Oyster Festival Festivities

The annual festival started this year as usual with the 'Landing of the Catch' when the fishing boats bring in native oysters and parade them up the high street on the back of a horse and cart giving them out to all the local eateries. Down on the harbour is the other infamous event which invites contestants to down as many oysters as possible in the fastest time. This year I decided to give it a miss having watched the competition last year which left me feeling rather nauseous, watching people tip over 30 oysters down their throats all washed down with a bottle of Whistable ale.

There are always loads of different events going on over the festival weekend, jugglers, punch and judy and lots of arty things. Our neighbour Tim is an artist and had asked to borrow our beach hut for the festival so that him and a friend could do a show as they thought it would be a quirky idea to exhibit on the beach. Tim is often at home so I see him alot and always have a good old gossip and he has been good company on those days when I am home alone and have not always felt so good. He suggested that he would like to frame some of my photos and put them up with his paintings as part of the show. It was a really lovely gesture.

So, the beach art weekend turned into a bit of a family event, Mum and Dad, Lou and James and the newleyweds Jon and Jo came down on saturday for a BBQ and general hangout. We had lots of lovely food including this enormous loaf of bread that was a 2 man job to cut. It was a scorcher though and we were glad of our lovely gazebo to shelter us from the sun. The exhibition went well and generated a fair bit of interest, including one passer-by when talking to Tim said "Oh yes I am familiar with Liz Baileys work, yes I have seen it in other galleries in town" Not bad for a novice and an unknown..?

Green Fingers

As part of the journey of recovery after losing Ruby, I decided to put my time at home into growing some vegetables, something I knew very little about. So, during the spring I sowed packets and packet of seeds of all kind of salad and in the mini greenhouse that I had been given planted tomatoes and cucumbers.

Over the last month or so, Mike and I have enjoyed eating the various types of salad leaves and cucumbers that shot up and grew so quickly. Last weekend, though was the big day, the day when we harvested the rest of our crops. As we emptied our potato buckets out our anticipation grew waiting for the 10 - 15kg crop we had been promised from the potato company only to be rather disappointed at the rather meagre supply we seemed to have grown. Not only that but none of the potatos were any bigger than a golf ball.

Putting our deflated feelings aside we tackled the next crop of spring onions, 2 packets, planted out into 5 rows. I had already prepared myself for some disappointment as we had watched a large army of snails munch their way through some of the tops over the previous month but nevertheless, we were ever hopeful of making our favourite spring onion soup. But it was not to be, one small, little but perfectly formed spring onion was all that we pulled from our troughs. The carrots were marginally better having produced 5 rather bent short but perfectly sweet root vegetables which we roasted that night along with some of the potatoes and were absolutely delicious.

I am however, feeling a lot more confident about our tomato supply which we have watched grow over the past few months into 2 metre high plants that are absolutely laden down with fruit which the sun is now ripening at a very fast rate. So I know that these will be our pride and joy and luckily one of our favourite veggies too as we will be overloaded with tomatoes in a couple of weeks time.

Still as the proud grower of such legumes I felt they righly deserved a proper arrangment even if they were never to be entered into the local horticultural society competition. Well, maybe next year....

Barcelona

Mike and I returned home Monday night from our wonderful trip away to Barcelona. We spent the first few days on the beach as the weather was perfect. The beaches in Barcelona were very impressive, clean, beautiful warm sea and beach bars dotted all along them playing really great tunes. So we just layed back, applied the sunscreen, soaked up the sun and chilled out. It really was the most relaxed we have felt since Ruby left us, definitely the right time to go away.

I also loved these quirky speech bubbles that were planted along the beaches encouraging people to keep the beaches clean.

We managed to eat our way at a variety different eateries, sampling lots of fish and paella with Mike stealing a glance at the football scores on our walks through the restaurants and bars. Barcelona has a very young vibe and is thankfully not full of gangs of the English abroad. However, we did sit in a restaurant one night where there were 2 stag nights in full flow with both grooms dressed in womens clothing but surprisingly it was quite amusing watching their mates plotting various games and tricks to get them absolutely plastered.

We spent one evening walking round the gothic quarter which was quite stunning, tiny little winding streets, beautiful balconies on the buildings and little churches dotted here and there. We ate in a fabulous restaurant there where we listened to the resident pianist and violinist play a medley of well known classical numbers, just great. We also spent the day visiting La Salgrada Familia which is Gaudi's most famous piece of architecture. It is an amazing temple that is covered in so many carvings on the outside that it really is impossible to take them all in. Rising up the centre of the building in between the 4 huge spires was an intricate sculpture of the tree of life. Each spire is covered with various mosiacs and carvings that really were quite random in their themes. We walked round the inside and then took the 350 stepped walked up one of the spires stopping at various places for photos and view takings. At the top we crossed a small bridge linking the spires and had an great view across the whole city. In the 85 degrees heat though we felt slightly jaded on reaching the bottom. Well worth the sweat.

So we have returned with fabulous tans, heads full of Gaudi inspired ideas for our garden and very very rested.