Zeltus

One reason that persuaded me into pushing myself too hard with a walk to Lyme Regis on Saturday was that meant I was in position to go to the South West Motorcycle Show the day after. I only heard about this after hearing about it on the invaluable but noisy Ixion motorcycle mailing list – Top tip guys!

I hadn’t foreseen that I would be as stiff as a post after a marathon slog and that in particular my legs would seize up or otherwise refuse to work – just mounting my bike caused both thighs to start cramping and I sure as hell wasn’t sure how I was going to dismount at the showground!

Still, I made it, I saw lotsa bikes, some gob-stoppingly awesome stunts and lots of desirable and expensive kit, none of which I really needed – I am pleased to say that I really do have all the kit I need to ride the beast in all weathers, not something I have had to worry about for several years but from now on, it is my only means of transport, come rain or snow. And knowing my luck, I’ll be getting all of that!

I did take but a few pictures with my crap camera ‘phone and here they are…

Extremely talented work, but as I said to the guy next me "Supreme skills, and they are not getting anywhere near my bike!"

Technorati Tags: bike, ixion, south, west

The Bank Holiday weekend was an ideal time to complete a rather ambitious walk I have had planned since my last outing. I wanted to walk all the way from Sidmouth to Lyme Regis – the distance is fair – somewhere around the 15-16 mile mark but it is a much more arduous path than I have walked recently.

I first took my bike to Sidford, well inland from Sidmouth. I had already sussed out that my return bus journey wouldn’t take me to Sidmouth, the true start of my walk and I felt better about leaving my bike in the car park there :- I really didn’t like leaving my bike parked in the street in Exmouth on my last outing.

The long and the short of it is that I did complete the course but it was it bit too hard a walk for it to be truly pleasurable. From now on I will be doing shorter legs – I think my next outing might have to be a north coast route. My cheap walking boots are just about, good enough, but sadly I am ahem, somewhat divorced from my expensive top-quality, well-broken in fit-like-a-glove proper-job walking boots. Still, gotta make do with what you’ve got I guess.

But I needed to do this leg, as the path from Seaton to Lyme Regis can apparently only be safely attempted in good weather. I also wanted to go to the South West Motorcycle Show in Exeter the next day, so staying in this general area overnight is a convenient thing to do.

Technorati Tags: beer, coast, lyme, path, seaton, sidford, sidmouth, south, west

Now I have the opportunity, I have started a project whereby I walk the South West Coast Path. This, my first leg, took me from Exmouth to Sidmouth. I don’t have much of a camera, just the one contained in my old and ancient mobile ‘phone (kindly donated by the son of a friend). But it’s good enough to provide me with an album reminding me of what I have done and when.

I’ve created a flickr set to hold these photos. Just click on the photo to go to the album and view the whole lot, hopefully correctly ordered by location.

I’ve no idea what my next leg should be. Or when. This project has no timescales or deadlines (other than the one true deadline!) I’ll do each leg as and when it suits me. And it suits me to do no more at this stage until the blisters caused by my new boots heal up a bit! :-)

After receiving a number of e-mails from a variety of people offering more information and details on the DICE Trials at Portland Bill in 1975, including a few corrections. But I’m quite pleased they were just a few corrections – my memory is still in pretty good nick then!

Anyway, I’ve edited my original web-page to include a few amendments and a couple of, I hope, interesting downloads. I found them interesting anyway.

Technorati Tags: dice, M.R.E., porton, spray, trial, weymouth

Well, cellar rather than belfry, in our case. I only go into our cellars in our French house once or twice a year – mostly to either shut off and drain the water pipes or else to open them up again.

So it was a pleasant surprise when entering our first cellar to find a small clutch of Pipistrelle bats dozing the daylight hours away. I guess it must have been a really good year for wildlife generally here in the glorious Dordogne.

