Whilst staying with my parents over the weekend we visited Filey, a place I hadn’t been to for many years. It was a pretty cold, blustery day but we managed a walk along the sea front and spotted this water feature based on a maritime compass which is part of Filey’s art and craft scene and which I primarily noticed because of Richard’s obsession with the shipping forecast.
No cream teas to review, but I can say that the Rainbow cafe does good bacon sandwiches.
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After catching the second half of last year’s The Apprentice, we started watching this series from the beginning and have enjoyed watching the comings and goings. I’m pretty impressed that an ex-pupil of the senior school I went to, Michelle, went on to win it and is now Alan Sugar‘s Apprentice. An excellent programme.
If you’re following The Happiness Formula on BBC 2 (Wednesdays, 7pm) you might be interested in the above book. The book covers what I’ve seen so far in the TV show, only in more detail.
Oh, the book write ups I do from time to time, are now available as an RSS feed.
If you’re having a party and wondering how much soft drink to get in, here’s a graph summarizing the proportions of consumption we saw at our little do the other day. It’s more-or-less in-line with the
moderately interesting Britvic soft drink report 2006 (PDF, which contains wonderful phrases such as: “Consumption occasions are the key to understanding and targeting consumers, to ultimately unlock category expansion”).
I think we could have shifted more volume of the J2O, and we definitely over-budgeted on lemonade-based drinks. Mineral water was popular.
Of course more beer was glugged than all soft drinks combined.
I feel that this could be the year of the teashop, or maybe just afternoon tea in general. So far we’ve visited 3 this season.
The first was when we were in Haworth with my Mum and Dad over Easter. We stopped off at the Apothecary Tea Rooms which is a pleasant place with a great view over the Worth Valley. Richard and I had sandwiches, but Mum and Dad had scones, and so it counts as afternoon tea rather than lunch 🙂
The second was Tallulah’s Tea Rooms, here in Brighton, in fact just around the corner from our house. We’ve eaten breakfast there (excellent), and we’ve had sunday lunches there (tasty and fresh), but up until yesterday we hadn’t managed afternoon tea. Richard and Nikki were still in Brighton after my birthday party on Saturday and so we met up with them for fresh, warm scones. As with all the rest of the food we’ve had there, excellent.
Then today we decided we were peckish after our visit to the British Wildlife Centre and so stopped off at the Duddleswell Tea Rooms in the Ashdown Forest. I drive past these tea rooms quite often on my way home from work and so it was good to try them out. It’s a busy place, so we sat outside and watched the world go by. They seemed to have run out of scones, so whilst my Old English Tea of crumpets and jam turned up really quickly, Richard’s Ashdown Forest Tea (2 scones with butter and jam) took 5 or so minutes longer to arrive. The crumpets were excellent, and the scones were pretty tasty too. Be prepared for a wait though as this is a popular place.
I’ve borrowed Sussex teashop walks from a friend at work so that should give us some inspiration for other tea rooms to try in the next few months 🙂
I picked up a copy of the “Brighton Festival of Artists Open Houses” booklet at the weekend. When browsing through it I spotted that Jules has got some work being exhibited – at Holland Street and Art Organic.
Last month we went to see Terry Garoghan‘s Brighton The Musical. I saw him perform Worthing, to the tune of Wild Thing, at the Crocodile Comedy club in the early 90s I suppose, but I didn’t realize it had grown it into a full-blown musical. Too many great songs to pick a favourite. I’d call the whole thing quite silly and wonderful, but others say it is “proper unpretentious, working-class humour at its best“. I should go and buy the CDs (which will make no sense to anyone who doesn’t know Brighton fairly well).
We had a bit of a country pub crawl on Saturday night. We started off for dinner at The Ram Inn, Firle which was really good – a nice pub, with a lovely atmosphere, good beer and an impressive menu (small, but carefully prepared). We headed off through Glynde, nearly lost a wing mirror to a 4 wheel drive full of paragliders who were too adrenalin filled to drive sensibly on narrow country lanes before arriving at The Cock Inn, Ringmer for a half of Old Ale. We then headed off to the Half Moon at Plumpton for a half of Old Cocky before finishing off at the White Horse in Ditchling. A great evening.
I missed the news that Muriel Spark had died. Those with good memories may remember that one of my photographs was used as the cover for All the Poems of Muriel Spark a couple of years ago.