Merry very belated Christmas Post

Okay, so we are literally six months from Christmas and six months to the next one. Oops. But since I'm playing a bit of catch up with the blog I thought I'd share some photos of our first Christmas both together and in the depths of winter - where at least having a giant roast makes a bit more sense than it does in New Zealand.

Firstly, on Christmas Eve I left work slightly early to go and lose my pavlova virginity. Something about a pav that always frightened me. Add to the fact I've been long regaled with stories about the time my Mum tried to impress my Dad's mum making one and failing miserably.I started with lots of eggs. A tip I learnt from lemon meringue pie, chilled eggs are a lot easier to seperate.Egg whites to soft peaks and the rest of the ingredients are introduced.Glossy and stiff means it's ready to be slow cooked in the oven.Nearly two hours later, my first pavlova ever is done.

I was then faced with what to do with the unused egg yolks and so made lemon tarts along the lemon meringue pie recipe with shortcrust pastry and some artistic flair.I thought they were pretty impressive and delicious I might add.It was then off to bed so I could get up bright and early to prepare our massive leg of lamb. Oren was still recovering from a cold so I let him sleep in while doing strange looking things with herbs.Oren finally arose so we could open presents from under our awesome tree. I skyped with my parents, in particular to point out to my own mother that she did not know my actual name.
Then it was lunch time!

All and all, it was a fairly successful day and with our central heating it was easy to ignore it was about -1 degrees outside all day. I still prefer Christmas in summer, being forced to take leave in the middle of winter and use your own heating doesn't seem fair.

--

In other catch up news - Oren has moved to a new HMV store to work at, which coincidently is even closer to our flat that his previous one...and that was only a twenty minute walk at most. My work's been a bit better too and I'm heading to Milan, Italy next week for a business trip. It's also a year this weekend since we moved into our wee Kiwi flat which now has a token Australian Kim who is lovely.

Now if we could only decide what to do with our summer holidays before it's suddenly winter again.

When the Road Runs Out

September 10-12 saw us attend our first UK music festival, End of the Road at the Larmer Tree Gardens in Dorset. EOTR is about as far removed, though, from the big summer festivals like Glastonbury and Reading as could be imagined, which was basically what we wanted as we sought the closest experience to our festival of choice in New Zealand, Camp(us) A Low Hum. I must say, this compared very, very favourably to CALH.


The first thing on the agenda was of course to set up our tent. We had bought it a few weeks previously but had not had a chance to have a test run at pitching it yet, and it wasn't until we had almost finished that we really how tiny the thing was. We managed to fit in it though. Just.

Please ignore the flag behind my head.

Some people were clever and hired these darling wagons for their accommodation; possibly something to look into if we go again next year.

"Purveyors of Fairydust"

Here is the central field of the grounds that held most of the food stalls, shops, pubs, activity tents and three of the smaller stages. Hopefully this gives you an idea of the laid-back vibe of the festival.


We enjoyed many fine local ales from the three on-site pubs: The Badger Inn, The Peacock Bar, and The Black Crow. My favourite drop was the Hedge Monkey - a malty, hoppy deep amber ale brewed in Somerton, Dorset.


For non-alcoholic beverages the Tea Stop, operating out of an old double-decker bus with a garden out the front, proved to be an excellent option. Here I am enjoying a milkshake and the view from the upper deck.



This is the main stage from afar. It was a lovely setting with lots of greenery and that cute archway off to the side. This picture was about away as far as you could get from the stage, and it was very easy to get up close for a great view of the performers.


Wandering amongst the mazey paths of Larmer led to many unexpected delights, including the macaws and peacocks that inhabited the site. Unicorns and zebras hid in the trees...


...while this delightful scene popped up in a clearing. It later hosted a lovely ensemble who played Joanna Newsom covers.


We probably spent too much time in the games area playing giant Connect 4. Here is an epic draw that we played out.


Oh yeah, a whole bunch of great bands played as well. As it happens we barely took a single photo of any of them, which probably says something about (a) how engaging the performances were, and (b) how much other fun stuff was going on around the place. If I were to pick two highlights from each day it would be Modest Mouse and Wolf Parade for day one, Iron & Wine and Caribou for day two, Errors and Wilco for day three.

There is a pretty high chance that we will go back next year, and early-bird tickets are already on sale... very tempting! For now we have our sweet t-shirts to remind us of the great time we had. His and hers, respectively:

A Weekend Tour, Part 2 - Sunday Driver, Yeah

We had had vague intentions of spending our whole weekend exploring the eastern counties, but after deciding to go back to London on Saturday night we made the call to head out west on Sunday. Our first destination was the inevitable visit to Stonehenge, but unfortunately we were left pretty disappointed with it. Overpriced and you can't get near the site without paying more to go on a guided tour, we found the whole experence a bit sterile. But here it is anyway, to prove we were there:


Luckily, though, Stonehenge is not the only ancient stone circle in the area, so we headed next for the lesser known monuments at Avebury a few miles north. This proved a fine choice that quickly washed away the disappointment of Stonehenge. Avebury's stones are in a much larger formation with an outer circle that skirts around the edge of a small village. With free and unrestricted access to the stones, in a pretty location with a nice atmosphere, I would recommend a visit to Avebury ahead of the more popular alternative.