We often see them in the evening hours as our garden is essentially surrounded by out-buildings and what with the garden lighting, insects are attracted in and have difficulty getting out – and the bats know this all too well. I’m pretty certain we get the odd grey-coloured Daubenton’s bat and we certainly see some larger bats – but they fly so fast it’s hard to identify them. These Pipistrelles roosting like this make the job of identification much easier! :P

They seemed quite unalarmed at my presence and even the flash on the camera left them completely unfazed. Nevertheless, I tried not to take too many liberties and left them in peace as soon as I got my shot.

Unfortunately, entering our second cellar was a less fun experience. A pipe had sprung a leak, God knows when, and it was our side of the meter – so we have to pay for whatever water leaked away. :? It’s not that serious – we have the cheapest water in the Dordogne AND it’s spring water to boot. Fortunately, plumbing, like electrickery, holds no fears for me and it was soon fixed. I guess the higher pressure caused when the street piping was renewed in the summer sought out the weak points.

Technorati Tags: bat, bats, cellar, dordogne, pipistrelle, pipistrelles, wildlife

After far too long a break, I have found something I felt worth the effort of posting. One of the delights of owning property here in rural France is that we are surrounded with wildlife that back in the UK, is rarely, if ever seen. A young Hoopoe visits our garden most days for an evening meal, Buzzards abound, bats are all over the sky of an evening and even at the smaller scale of things, European stick insects and Praying Mantis’ are to be found if one looks carefully enough.

Of course, we also get less welcome visitors – particularly at harvest time, when mice are evicted from their field nests and come looking to us for a new home. Mostly field mice, rather more rarely, harvest mice and one memorable occasion, when a whole family of pygmy shrews moved in. In general, I use live traps when I can (that is, when we’re here) and simply move the critters I catch to the outskirts of the village and release them in a hedgerow. The incredibly aggressive but completely harmless pygmy shrews were very vocal in their disapproval of me evicting them but it’s that or the old-fashioned spring trap and rodent heaven as the alternative. I have resorted to killing traps on rare occasions – we have felt under siege once or twice and felt we needed to get rid of the uninvited guests asap. Fortunately, last night it was one of the live traps that did it’s job and this is what turned up in it.

I didn’t immediately recognise the beast – about the size of a gerbil and with a furry tail – well, that alone meant it wasn’t a mouse. I was rather confused as if the tail had been quite bushy, then I would have instantly have thought “Dormouse!” – but the Common Dormouse, Muscardinus avellanarius, is an attractive gingery brown colour and the Edible Dormouse, or (Glis glis) is a bit larger and more silvery-grey in colour. Whereas my specimen had a very attractive coat in grey, white and black. A quick look thru’ my books soon identified it as Eliomys quercinus, the Garden Dormouse, very common in the south of Europe and generally completely harmless. Not that commonly seen as they don’t often come into houses and they are nocturnal. The only problem that might occur is that they are communal creatures and tend to be quite noisy. So I’ve set a few more traps to see if we have more of them resident. I released this one as per normal but if we do have a glut, then I’m afraid the spring traps will be the next line of defence. Thankfully, it’s not a family of Glis glis – they can be a real nuisance, noisy, overly plentiful and quite happy to chew thru’ cables, wood pipes – anything really.

I’m afraid I had to steal this picture off’ve images.google.com. I didn’t see much value in trying to keep the animal until the next day simply to take a photograph of it. So I released it as soon as possible.

Technorati Tags: dormice, dormouse, edible, france, glis glis, harvest, mice, mouse

Our Wedding Photograph Album was pretty much the first HTML I ever wrote. And it certainly looked a bit frayed and tatty at the edges, what with the advent of Flash and mature Javascript technologies now in full use by, well, pretty much everyone.

It’s now coming up to ten years (yes, really, ten years!) since the happy day, So I have taken the opportunity to update the style of the album, to pretty much, more-or-less, match the style of my main “Zeltus” web-pages.

This is probably the last photo set I shall host directly – in future, all my albums will be hosted on Flickr.

Here’s hoping the reminder of the album’s existence, with it’s nice shiney new skin, will bring back happy memories for all of those who were there.

