Exercising democracy

We became citizens of Canada just a week or two after the last Ontario elections and there hasn't been an election at any level of government since then. Today's Ontario election was the first time I have had the opportunity to vote in this country. It's something that's easy to take for granted, but after living here for seven years without a vote, I have come to realise how important it is to have that small role in a democracy. When I didn't have it, I felt excluded from a significant part of local, provincial and national life.

Our polling station is 10km (6 miles) away - so it's not like being in a city where you can just stroll down the road to cast your vote. I decided to make an event of it and rode my bicycle to the town hall in Hillier. It's a nice route, as much of it is along the old railway line and consequently it's fairly flat (important as this was also my first bike ride this year. Shameful, I know!).

In one short stretch of my journey I encountered three separate snapping turtles, all scraping out hollows along the edge of trail and laying eggs in the depressions.

Definitely not something I've ever seen while going to cast a vote in England!

Easter nostalgia

I seem to have more memories of childhood Easters than I do of Christmases, for some reason. Like the time I left an Easter egg on the living room windowsill and it melted into a puddle. Mum put it in the freezer and I remember sitting in the garden the next morning, nibbling on frozen chocolate, thinking it was much nicer than the egg would have been.

Apart from hot cross buns on Good Friday, I don't think we had any particular food every Easter. Except various forms of chocolate, of course - the children at school would brag about how many eggs they'd received. Easter eggs don't seem to be as much of a thing over here, although chocolate certainly is.

My aunt sent us an Easter parcel with some Cadbury's mini eggs in it and they brought back a vivid memory of a cake my mother made one Easter. It had a bird's nest on top, made out of Shredded Wheat coated with chocolate, and a clutch of mini eggs in the middle.

I don't have any Shredded Wheat, but I did have some chow mein noodles which I thought might work just as well. I melted a bar of 85% chocolate with about 50g of butter and a tablespoon or two of honey, then stirred in the noodles, breaking them up a bit. I used my crumpet/egg rings as moulds for the nests (on a baking sheet covered with parchment paper) and piled the chocolate-covered noodles into them. 

I used the handle of a wooden spoon to make a bit of an indentation in the centre of each nest, then refrigerated them for a couple of hours until the chocolate had hardened, Then I removed the rings and put the mini eggs in the centre.

A perfect Easter dessert!

It's complicated

One thing that has struck me about winters here is how varied they are, which is not something I was expecting before we emigrated. Snow and ice, yes, I was expecting them, but it's the varied combinations of precipitation and temperatures that makes each winter not quite the same as the last and keeps us all talking constantly about the weather (I know the British have a reputation for talking about the weather a lot - but Canadians have so much more weather to talk about).

The ice storm was a first for us, and this winter was also the first time we'd experienced frost quakes (cryoseisms) - when rapid freezing after the ice storm jolted the house in what felt like a small explosion.

After grumbling about the blizzard-like conditions on Tuesday, I had a lovely walk in the snow-drifts that were left in their wake on Thursday.

There were interesting, meringue-like heaps,

alongside coyote tracks,

and ash trees disguised as silver birches, under an impossibly blue sky. Perhaps winter isn't so bad, after all.

Today's walk was less fun. It has warmed up just enough to make the layer of December ice below the snow unstable. Every so often the ice cracks underneath your weight, maliciously snagging an ankle or unexpectedly dropping your whole body six inches lower.

So yes, my relationship with winter is complex. Just when I'm ready to call the whole thing off, it charms me back. And then trips me up again. Sigh.

Disgusted at Drummondville

I've seen a couple of stories along the lines of the one reported by the CBC on Wednesday. A couple living in Drummondville, Quebec, have been told that they have to replace their front-yard vegetable garden with at least 30% lawn or face fines of $100-300 per day. There was a similar story about this time last year about a family in Oak Park, Detroit who also faced fines and possibly jail time over a similar issue. In that case, the charges were dropped after the city was bombarded with negative publicity. I hope the same will be true in Drummondville.

In both cases the vegetable gardens were a credit to their neighbourhoods and had been started with the best of intentions by the families involved. I find these by-laws baffling and anachronistic. I can (sort of) understand them being passed in the 1950s, when the suburban lawn was the height of fashion, but in today's world, where we are more aware that maintaining the monoculture of a lush lawn is a waste of precious water (and not to mention the toxic weedkillers and fertilisers that make their way into those water supplies)?

