Norham Gardens; Take a Break; goji berries

Norham Gardens

Ruth and I went over to Oxford on Sunday afternoon for a bit of a mooch as I had an urge to go and look for the street that features in the title of Penelope Lively’s children’s novel The House in Norham Gardens, to see if it was anything like the representation in the book (see here for a potted review). Indeed it is, being a pleasant genteel tree-lined street of large Victorian-era houses, most of which seem to be nowadays either in flats or used as offices/educational centres of one type or other. Here's a picture of me posing outside a Gothic-style pile (can only see the ground floor windows unfortunately).

Me enhancing Norham Gardens

On the way back, we went for a bit of a browse around the Oxford University Museum of Natural History and the attached Pitt Rivers Museum (also mentioned in the novel). The Natural History Museum is the usual somewhat dusty collection of ancient stuffed animals and birds but there are some more interactive displays to attract the young including quite a bit of stuff on dinosaurs (presumably always a crowd-puller); the main draw for me is the building’s extravagant architecture. The Pitt Rivers Museum is an amazing collection of tribal plunder of various sorts, including a collection of shrunken heads.

After the museum we went to Brown’s for a lovely late lunch/early dinner. To while away the time on the train home, bought a copy of Take A Break, a low-budget magazine that I used to buy quite regularly – now buy it only infrequently but I do get an urge to enter the competitions from time to time as there are some quite attractive prizes on offer, not that I’ve ever won anything but as with the National Lottery one lives in hope. The magazine is mainly based around ‘real-life reader experience’ type articles; a typical issue contains one, or at most two, genuinely moving articles where you think ‘blimey, good on them’ and a number of others that range from dull to the frankly outrageous where one marvels at the sheer stupidity and crassness of the people involved. One particular gem I shall always remember was a mother and daughter bemoaning how, having somehow been defrauded of their benefits by an unscrupulous relative after inexplicably handing power to handle their financial affairs over to him (because he was ‘family’ (say in requisite Cockney Wanker accent) and because presumably they found filling in the odd form too difficult to contemplate), they were forced to live on baked beans and their ilk for six months. The photos featured of the doleful-looking duo, presumably following these starvation rations, suggested that their combined weight was almost certainly in excess of 40 stone. One wondered what they weighed BEFORE the baked bean diet.

This week’s Graze box contained a mix that included goji berries – never having heard of these, I did a few minutes desk research. According to Wikipedia, the goji berry is native to southeastern Europe and Asia, and is apparently the commercial name for the wolfberry. It appears to have a whole slew of alternative names including ‘barbary matrimony vine’ and ‘Duke of Argyll’s tea tree’. Apparently the bulk of commercially produced wolfberries come from China. They seem to have been trendy among skinny celeb-types and marketed as a bit of a ‘superfood’ (so presumably the Gillian McKeith munches quite a lot, in between inspecting folks’ dung). My verdict: they’re OK.