Zen Cooking & Duck Dabbling

Bottoms up in Lathkilldale, idyllically beautiful stream and nature reserve. We went in search of dippers, chubby little bobbing waterbirds for my old friend Louise from Oz, publisher and expert in the wild wildlife of the bush.

In spite of its tameness, our lovely stream did not disappoint and the ducks and dabchicks more than made up for the disappearing dippers.

All will be silent here for a week as I too disappear, to deepest Wales to cook for the Zen meditators of the Western Chan Fellowship.

Zen Cooking – MrsG ties on her apron, heads off with a car load of food (meditation is hard work) can it all be held in the mind at once? Only with great concentration. All is silence – until July 23rd.

Fairs, festivals, fetes & get togethers

High summer, and weekend Derbyshire is just one festival after another.  The Vintage Motorcycle Club were gathering at the Stone Centre when we walked through to get the Sunday paper. The motorbikes gleaming and spotless, their  grey haired riders all in leathers with happy smiles on their faces.

Later, to Shipley Park once a coal tip now a country park for a multi cultural festival of music and dance and a performance chance for young bands from the area. Squelchy underfoot so the breakdancers had to perform outside the visitor centre, but the sun was shining, nobody had any suncream with them.

Bilberries on Stanton Moor

Bilberries big as blackcurrants on Stanton Moor. Discovered on the first sunny day for weeks, they’ve been secretly growing in the rain and no one out walking to pick them!

Velvet curtains & blogging for idiots

First rule of blogging for idiots: write the post first, in fact write the post in Notepad before you start fiddling with the technical stuff.

Somewhere, floating in the techno stew is the most brilliant post about French velvet curtains redolent of provincial hotels – however, I stopped halfway through diverted by uploading the picture and options on offer and lost it forever.

We’d got up at the crack to drive a van over to Manchester and help Garden Guerilla Girl get the last sticks out of her old family home. A 1930s bedroom suite, some bits from the garden and an anvil being all that remained, it barely made a vanful to bring to an end 3 or 4 generations in the same house. We left GGG performing a last neighbourly act and mowing the lawn for the batty old lady next door that she’d known all her life.

On the way back we stopped here, at Cafe Nats in Buxton, one of my favourite places. Not just a cafe, but they sell old textiles, velvet curtains and engaging bits of junk as well. She goes to the giant flea market in Lille, the lady here, and sold us our bedroom curtains, big enough for chapel windows, dark green with slight fading in streaks where they’d hung through long quiet dusty French afternoons.

Grass in The Fields

They never cut The Fields until very late in summer so the grass grows long and it’s possible to see the variety and subtle beauty of this lovely plant that we all take for granted. Like everything in the garden, it’s bashed about this year by the rain (yes again today) and the wind (gusty and strong this morning).

Places are given plain straightforward names here: there’s Main Street, The Lanes, The Moor, The Fields. The Fields must be very old since they are a series of long strips running across a wide hollow – there’s an old photo on the village website here that shows them clearly, before all today’s trees have grown up to obscure the layout.

You never see animals grazing here, there’s a regular sequence of dog walkers and in summer gangs of the village kids come here and sometimes you see a family out walking knee deep in buttercups. The swallows swoop and dive across the top of the grass, driving the dog into a frenzy of hopeless chasing.

It’s a frost hollow and in winter you can follow the track of the sun as it melts the hoar frost. Just beyond The Fields is the old lead mine, one of the oldest in the area and Harold says you can see the lead glistening in the drops of moisture when there’s a heavy dew on the grass.