Out of interest, I went to Google Street View to see if there was a 'before' snapshot of the Drummondville front yard. By some fluke, I landed on the exact spot on my first look. So here is the garden as it looked whenever the Google car went past (if I've got the right property):

And here it is today as recorded by the CBC.

So much more interesting and vibrant, I'd say. Not to mention productive, health-enhancing, environmentally responsible... Sigh.

The Drummondville case is even worse than the Oak Park one, because the city is planning to ban all front yard vegetable gardens in homes built after this Fall. You can probably hear me banging my head on the desk from there.

Gardeners' delight

I usually try to avoid crowds: part of my motivation for moving to Canada was to escape the hideous crush of people in rush-hour public transport or the traffic jams which are such a normal part of life in getting from one part of England to another.

So for me to willingly attend an event at which thousands of people are expected is a little out of character. But when it worked out that I would be in England at the time of the Hampton Court Flower Show and that my aunt and her friend were willing to take me along with them, I jumped at the chance. I've never spent a day at one of the big flower shows and I thought it would be an experience not to miss, even if it might be a little stressful to be in a big crowd.

Luckily, the show is spread over a large area in the grounds of Hampton Court Palace and although it was very busy, it never felt overwhelming in terms of people. What's more, the show is full of such interesting plants, gardens and merchandise that it's impossible to feel claustrophobic for very long. And everyone attending is a gardener and is enjoying him or herself, so the crowd are good-tempered and happy to amble rather than rush.

The weather could have been better at the beginning of the day...

It was so wet that even the ducks needed boots:

But it did brighten up as the day went on.

The displays in the marquees were amazing and enough to distract my mind from the vaguely panicky feeling of claustrophobia caused by being in a space with so many other people:

The show gardens were inspiring and eye-catching:

Blue and yellow was a popular colour combination in quite a few of the gardens.

This garden was inspired by last year's UK riots. I liked the 'edible bus stop', with its crop of tomatoes and strawberries.

One thing I did enjoy about moving past other people in such a big crowd was the way I heard little snippets of other people's conversations. They are so intriguing: "...gravitating towards the agapanthus..." "...Tom could get those free at the cattle market..." - it's like tuning a radio from one channel to the next.

It was a wonderful day and I'd love to have the chance to do something similar back home in Ontario. There's a garden show in Toronto in March, but I'm not aware of anything quite like the summer RHS shows in Canada. It's a shame, as the weather there is much more likely to be co-operative! But I suppose the smaller population of gardeners wouldn't make it worthwhile to stage such an event. There it's a problem of not enough crowds.

The extent of our civilization

It's been quiet around here recently, mostly because I've been madly busy with work, on or off the farm, or with campaigning to try and stay in work, given recent drastic cuts to funding for archives in Canada. The children and I spent a day in May demonstrating in Ottawa against the cuts.

It was great to see democracy in action like that and it's been wonderful to see the way that our small profession and those sympathetic to our principles have responded to the threats posed by the short-sighted decisions of the individuals currently in charge of Canada's national library and archives. There's an online petition with more details about the issue, if you are interested in what all the fuss is about.

As a consequence of losing a chunk of my income with these cuts, I took on a stall in the local farmers' market on Saturdays this summer. This has meant I've had to spend more time keeping the garden weeded/seeded and my weekends are correspondingly shorter. All in all, there's a lot less time for blogging, but at least I'm spending more time outside, one way or the other!

I went to the national archivists' conference was in Whitehorse this past week (more time away from those fast-growing weeds, ack!). The conference was the perfect place to be at a time of professional crisis like this: a sort of group therapy. The sense of solidarity among archivists from all over Canada (and beyond) was fantastic. A colleague of mine from Britain commented that she didn't think that UK archivists would react in the same way if there was a similar threat to archival funding over there. I think she might be right - and it's only when the Canadian archival system is under threat that you understand that its members do see it as a system, rather than just a loose affiliation of professionals. It's a shame the people at Library and Archives Canada don't recognise it as such...