At this point our Sunday was decidedly lacking in cathedrals, so we drove to Salisbury to get our fix.






Our final stop turned out to be my favourite of the whole weekend. While in Avebury, Jo had picked up a brochure for a nearby ruins, Old Wardour Castle. Neither of us had heard of it before but it looked lovely from the brochure so we decided to have a look. It was not easy to find, with no signage on the main roads, but after making our way through narrow country roads and thatched-roof villages we came to this wonderful place.








If we learnt one lesson that day, it was that the best attractions are often these lesser-known, off-the-beaten-track types.

A Weekend Tour, Part 1 - Cathedrals and Roundabouts

Last weekend was my first full weekend off since I started work (usually I work on Saturdays), so we decided to make the most of it by hiring a car and seeing some more of our new home country. We didn't have many concrete plans when we set out, and we ended up covering more ground than we expected, in all passing through 10 counties over the two days.

Our first (and more-or-less only) settled destination was the small town of Brandon in Suffolk, the home of Jo's great-aunt Dora. But first we had a journey of 2-3 hours ahead of us, and it wasn't long until we had developed an intense frustration at the British motorways. There is one particularly awful feature that you may well have heard of or experienced yourself: the roundabouts. Every bad thing that people say about them is completely right. The British road system is littered with hundreds of the buggers, and they serve no practical purpose other than to annoy. Often after you successfully negotiate your way through a three-lane monster complete with traffic lights and many exits, it is only 20 seconds further down the road until you encounter another. Sometimes there are even two or more roundabouts placed adjacent to one another, so you exit your roundabout... into another roundabout! Just in case you couldn't wait for the next one! Many of them have poor (or non-existant) signage, instructing you to get into one lane before making you swerve violently across others lest you miss your exit. Other countries have perfectly functional highways without these monstrosities, and I cannot figure out the need for them. I know I have been ranting about roundabouts for a while now but I just hate them so much! And I wasn't even driving!

*Deep breath*

Shortly into our journey, our rental car started beeping at us and flashing symbols on the dashboard, which we eventually figured out was it telling us we were low on fuel. We checked the map for nearby towns to refill, and I saw we were near St Albans, which my friend Elizabeth had recommended to me a while back. It turned out to be an fine decision, providing us with the first of many excellent cathedral visits for the weekend.







Our other port of call in St Albans was to stop for lunch at the local waffle house at the recommendation of our Lonely Planet Great Britain guidebook. It seemed that a lot of other people had also read this, as the restaurant was very busy, though we were lucky to arrive at a time when we were able to be seated within five minutes before watching the queue extend to around five times that length while we ate. The restaurant serves a large variety of waffle dishes, including exotic-sounding savoury ones (eg: Mediterranean vegetable waffle, waffles with curry). In the end we went for the more familiar sweet waffles: Dutch apple waffle with loads of maple syrup for me and banoffee waffle with vanilla ice cream for Jo; both incredibly good.

With both our car and our stomachs refuelled, we set out again for Brandon. It rained.


We did make it eventually though, where Jo and Dora had a very touching reunion after three years had passed since their last meeting. Dora, still very lively at 92 years old, was obviously delighted to see us, and kept saying how she often thought of her relatives in New Zealand but never thought she would see them again. She was the perfect host, having made us ham sandwiches and cheese scones and it was lovely to sit down and chat with her for a couple of hours over our food and tea. Possibly our biggest mistake of the trip was not taking any photos with Dora, but we will make up for that next time we visit her.

After saying our goodbyes we headed for nearby tiny Lakenheath station, where Jo's grandfather and grandmother (Dora's sister) had met during the war, and later lived when her grandfather was the station master there.




Our next stop was the small town of Ely in Cambridgeshire to check out another famous cathedral. We didn't go inside this one as we were there later than the 7pm closing time, but it was a spectacular enough building from the exterior.




Finally, we headed for the town of Bury St Edmunds as our last destination for the evening, where we enjoyed a lovely dinner and wandered amongst the evening streets of the village for a while. We realised it was not going to be practical to find a room to stay the night out there, so we returned to London for the night (eventually, even in the middle of the night London cannot be quickly crossed from the northeast to our home in the southwest). We were pretty knackered by the time we got home well after midnight, and we had a full day ahead of us for sunday too.

Stay tuned for the second part of our weekend trip report, including Stonehenge, Avebury, Salisbury and Old Wardour Castle.