Good Taste Cafe - Keswick (opposite Rohan shop)

Too warm in the seating area upstairs - do something about the heaters. Friendly service, if a little slow to arrive with the drinks and the caramel shortbread. An improvement on the latter from Bells - Wigton, much sweeter, chocolate thicker and resembling the dark stuff, caramel thicker but biscuit disappointing. Filled a gap perfectly fine and was sweet enough to begin to suggest magic, but something nagged. Doubts remain as to the wholesomeness of this effort. The shop seemed to have a selection of home made and imported biscuits. However, the latter seemed to be from those dubious olde worlde country cottagey biscuit concerns that predominate in too many indie cafe's and it's never entirely clear what was home made and what just came unwrapped in a large display case but was still sent out from Factory-ville, Nantucket and hadn't had the care of the local Mrs Moppet and her worn oven gloves.

Bells Bakery (chain) - Wigton, Early Dec 06

Caramel Shortbread
My oh my, a northern bakery but what a dismal C.S. It looked mass produced from a nasty clinical machine and it tasted of nowt. Biscuit too thin, dry and crumbly to oblivion. Caramel too thin and tasteless and the chococlate neither the real stuff, thick enough or nice enough.

Stollen
Still, it being the run up to Xmas, a slice of Stollen was available and was fantastic. Perhaps not the finest ingredients, but a lovely satisfying finger of cake, bursting with almonds and fruit and dusted in white powder. Buy one!

A day to bury bad news

PM interviewed by police, PM ends investigation of unscrupulous business dealings with the saudi military - all on the same day that Pricess Di's death re-enters the news stands. There's also an emerging story re: the british thoughts on Iraq, something about us not really seeing a risk from WMD? It really does seem quite unfathomable - that we let our elected servants get away with it...

End of Rain

As I walked up the valley tonight, on the gleaming wet tarmac, the air was really zinging. After a week its stopped raining and the air was razor sharp, cold cutting at my jacket where it was still damp from yesterdays sodden experiences. Out across the plains, across to the solway coast, the lights of nearby towns and villages seemed re-established and glinted away, reassuring and seemingly profound all at once. The dog noticed the change too and strutted between roadsides, the fresh air, cleaned of rain jabbing us both. The dry weekend shouldn't be wasted.

Casino Royale

What a strange film. It shouldn't really work, Bond's such a tired genre on reflection and no matter how hard you want it still to work you wonder if they really have the balls to pull it off. I'm not sure this film has balls, the first half hour gets to be a drag, endless action as if Bond has to prove himself in a hollywood action-a-thon, but what the film does have and where the balls do clearly reside is in Daniel Craig. He's a revelation, charismatic, brutal, brutally believable often and he single handedly keeps this pretty messy affair of a film afloat - its a huge task and that he does it with aplomb is all the more reason to forgive the overall film its flaws. The biggest test is to come though - making sure the next one, where the element of surprise Craig is afforded here, won't be so redolent...

Perfume Ads

To sound like Dad's across the land, bloody nonsense, embarassed and repressed, men kissing, women that look like men, men that look, well not right and thats just the vaguely penetrable ones. French, euro art house madness some of them. But they're no longer the worse adverts. That accolade must currently reside with mobile phone ads. Imaginative and exuberant they may be...people fall from skies (erm thats the new Canon EOS Digital Camera ad, but it looks like a mobile ad), or rip up the screen or bounce off solid concrete. Costly and clever they may be, but they wear this with an ugly, barely perceptible sheen of horror. In the same way the old pringles ads with kids playing bongos with the cartons made you want to massacre the party, mobile ads have a vacuous beauty, a soulless despicable emptiness to their uber professional oh so clever performances and visual flourishes. Go away scum.

wet monday

Its not stopped raining here it seems for the past two months. Tomorow morning I must be up early, up with the crows, to accompany caramel, black and white into the 7:30 gloom. I can't quite work out the light here right now. It seemed do-able this morning, not too dark that all enjoyment would be muted by the grey wet smog surrounding everything and if the wind dies down just enough, hopefully light enough to fly the disc. Pumpkin soup for tea tonight, hot and sweet and just the job to blow away the dankness around the bones. Funny how thinking about it now the winter seems like a bit of a journey into the unknown, how cold, how wet, when the clear days? the blisteringly crisp and dazzling frosts. The latter seem a distant enough memory. What's going to happen and how long will it take?