The last stop on our trip to Ottawa on May 28th was the statue of Dominion Archivist Sir Arthur Doughty (the only statue in Ottawa to honour a civil servant). The words on the base of the statue are these:

Of all national assets, archives are the most precious. They are the gift of one generation to another and the extent of our care of them marks the extent of our civilization.

Cracking crumpets

I read Emily's post on making English Muffins the other day with interest. It reminded me of the crumpet rings I bought a long time ago (probably from Lakeland, but the ones they sell now don't look like mine). I think I tried to make crumpets with them once, when we lived in England, and it wasn't a successful experiment. But crumpets, once regular weekend tea-time fare for us, are hard to find in the shops here (and disappointing when they are found) so I thought it was worth repeating the experiment.

I can't remember what went wrong last time I tried, but I suspect the problem was that the crumpet batter stuck to the rings. The trick to avoiding this is to make sure that the rings are greased and that they are allowed to get hot in the pan before you add the batter.

Anyway, here's the recipe I used. It's from the Good Housekeeping Cookery Book (1998). I note that the other recipe on the same page is for Peshwari Naan Bread. This one cookery book page sums up a century of British food tastes, I'd say. But I digress...

Crumpets
Makes 12 crumpets. (The book says this quantity makes 24. The book lies.)

350g/12 oz/2 generous cups strong white flour (I used all-purpose*)
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon sodium bicarbonate
1½ teaspoons instant dried yeast
300ml/10 fl. oz/1¼ cups warm water
250ml/8 fl. oz/1 cup warm milk
Oil for frying

Mix all the ingredients except the oil in a food mixer for a few minutes to make a thick batter. Cover and leave somewhere warm for an hour. Beat for a further minute then pour into a jug.

Heat a little oil in a frying pan over a high heat. Grease four 3-inch crumpet rings and stand in the pan for two minutes until very hot.

Pour the batter into each ring, so that they are about three-quarters full (the batter will expand as it cooks). Cook for 5-7 minutes on a medium heat until the surface is set and holey.

Remove the metal ring - the batter should have shrunk away from the edge, so this is fairly easy (not how I remember it from my earlier attempt!). My rings have little handles, which help. Flip the crumpets over to cook for one minute on the other side.

If you eat them straight from the pan, you don't need to toast them. But if you let them get cold, then toasting them will bring them back to full crumpetty perfection.

Watching the holes appear in the surface of the crumpets is fun. Here they are after a minute or two, with holes appearing at the edges:

Two or three minutes later, nearly ready to flip over:

And the finished product, crying out for some butter to melt into all those holes.

Personally, I don't think crumpets are complete without Marmite on them, too. But I accept that might be a little too English for some people...

*I tried this recipe with strong flour a week or two after writing this post. It wasn't a success: much harder to pour the batter, which turned into a gloopy mess. My advice is to stick with regular flour. If you like, you can substitute wholemeal flour for half of the total, to make a slightly more rib-sticking version.

Fronts on Front Street

The older stores on Belleville's Front Street show a genteel, polished appearance to users of the street, but it's a different story in the alleys leading up to it. There, the limestone structure of the buildings is on display, with no attempt to hide its roughness with a layer of plaster.

I haven't yet worked out why 'Front Street' is the preferred term in this part of the world for 'Main Street' (or what would be 'High Street' in England). But when you see the contrast between the sides and the fronts of these buildings, it makes you wonder if that's got something to do with it...

At the County fair

Some of the sights at the County Fair were what I was expecting. Beautiful vegetables:

And shiny fruit:

The Demolition Derby was a new experience for me, though. I do vaguely remember seeing banger racing in England as a child, but that was an actual race around a track. This was more brutal: like the dodgems but with real cars, played out in what seems to be a very small field of battle. The driver of the last car still capable of moving wins.

In theory, I disapprove of this form of entertainment: it's dangerous and not at all environmentally friendly.

But there's no denying that there is something thrilling about watching people deliberately crashing cars into each other. The crowd gets really involved, with lots of cheering for particularly spectacular collisions. I can see why this has become a standard part of county fairs in North America.

I feel a little guilty about enjoying it, that's all...

School days

Child#1 is embarking on her first year of high school next week and she spent part of yesterday at an orientation session at her new school, picking up a lock, student card and her schedule for the year. I took one looked the schedule and went "Huh?". Maybe not the most eloquent of speeches, but that document really confused me. Partly because it seemed to be written in code (I'm sure she's looking forward to her first lesson of PPL101b, for example), but mostly because it was so simple. For the first five months of the school year she will have the same four classes every day. Then in the rest of the year, she'll have a different four classes.