Technorati Tags: cameracraft, cornwall, falmouth, wedding

Today is St. Hilary’s Day. A long, long time ago he was a Bishop of Poitiers, not far up the road from here and he wrote some theological works considered to be quite important by those who care about such things.

Some posh Universities and Colleges name one of their teaching sessions Hilary Term, almost certainly because the start of the session is more or less somewhere around St. Hilary’s Day. You probably have to be posh and privileged for this to matter to you.

More interestingly, today is supposed to be the coldest day of the year.

On a down to earth level, this is patently untrue for this year but if it at least marks the turning of the tide and from here on in Spring beckons, then that’s fine by me. It’s the first day this year I’ve been able to get out of the house and potter about in the workshop and garden a bit.

Technorati Tags: coldest, foklore, hilary, spring

My Dad was born and bred in Cranfield, on the western edge of the small county of Bedfordshire in England. Other than fairly rare visits to my Grandparents as a very young boy, I really didn’t take too much notice of the place.

But when Dad left the Army, he moved to Cranfield. And in the 80’s, I moved there as well. At which point I started taking a lot more interest in it’s history. Like most villages, there is any amount of gossip and rumour regarding it’s history: the Churchyard contains a distinctly square plot of land within it’s boundaries that everyone knows as the Plague pit. And during the height of the Industrial Revolution, it’s rumoured that a lot of Parkers were forcibly moved to the Manchester area, to work in the Cotton Mills, rather than be a burden on the local Parish. And so on.

But here is a bit of history that I have not seen anywhere else – by chance, whilst browsing in a junk shop in Newport Pagnell, I came across a very faded (and tres expensive!) photographic postcard of a Cranfield pub I didn’t recognise. Dad identified it as the Fox and Hounds, sited where Mill Road meets the High Street. Apparently, this Public House closed sometime during World War II. The earliest memory of this part of the village I have is of a small cinema, with a derelict Windmill just behind it. Today, the village Chemist occupies this spot.

I was extremely doubtful about buying this postcard, as it really was rather more than I wanted to pay for it and in very poor condition. But in the end, I did purchase it. And now I’m rather glad I did. Thanks to Adobe Photoshop, it really was very easy to scan it in to my PC, and with but a few clicks, adjust the colour balance, the contrast and a few other settings. I expect that if I put some real effort into it, I could improve it still further. But on the whole, I think the look I have achieved is authentic enough for me.

Technorati Tags: bedford, bedfordshire, beds, cranfield, history, house, inn, old, pub, public, pubs

I have pretty much always made my own Christmas Puddings. I do so partly because it’s a fun thing to do, partly because it’s a traditional thing to do and partly because I have control over what ingredients go into the pudding (does anyone, anywhere, actually like glace cherries? :-CHEF ) And if I say so myself, friends and family who receive them seem to appreciate them.

Traditionally, Stir-up Sunday is THE day to make puddings. But that’s the beginning of Advent and is too close to Christmas for comfort. So I tend to make my puddings around now, in October. The puddings definitely appreciate having time to mature and for their colour and flavour to develop.

I have now been persuaded to go public on my hitherto top-secret, never-to-be-revealed, cross my heart and hope to die famous recipe. And I have set up a web page fully revealing all the gory details. It’s at http://zeltus.eu/xmas_pud and is now available for anyone and everyone to gasp in awe at.

In reality, of course, it’s not much different from any other recipe. But for me, this particular version does have a history and anyway, if you want to develop your own version, you have to start somewhere and this recipe might provide that initial starting point.

The page is not quite finished – I need to wait for Christmas Day itself when I can then obtain and include a photograph of my own pudding aflame instead of borrowing a stock photo off the web.

I guess I also ought to set up a printable version of the recipe sometime. That can wait for a day or two as I now want to get back to Google Map mash-ups…

I’ve created an abbreviated version of the recipe, saved it as a PDF and it can now be downloaded and printed. It’s right at the bottom of the recipe page. Hope it’s helpful. Now, maybe I can get back to Google Map mash-ups!

Technorati Tags: advent, christmas, plum, pudding, recipe, stir, stir-up, suet, sunday, up, xmas