Wednesday 18 November 2009

Went for a lovely dinner with Kate and Steve on Friday at The Crown at Playhatch, a local gastropub-type establishment. To start, Ruth and I shared the king tiger prawns wrapped in crispy potato strings, which were certainly artistic although slight risk of firing shards of crispy potato string into fellow diners’ eyes. The slices of rare¹ duck breast I had for a main course were very nice although I’m not sure what ‘pommes fur’ are.

Have been on something of a roll this week with Freecycling. Advertised an old IKEA double bed frame at around 2pm on Saturday and by 3pm had had seven replies from interested parties. A young lad duly came round on Sunday and loaded it all into his car. Wonderful notion that people will just come to your house and take away your old junk.

Jurys, Birmingham

Late in the day, Harley has proved himself a chewer. I had been rejoicing in the fact that Harley and Lola seem much less inclined than the late Jake to chew books/paper/clothing, which had led me rashly to store a pile of books on a low shelf in the dining room. This week I came home to find several with nibbles out of the spines. Rabbits apparently do need to chew constantly in order to keep their teeth worn down, so chewing is to be applauded, but they are provided with a plentiful supply of hay for this purpose. Lola enjoys hay but Harley appears to spurn it in favour of, this week at least, Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway and the International Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs.

Spent Tuesday evening and Wednesday of this week at the Lifelong Learning Networks’ National Conference at the Jurys Inn, Birmingham. The conference was enjoyable enough and the hotel was nice on the whole – in my experience Jurys tend to have nice rooms but indifferent food, which was pretty much borne out. Am permanently amazed though as to why mass catering is so often so mediocre. At the conference dinner on Tuesday night, the main course was advertised as ‘medallions of fillet steak’ – to which I thought OK, sounds quite nice. The steak duly turned up – overdone, but that’s par for the course, but my suspicions were aroused when a dish of well done boiled vegetables then appeared at my elbow. The worst was confirmed when roast potatoes and gravy appeared a minute later. I mean WHAT IS THE POINT of serving fillet steak if you’re going to then turn it into a roast dinner? Personally I like steak with pommes frites and either béarnaise or peppercorn sauce, or mustard. Not BLOODY ROAST POTATOES AND GRAVY. I mean. Honestly.

¹ By 'rare' I mean pink, obviously. I don’t know what type of duck it was but hopefully not an endangered species.