Each day of the week exactly the same and only four different classes: this is the 'semester system' and it seems very strange to me. I imagine it makes timetabling a lot easier, but it does sound rather monotonous. And odd not to be doing a core subject like English, French or Mathematics for half of a year! When I think back to my timetable for the same age (13/14), I had 13 different subjects (and 12 separate exams at the end of that year (now I'm feeling hard-done-by)). Seems like the kids specialise very early here. Will be interesting to see how it works out.

Having a riot

Mike got the new electric poultry netting connected up at the weekend and the remaining hens are enjoying being back out in their green space again.

We did notice quite a difference in their eggs while they were confined to the coop because of the chance of a fox attack. A study by Mother Earth News suggests that compared with eggs from caged birds, eggs from hens free to roam on grass contain:

⅓ less cholesterol
¼ less saturated fat
⅔ more vitamin A
2 times more omega-3 fatty acids
3 times more vitamin E
7 times more beta carotene

Impressive, huh? I'm looking forward to getting back to those kind of eggs again, now that the hens are back on the orchard grass.

The news from England has been depressing over the last few days, with reports of rioting, arson and looting in London and other cities. In the middle of all that, we got letters yesterday informing us that our Canadian citizenship test will be taking place in two weeks' time. I don't think I've ever felt more enthusiastic about becoming Canadian and less proud about being English.

Old enough for Shakespeare

I remember the first time we took the children to a live theatre event. They were about three and four years old when we went to see 'The Tweenies' at the Manchester Evening News Arena. They were completely enthralled by the performance. So much so that when it was over Child#2 had a massive tantrum, distraught that the show had finished. He refused to walk and had to be dragged, bawling all the way, to the tram stop in Victoria Station. He wasn't much given to tantrums (if my memory is being reliable) and the fact that it was caused by an occasion we thought would be a great treat was particularly galling.

But that was nearly ten years ago and he's grown up a bit now. When I saw that there was going to be an outdoor performance of Macbeth in the County yesterday (performed by the Driftwood Theatre Group), I wondered if the children might like to go and see it. I wasn't sure if they were old enough to appreciate Shakespeare, but thought it worth a try. I'd seen open-air productions of Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream in Oxford in the 1990s and they'd been excellent. I wasn't expecting to get the chance to relive those experiences out here in rural Ontario.

When I suggested it to the children they were both quite enthusiastic, although their cultural contexts for Macbeth might have given me pause. I asked Child#2 first and he was keen to see it because he'd recently seen an episode of The Simpsons which had featured Homer and Marge as Macbeth and his Lady. When I sounded out Child#1 she immediately thought of an old episode of Blackadder which had featured frequent mentions of 'The Scottish Play' and wanted to see it because of that.

So they both had a context for the play, although I wasn't sure that there were going to be quite as many laughs a minute in the real thing as there had been in the TV shows they'd seen. And sitting through a half-hour comedy is rather different from sitting through a two-hour tragedy. But I thought it was worth a try.

Having learnt from our firework-watching experience on Canada Day, we packed up garden chairs, sweaters and a picnic and made our way to Bloomfield, where we formed part of the very front row on the southeast side of the stage. As the sun went down behind the trees, the performance began and as the play became darker, so did the night.

There were perhaps 200 people in the audience, none of us very far from the stage, and the actors were coming and going all around us, making everyone feel very much part of the performance (if slightly distracted by some persistent mosquitoes and enormous moths). I really enjoyed it and, to my slight surprise, the children said that they did, too. I think it was the immediacy of it that pulled them in: it's very different from watching a play on a distant stage or on a movie screen. There were quite a few children in the audience and (I'm pleased to report) there were no tantrums or even complaints from any of them on this occasion.

Back in the saddle

It's been a while since I've done much cycling. We used to do a fair bit when we first got married and there was a brief period when I was close enough to my workplace to cycle to it. After having a couple of babies it got more difficult to do - and even harder when we moved to Manchester and were surrounded by busy city streets. Even once the children could ride their bikes, you don't want to be out on those roads with them. Going for a ride meant loading up the car and driving somewhere in the country: a lot of hassle.

