pumpkinstrokemarrow

DT gets off to a good start yesterday with the information that St Michael's Mount is under threat by rising sea levels. Page 3 lead. I found this quite alarming as Epsom is only a hundred feet or so above current sea levels. Calmed down when the small print explained that what they actually meant was that the causeway to the Mount may no longer be passable, even at low tide. Further in, there was a large picture of a tiger in a pond with duckweed, said to be desperate. Not at all clear why. Maybe their correspondant could smell the fear on the tiger - although this seems a bit unlikely as presumably the picture was lifted from some wire service to fill a bit of dead page. And then, a couple of days ago, we were told that the entire Best Western customer database had fallen into the hands of a hacker, with the clear implication that it was for onward sale to Al Quaeda. Today I get an email from Best Western (as someone who has patronised one of their establishments in the recent past. I rather like them) explaining that there was a security lapse (virus infestation) in one of their hotels in Germany, permitting access to details of ten people who had recently stayed at that establishment. They are working hard with the relevant regional, national and international authorities. And then a few days before that, the story of the old lady who was funding a rest home for her friends out of the proceeds of a thriller that she had just published at the age of 90 or something. Always wanted to be a writer. It turns out that the enterprising lady made use of the services of a vanity publisher, which is to say that she pays them rather than the other way around. It seems that several papers picked the thing up before the TLS blew the whistle, the TLS properly being more learned in the arcana of publishing than the DT.

Back to decorating yesterday. With the first coat of crushed apricot on two of the four extension walls. For some reason I could not get the name Cloudsey Shovell out of my mind while I was doing this. Checking afterwards in Chambers (a good source. And being published in 1956, entirely independant of Mr Google and other internentiles), I find that Sir Clowdisley Shovell was a notable naval warrior in the War of the Spanish Succession, drowned along with 2,000 odd others, off the Isles of Scilly when returning to base for R&R in 1707. I must have come across him in my recently acquired book about the Household Cavalry by Barney White-Spunner (vide supra). But quite failed to make this, or any other connection, while actually painting. The vapours from the crushed apricots must have got to me. Maybe I could get into business selling them as an illegal psychoactive substance?

Or maybe it was the cabbage soup. The day before the BH had firmly declined any further lentil soup. But circumstances conspired against her and I was allowed to make cabbage soup. Simmer six ounces of pearl barley with thin crosswise sliced celery for an hour or so. While this is going on cut half a pound of roast Polish bacon (vide supra) into centimetre cubes. Wash a goodly quantity of crinkly cabbage leaves. Cut each one down the middle of the tough central rib, then slice thin crosswise. Add cabbage and bacon to the pearl barley about ten minutes before the off. Add mushrooms about five minutes before the off. Unusual flavour but good. We did the whole lot, maybe half a gallon, in one sitting.

By way of conclusion I should correct the impression that I may have given that pies are rare in Devon, on the basis of recent experience in Exeter. There are pots of them in Dawlish. Provided you go before 1700 on Sunday (when lots of eateries seem to shut), no problem at all.