You can stuff your Borough Market up yer…

Oh yes, you can stuff your… We are looking forward to this:

Nineteen days of reason to move to the North East, beginning May 3rd. If you like food. Who needs the snooty, overpriced, and soon to be pulled down Borough market, with its oafish media types playing snazzy barista attitudes on a Monday morning after struggling through the tube. We’re free!

(Although you recognise all of that was tongue in the proverbial cheek. Every food market is to be relished, not ripped down for some travel connection.)

Particularly looking forward to the taster market and finding the local producers, which has not been easy. Even Abel & Cole don’t come this far east. And the Fish on the Tyne weekend, although we’ll only squeeze in a fillet of it on the Sunday, as we’re driving up from London with T’s truckful of belongings.

Endings, new beginnings… food fulfils such a philosophical need in us, as well as a carbohydrate requirement.

it’s not fishing, it’s catching…

I tell you what’s not catching. Money. Wish it was. We’ve spent a lot of tonight looking over T’s plans to make us a lot of money. Can’t give the game away now, but let me tell you a little bit about the impetus for it.

One: a home. As said in the last post (a subtle hint towards our moods tonight) we want to buy a home. We went to see a lovely five bedroom house down the road earlier, where the woman – absolutely lovely, a real inspiration in terms of her attitude towards the loss of her husband and getting on with life, particularly as I’d come home from the University feeling a real under-acheiver and fed up with things – had lived for 32 years, with her husband, who was no-longer around, but their dream of moving to France, well, she was seeing it through… anyway, money, to buy a house, and we don’t have enough right now. So T is going to earn us a packet with her internet entrpreneurial skills while I cheer myself up and try to write a world beating novel. If I could have a home with as much lived-in-ness as the one we just went to see, with the biggest video collection I’ve ever seen, all catalogued, of the world’s worst horror films ever… I guess I’d consider that some form of achievement.

And reason two for lots of money: eating out. We’d like to, if nothing more than to keep you interested in this blog (I don’t think I’m going to get picked up by Random House just talking about our mortgage desires… there’s a phrase put paid to by the credit crunch, and good editors everywhere). So. We’re on a budget, ergo tonight. Luckily “Night Three of Cooking at Home in Week 12 of 2008″ was as wonderful as ever, with T’s skill with the fish slice making a fillet of Jamie Oliver’s Fish Pie recipe. Cooked to perfection, with fresh haddock instead of salmon and some dijon mustard in the sauce. See the pic. See my smile. And my belly. A run tomorrow, down to discover Backhouse Park for the first time. Sunderland has its hidden gems after all, including a potential new neighbour if we manage to get the money for this property, a Dr Wheeler, renowned meteorologist. I wonder what it must be like to be a meteorologist in the UK – raining again…? He must dread dinner parties.

easter veggie pot pie

We’re back in London visiting Simon the cat for the weekend. Terrible things have happened. Forget political rhetoric on terror and animal-human embryos, we went to The Larrick and watched Liverpool defeated three-nil.  We also did some quick-smart character assassination on a pair of newly engaged Londoners who got into a right ol’ argument over not sitting together. The guy was clearly an extrovert, the girl not so comfortable in a big group. Boo on him for leaving her standing on her own and going to sit down with his mates at the other end of a big table. It, is, however, as T says, an issue of confidence. God knows I’ve suffered similar social lowpoints, so still boo on him. What is it about the social that can so terrify or annoy? Some theories of Social Anxiety are a little too broad-brush. Mine, personally, have always been about insecurity in a relationship: not knowing how to call on the support of a partner when feeling threatened; feeling threatened in the first place; not feeling first-placed. A bit like Liverpool. Maybe my anxiety all stems from that Michael Thomas goal in 1989…

Anyway, T and I did our budget last night. We want to buy a house in the next twelve months, credit crunch and recession permitting. One of the outcomes (see our budget page) is a wonderful Easter cookfest at home, with £14 worth of vegetables, some Stork lard for pastry, a bottle of Saumur Brut (£8 from Nicolas) and a veggie pot pie in the oven. T is a superlative in the cooking vocabulary. I, a mere adjective. Roll on dinnertime.

It’s all Loching Fyne…

Apologies for the terrible headline, but no apologies for the views. T and I are just leaving York after the weekend. Lovely city, loud geese, one of Canada’s more underhand gifts to the UK: damn you, Trudeau. It’s the weekend of the last Six Nations rugby, so to be fair the geese along the river Foss are merely competing with the gaggle of Woodford RFC rugby boys on tour (pink shirted, Wetherspoon-loving, dodgy kneed fellas – what’s with the silver trays, guys?).

Anyway, after a wander round the Shambles and YorkMinster and along the 2000 year old wall, and a discussion on the advent of archaeology (“what did people think of relics before archaeology?”), we came back to Foss Street, where we spent the majority of the weekend (I mean this literally) dining at Loch Fyne, a fish restaurant, and a chain, we know, but one with some commendable sustainability polices. Which stretched to printing their menus and marketing material on 100% recycled paper. More on this later.