Where we are now is a little bit of cycling heaven (hardly any traffic, picturesque country roads), but it's taken four years of living here before I've got around to getting back on a bike again. I'd forgotten how much fun it was. I'm taking it fairly slowly, as I know I'm not at all fit (and it's going to be a while before my body gets used to a saddle again!). Last week I did short rides in the early morning in each of the three different directions it's possible to go from our house. This morning I managed my first self-imposed target: a circular route of 14km/8.7 miles. I notice that Google Maps now has cycling directions. They reckon it should take 41 minutes to do this route. I think I did it in 50, so I'm certainly not as fit as the Google average...

My next target will be to do a ride around the perimeter of Lake Consecon, which will be about 20km/12 miles.

One of the great things about cycling is that you notice things that you miss in a car. It's also easier to stop and take a photo (you feel a lot less noticeable stopping a bike than you do stopping a car). That's why I'm slower than Google thinks I should be...

Harvest lines

Curious cows

Flooded corn

Canada Day fireworks (finally!)

I've had a camera with a fireworks setting on it for a while now, but I've never had a chance to try it out, because we've not been to see any displays since we moved to Canada. As this was our fifth Canada Day, this is possibly a shocking confession. Fireworks are as integral to Canada Day as they are to Independence Day in the US or Bonfire/Guy Fawkes Night in the UK.

Part of the problem is the time of year: it doesn't get properly dark until 10pm, which makes it a late event when you've got kids. Not something that was ever a problem with Bonfire Night in November, when it is dark in Manchester by 5.30pm. This is the first year that we've thought the children might actually stay awake to see the show. We went to Picton, where the hill at Delhi Park makes a natural amphitheatre: a perfect viewing spot. It was an impressive event.

The pictures I took aren't what I'd call classic firework shots, but I was pleased with the results, anyway.

This one is of two sparklers that some children near us were waving around:

The rest are the fireworks. The last one looks like those weird deep-sea creatures that never see daylight, I think.

Next year, I'll take something to sit on: it's surprising how cold and damp the grass can get after a hot day!

P.S. Realised after posting that this day marks the fifth anniversary of blogging in 'Someone Else's Kitchen'. So all the more reason to celebrate!

Early-onset nostalgia

Child #1 is moving on to high school in September and it looks as though Child #2 will be going to a different one in the following year. Consequently, this week will be the last for them to be travelling home together on the same school bus. It's making me sad, this end of a stage in their lives.

Of course, if we'd stayed in England, this stage would have finished two years ago. Here, the elementary schools run to grade eight, rather than the more usual year six in English primary schools. So both children would have been in secondary education by now. I'm happier with the way it works here, although I didn't know about this particular difference until after we moved. By delaying high school to the age of 13 it feels like they get to be children for longer.

The transition from one school to another is celebrated in a graduation ceremony. This seemed odd to me, when I first heard about it. Graduation from high school seemed strange enough, but from elementary school? For all I know, this is something that is happening in the UK now, too, but neither of these transitions were marked by a school event when I went through them. I do remember being very excited about leaving both my primary and secondary schools, though. No nostalgia at all for me in those days. Must be something that comes on with age...

Last night was my daughter's graduation and although the school's gym was hot and crowded, the ceremony was enjoyable: it was great to see the young people being recognised for their achievements. I don't often blather on about my kids, so bear with me while I share the moment of happiness I felt as I watched my fledgling young woman dance with her dad.

After a long time of being the parents of two children, we're suddenly finding that we are sharing our lives with two young adults. I can't quite believe how quickly that has happened. It's wonderful to watch them growing up, but nostalgia for their almost-over childhood years can be hard to shake off at times of like this.

Now I'm going to listen to ABBA singing 'Slipping through my fingers' while I shed some tears onto my keyboard. With any luck I'll be back to normal by the time that yellow bus draws up outside again...

Libraries and volunteers

Wellington Library

This post is slightly off-topic for this blog, really, but at the core of it is what seems to be a deep difference between the way things work in Canada and in the UK. The context is the deep cuts in library services that are being made across many areas of Great Britain. This grim map shows the extent of the planned closures. There is an assumption being made by those advocating closures that volunteers will step up to keep libraries open.

