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?

RocknRoll Hell

My oh my, what a dismal showing the recent induction of George Martin to C4's R&R Hall of Fame was. Talking heads espoused his greatness, but instead of potentially interesting post-punk, new york funksters turned fifty-sixty somethings, the talking heads C4 gave us ranged from Celine & Ozzy up to Nobody, how George had done this and that blah de blah de la. Yeah fine, you've managed not to tell us anything interesting and the music's nowhere...and hand on just a miunte, was that Celine Dion we saw him with a fleeting moment ago amidst the jump cuts. I'd run for the hills, if I wasn't already cowering beneath one of albert's most northerly fells. Whatever his achievements and let's not forget (as everyone seems to in this aren't Oasis great, ohhh look the emperor bono has new clothes on, topsy turvey world where boring middle class white kids playing guitar and singing about love and isolation in the indie TM genre, bless, predominate like acid house never happened...erm go on just name anybody around right now...) lets not forget that in this musical garbage bin of existence we seem to have to live in, listen to at present, lets not forget that since his achievements with the Beatles, there's been punk, there's been Kraftwerk and there's been Acid House. That's erm at least three revolutions. Bloody hell, how many more will we need to kill them off. Instead the beheaded corpses of christmas pasts, stupid, ignorant bloated ancien' regime hangers on still perpetuate - and to this end we had a mega mix comprising an orchestra (groan) a dumb ass drummer (the moron from Queen) [awful], the pointless turd lead singer from Razorlight [worse than even Queen] drowning out Jose Gonzales (the point of his delicate guitar plucking against this racket was erm, what?!). In two words, truly awful. Thry should all be thoroughly ashamed of themselves, every single one of em.

England Vs Holland

Two kids from the manchester city academy finished tonight's game (Micah Richards & SWP). What's happened to SWP is a lesson (hopefully) to Micah. Leaving city does you no good. Worse still going to a london club, a supposedly "big" club, although in this case a club that had won pretty much rock-all until Abramovich & Mourinho combined in recent seasons, does you no good. Better to stay with city Micah and hope that SP knows what he's doing and SWP returns. Yeah its a totally longer shot than winning the lottery and getting hit by lightening on the same afternoon, but its called blind faith and its what's kept city fans turning up for the past few fruitless decades... Plus, think of the service your doing the country, stay at city, play for england, replace gary neville and we're all spared his girly waddle and bum-fluff facial gorm that's graced a hundred MUTV specials. Devoid of humour, self knowledge, self depreciation, reality, community and rational thought processes like the rest of the Man U brand, the end of gary neville and his brother phil is at hand. Thank the lord. Here's at least one shop steward who deserves the hate of the daily mail.

Caramel Shortbread

Millionaires shortbread to some, presumeably due to some historical wealth index which dictated only those with plums in mouths could partake of the luxury of bare biscuit covered in caramel and chocolate. Quite how they managed both plum and biscuit... But, for today, in the age where the chocolate, caramel and wierd fluffy stuff of the mars bar (the fuffy section resembles the liner of some pipe at a chemical factory) has been overtaken by the "boost", scientific caffeine fuelled, fatty's "power bar", which unfortunately tastes like shit, the caramel shortbread is surely a more down home, down with the kids, snak of the people?
Clearly I don't like the name Millionaires Shortbread.
Caramel Shortbread though is gorgeous.

Too thin chocolate? Too crumbly biscuit? Too runny caramel? I'm going to find the perfect caramel shortbread biscuit...

Missing Frisbee

Dark nights here now and it hasn't stopped raining in days. The sun, wherever it is behind acres of uniformly bland grey / black cloud, is in a foreign country altogether and the walks with the magic dog, her brown tricolour looking like caramel, are a grim affair. The ground squelches and the clay heaves. Moving at least a little, although it doesn't bother budging itself much for these city feet. Splashing in who knows what, scampering amidst the gloom, I'm gonna have to towel you down later so I hope its not brown and smelly. How I miss the late summer evenings of your first walks, all sun bleached sky and swarms of insects amongst the overhanging trees and big sky across to scotland. And frisbee, soaring, gliding and damn, careering off at unintended angles, and just a few times the magic throw, on the mark, on the money, perfect wrist and not too much power, straight as a dye and you chasing after it. Frisbee evenings are a long time coming...