growing, knitting and baking in the last few weeks by the sudden and unpleasant realisation that I am actually going to finish my PhD next year (OK, this is actually an extremely welcome realisation) and that I need to decide what I'm going to do afterwards. I'm actually feeling very positive about ending my long stint as a student, finding a job and moving a bit further into the real world, but as is the way of big life-affecting decisions, deciding on future plans is proving as mentally draining as it is exciting.

The upshot of all this is that there hasn't been much to report, good-life wise. Now that Autumn has well and truly come to Cambridge, the patio allotment is slowly wrapping up for the winter. The beans finished with a final flurry of activity and should probably be pulled out soon. The courgettes died off without producing any more fruit, and the single patty pan should probably be picked soon. There are still plenty of green tomatoes left, but continuing blight and cold are taking their toll on the plants and I've started to bring the most promising looking ones inside to ripen on windowsills. I don't have much that will over-winter, but three of my kale plugs are doing a lot better than expected, especially now that the colder weather means that they no longer need to be guarded quite so obsessively against caterpillars. I've also got some spinach and baby beetroot growing in the hope that they might provide another winter crop, but despite the two neath rows of seedlings, I rather get the impression that they don't like it very much in their planter. In fact, nothing seems to like it very much in that particular planter, and I have a growing suspicion that it doesn't get quite enough sun.

Job hunting aside, I now need to decided what I'm going to do with all these newly-empoty pots. Nothing is concrete as yet, but I'm tempted to plant spring bulbs next week. An array of snowdrops and crocuses on the patio would be very welcome come the dark days of January and February.

Straining the elderberry schnapps

As promised, I managed to strain the first batch of elderberry schnapps at the weekend, and I am now pleased to say that I have a lovely 700ml of dark, clear berry schnapps goodness neatly labelled (neatly labelled! again!) and sitting on the alcohol shelf. Provisional taste testing was promising, although not as extensive as I would have liked since not only does the recipe advise that it be left to age for a minimum of two months, but my tolerance of vodka is pretty low at noon on Sundays. The teaspoonful or so that I did try suggested that it is pretty well infused with a soft elderberry flavour, yet still with a good kick of vodka lying underneath. Updates on how it ages will be forthcoming in due course.

For anyone who hasn't tried straining very small berries out of a rather narrow-necked bottled before, I have to say that the arrangement of sieve, muslin square and clothes pegs depicted above was absolutely invaluable, as was a skewer to winkle out the last of the berries. I also had great fun washing out the muslin square afterwards - every time I rinsed it out I would open my hand to reveal shade after shade of first dark purple, then violent and lavender, before a beautiful pale blue finally refused to get any paler.

The only question left is what I do with the tupperware container-full of extremely alcoholic elderberries sitting in my fridge. I'm thinking a vodka-elderberry-and-apple pie, but alternative suggestions will be gratefully received.

An unexpected squash

A pleasant surprise greeted me in the garden this morning - the flowering of my very first patty pan fruit, definitely a case of better late than never. I decided to grow patty pans this year for K (they are far more common in South Africa than here), but with sadly limited success. The plants themselves absolutely thrived in their pot, and in fact in many ways seemed well suited to container growing - the plants are both smaller than courgettes and distinctly more handsome - but the seed packet only promised a bumper harvest 'in a sunny year', hardly a description that could be applied to this wet and miserable summer. A couple of female flowers have emerged before only to shrivel up and die. I didn't really hold out much hope for this one, but it hung on despite everything and this morning bloomed into a beautiful (and quickly hand-fertilised) orange flower. Fingers crossed for a few more days of sunshine to allow it to ripen!

Elderberry Schnapps

Those with an eagle eye or two may recall a post written a few weeks ago about the gathering of elderberries, in which I alluded to their future as elderberry schnapps the very next day. I’ve been meaning to reveal what actually happened to these berries ever since, but sloes and mini-breaks rather got in the way. Finally, the fate of the elderberries is revealed!

Despite what I promised earlier, I didn’t actually make the schnapps the day after the berries were gathered. After checking that great schnapps resource Danish Schnapps Recipes, I realised that they were supposed to stay in the freezer for a week rather than just overnight in order to temper the slightly bitter taste. In the interested of continuing experimentation with the brewing of odd liqueurs, coupled with my decided taste for the sour and bitter, I decided to leave half in for a week and half for 48 hours. The results will appear in the form of a taste trial in due course.

While the elderberries rested awhile in the freezer, I took myself off to Sainsburies to acquire hefty amounts of booze to match my large haul of berries. My slightly puritanical eyebrow raising at the fact that they include vodka in their el cheapo ‘bare essentials’ range was coupled with irritation that they didn’t make said vodka in one litre bottles. On reflection, being forced to buy slightly more expensive supermarket vodka was probably a good thing, and I'm sure my brain cells with thank me for it in due course.

The recipe used for the schnapps is simple:

- 800ml of elderberries
- Around half a litre of vodka

Place berries in a one-litre bottle and top up with the voddie. This should sit for about four weeks, with occasional shaking. The plan is then to strain the fruit after four weeks and leave the resulting brew to age for a couple of months, or until it seems like a good idea to drink it. I'll probably strain at least one bottle this weekend, so I'll let you know what the results are like. I'm most interested to see how much it still tastes like vodka, since I'm not actually a huge fan of vodka, but if the results are disappointing I suppose I can either leave to it age for a while, or alternatively add some syrup and make it into a liqueur.

What next? Space on the booze shelf permitting, I'm quite keen to try making hawthorn liqueur. I've always thought it a shame that hawthorn berries come in such profusion every autumn yet cannot be used for very much. Unless you are a blackbird.

Mystery patio wildlife

Can anyone identify this little beastie for me? I spied her* the other morning making a fairly sizable hole in an aubergine leaf, and I was quite impressed that she had made it all the way up the stairs to my patio.

*updated. Thanks for Magic Cochin for identifying this as a female bush cricket!