My very limited experience here in Canada is that volunteers have an important (actually, essential) role in small libraries. There is a core of paid staff, but a lot of desk-duty, book-shelving and labelling is undertaken by volunteers. When I started reading British librarians' objections to the use of volunteers, my first reaction was to think 'well it seems to work quite well here', and wonder what the fuss was about. The work done by volunteers in just one library I'm involved with here is worth tens of thousands of dollars a year.

But then I reflected a bit further and realised that 'here' and 'there' aren't very similar in this respect. My sense is that volunteering is much more common here and there is much more community spirit. Of course, part of this is the difference between living in a rural area here and (most recently) living in a city, there, but I also lived in an Oxfordshire village for a while and I still don't think there was the same extent of voluntary work there. There was a central hard-core set of retired people who had time to spare for community work, but I would say that was it. Just here in the County there are so many different organisations which do charitable works in the community - Lions, Kiwanis, Rotary, Legion, Elks, Odd Fellows, Masons, Women's Institutes, to name but a few (and that's not even looking at the activities of the various churches). And all for a population of only 25,000.

In Ontario, children have to do 40 hours of community service once they get to high school, which helps to get them into the volunteering mindset, I suppose. The Canadian Citizenship Study Guide we've got to learn for our test emphasises that one of the responsibilities of citizenship is 'Helping others in the community'. I somehow doubt that the same point is made in the British equivalent, but I'd be happy to be proved wrong about that.

Philip Pullman's wonderful, passionate speech in defence of Oxfordshire's threatened libraries makes good points about the scarcity of volunteers in the UK. I wonder why the two countries are so different in this respect, and whether it has always the case, or if something changed at some point in the UK to make people less likely to volunteer their time for others.

Deprived childhood

Growing up on the south coast of England, we never had much in the way of proper winters. Or proper summers, for that matter, I suppose, but that's a topic for another post. We got snow sometimes, but never all that much and never for very long. My brother and I had inherited an old toboggan which had been given to us by our grandfather. We lived half-way up a smallish hill and we would jump at the chance to ride the toboggan down the pavement/sidewalk on the rare occasions when it did snow. I remember our (utterly selfish) outrage when Mr Collins, our elderly neighbour, put salt down on his part of the pavement and spoiled our fun. I suppose we were about ten and eleven at the time.

We took our toboggan elsewhere and made a new slide on a pavement of a different road, a few streets away. The road was a quiet one, mainly inhabited by elderly people, but it had a nice slope and that was all we cared about. We had a great time for an hour or two, but the major disadvantage of our new toboggan run was that it was visible from the upstairs windows of our own house. Mum saw what we were doing and was (quite rightly) horrified - what if some of the old people had slipped and fallen on what was now an absolutely lethal pathway? She came to put a stop to our fun and I remember her being furious with us, although there is a blank space in my memory as to what the consequences of our selfish hour of fun were. If I'd been her I would have made us scatter salt on the slide, but I can't remember if that's what happened.

Anyway, the point I was trying to make was that we didn't get a lot of snow and ice to play with when we were young. There was sometimes a layer of ice on a puddle to crack, but that would be about it. I'm baffled now, by my own children, who spend hardly any time at all playing outside in the winter. On the plus side, it means that they're not getting up to the mischief that my brother and I were at the same age, so I'm not having to worry about what they're doing, but I can't help feeling that they're missing out.

I, on the other hand, am still making up for lost time. The recent thaw has thinned the ice over the stream. The winter-deprived child in me takes great delight in breaking the ice and creating mini ice-bergs and ice-jams. I know my eleven-year-old self would have been out there playing for hours.

So why aren't my kids?

Festive ice cream

These are my Christmas gifts for my co-workers at the library (it's OK, I don't think they read this blog, so it should still be a surprise!). I decided to make ice-cream for them this year. With a North American flavour.

The orange-coloured layer at the bottom of these pots is pumpkin pie ice cream. I roasted my pumpkin at the weekend and it produced about five pounds of purée. Mike suggested that my colleagues might like it as ice cream. A quick hunt online found a few recipes, including this custard-based one which was what I used as the foundation for my version. I drained the purée in cheesecloth in a sieve for half an hour or so, first, as pumpkin can be quite watery. The other departure from the recipe was to stir in pieces of crystallised ginger to the finished ice cream (an idea from one of the other recipes I found).

As you can see, the pumpkin pie ice cream didn't really fill the five containers, so I needed to think of something else for the top layer. Originally, I was just going to do vanilla, but then it occurred to me that it wouldn't take much to turn vanilla ice cream into egg nog ice cream. Just a bit of nutmeg, cinnamon and a generous slosh of brandy, in fact. Tastes pretty good. There's some left over and I think it will be great as a topping on my Christmas pudding. A mix of Old and New World. How apt.

Catching up

Nearly three weeks is a long time to be away. The garden has changed considerably, with two frosty mornings in my absence. The outside tomato plants which I'd left green and fruiting are now brown and dead and the basil plants are blackened skeletons. Other vegetables are still going strong: there's a fair broccoli crop and the spinach is looking fantastic.

The new chickens are now as big as last year's hatch, but they're not yet laying. The feathers of the older hens look quite faded in comparison to the younger ones:

There has been an excellent crop of shaggy ink-cap mushrooms in the orchard, although I've missed the peak of production. We did manage to gather enough for the three adults to have a pleasant supper of mushrooms-on-toast last night. This year, with the losses to the May frost, we've actually picked more mushrooms from the orchard than we have fruit!

I transferred the wormery from the garage to the basement, to protect the worms from the frost. They'd converted two trays of kitchen waste into crumbly black compost, which I've added to one of the greenhouse beds. Mike and Child#2 put three tractor-loads of wood into the garage, ready for the days of wood-fires.

In England, the trees were still mainly green. Here, the ash trees have lost all their leaves. The only deciduous trees with leaves still attached in our little bit of wood are the oaks. And we only have two of those, so it's looking pretty bare. Considering that the temperature in both countries is similar at this time of year (and that we're further south here, and therefore get more daylight), it's quite a striking difference.

Adventures in public transport

I've been on a trip to the UK since the beginning of October, which I hope explains my blogging silence. It was a strange visit, starting in Aberdeen and ending up in Kent, with lots of buses, trains and walking in between.

One of the big differences between living in rural Ontario and living in a British town is the availability of public transport. In my trip away I saw the best and the worst of UK public transport, from severe overcrowding on trains in London and Leicester, to punctual and frequent bus services in Aberdeen and Dundee. OK, the bus from the airport into Aberdeen on my first day wasn't so good - I had a half-hour wait in wind and rain and then the woman who was sitting behind me vomited into her bag as we got into the city. But otherwise, my bus experiences in Scotland were fairly positive.

In Leicester I enjoyed the scenic environs of the New Walk very much. Except for the point when a man entered the park and urinated against a tree just twenty feet from where I was sitting. That was another low point of the trip. As I walked back to the station, a couple were having a screaming row on the path. So loud and passionate were they ("This time I never slept wiv no-one!"), that I half-suspected it to be a piece of street theatre, with hidden cameras recording the responses of passers-by. At times on this trip I wondered if all these people had been sent to misbehave around me just to reassure me that I'd made the right decision about emigrating.

The only other note-worth journey was the experience of going into and out of London's St. Pancras station on the Southeastern Highspeed trains. It was novel to get from Kent to London by first travelling through Essex. The trains had a mildly annoying three-note chime before every announcement.*

On my journey back into Kent something had gone wrong with the automated announcements altogether and it seemed to be stuck on a continuous loop, repeatedly informing us that the train was on its way to Faversham. This began by being irritating, but soon I became close to breaking into unseemly giggles, as everyone else in the carriage was studiously ignoring the repetitions. Perhaps it happens every night. I began to feel that there was some deep significance to the brief pause and then seductively breathy emphasis that the female voice gave to the final word of the announcement "and...Faversham". It was quite a relief to get off that swish, clinical and high-tech train at Rochester, to board a smelly regular train, whose digital display insisted, for the remainder of the journey, that the next stop was going to be Bromley South.

Where we are now, there isn't much public transport at all, so I miss these delights, in a perverse way. Now, when I go back, I feel like an outsider and observer of British life, rather than a part of it. It's an odd feeling.


*British readers of a certain age might remember a similar arrangement in announcements made in the 1980s sit-com Hi-de-Hi. It was very similar to that.