Archive for the ‘Fen news’ Category
Pint of nostalgia.
Learning to drink in the fens
Although a short course.
Name: Ellgood’s Cambridge Bitter
Type: bitter
Venue: Four Candles, Oxford
Review/notes: Odd to see an Ellgood’s brew in Oxford but a welcome sight, indeed. Brakspear could learn a thing or two about the production end of the business from these Wisbech ladies. This beer was, indeed, bitter, but with layers of hop that maintain their individual flavours. Welcome trip down memory lane to our first year in England, back east in Cambridgeshire/East Anglia.
As this blog winds down (fear not: it will continue at Drunken Bunny), I have been meaning to look back over my old posts from the first to now and list my own personal favourites (about once per month I really knock one for six, but most of the others — like this one — are just there for duty’s sake). This Ellgood’s pint prompted me to start and I just got through February and March of 2009. By the time this blog fills, I should be easily through December 2014.
[DT =Daily Tipple, explained in DT #000 here]
Monthly consolidations/compilations: January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
Biased by our personal histories we are forced to judge the world accordingly. I know, and have known for a long time, that the Otter Brewery is down in Devon but my first Otter Bitter was nearly five years ago in the Lazy Otter near Stretham (on the River Ouse) then every other pub I hit on the Great Ouse seemed also to stock the stuff, so I have a very Fen-centric view of the brews. Today in the Fork Handles I found Otter Claus waiting for me.
Overall: Not much different from Otter’s Bitter, but that’s not a complaint.
Colour: Streets by the Wisbech docks after a flood, ferric red/brown.
Aroma: A spring jog along the mouth of the Great Ouse close to the Great Wash, with cereal growing in the fields and sugar beet fumes billowing from the factories.
Mouth: Medium but a bit sticky. I’m sure this would prompt an argument with those that know better but it’s an argument that reminds me of pointing out how heavy the accents in East Anglia actually are (like Californians, they think they don’t have an accent, and like Californians they are dead, fucking wrong).
Flavour: All business: bitter, curt, and sharp; but, also a farm business with some of the social niceties left intact, like the floral scents in the aftertaste.
Yesterday’s entry here.
The Aldreth Causeway was the path by which William the Conquerer was able to invade the Isle of Ely and eventually defeat the forces of Hereward the Wake. For me, it is a nice fen trail that gets me between Haddenham and Wililngham fairly quickly on my long runs and with a minimum amount of traffic. Here are some historic information signs from the footpaths:
Here is another article from my local paper, with some links to national news.
Best line:
“I assure you the problem of throwing fruit is no joke.”
Father arrested for carrying out citizen’s arrest on yobs ‘who threw apples at him and his wife’ (Mail)
Seriously, though, kids are out of control here.
Here’s an article wherein a couple receive suspended sentences for growing 83 marijuana plants because they are heavy users and the judge found it plausible that this was meant for personal use.
First consider that the plants were valued at £26000, total…that’s a little less than $500 US. The newspapers in the US typically value a cannibas stem as $5000 to $6000.
Then, consider that even crappy growers are going to bet an ounce of buds off each plant (dunno how I know that). If half are males and discarded, the 41 ounces (forget that they could easily harvest up to as much as 300 ounces) they have sitting around the would easily keep two stoners going for 6 months to a year if they lost half of it (and what are the chances of that).
The students, if they can call themselves such after this, at Anglia Ruskin University have converted their student union bar into a gymnasium…another sign that something is seriously wrong with the youth of today:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/8269157.stm
look at this jackass, he needs a beer and some smokes
My sleepy little village is all over the news, lately. Primarily, we have been watched because of the just ended trial, conviction, and sentencing of a mom that stabbed her two teenage daughters to death here two years ago:
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2009/09/22/rekha-kumari-baker-trial-mum-stabbed-her-daughters-to-death-in-revenge-attack-on-men-115875-21691470/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cambridgeshire/8268632.stm
Then, just last Sunday morning an 81-year-old childrens book author (who has sold more than 21 million copies of her Topsy and Tim series) was mugged by a teenager as she left the village store:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cambridgeshire/8267542.stm
This post will be updated periodically, and I think I’ll just give it a new publish date to stick it on top when it is updated.
Chippenham:
Fordham:
Isleham (didn’t think to ask if it is “Eye-El-Ham” or “Izzel-hum”):
Updates from Bar Hill – Cavendish Labs run on 15 May 2009):
The American Cemetary near Madingley:
Madingley (I think they meant to have “per arduo surgo” on the shield, but proofreading is a bitch…rising through adversity):
Cottenham:
Went for a run from near the Cavendish Laboratories, through Coton, past a military gunnery range, through Hardwick, Comberton and Barton (where I found some grafitti in the bus shelter). Here are the bits of signage I was able to add for this trip:
Coton village
north end of a firing line, just west of Coton
Comberton village
Barton village
In the Barton bus shelter
Public footpath signs don’t always have the village that the path leads to, if indeed one is led to at all…it’s even unusual for them to even point to the footpath:
Impington
Sutton (both sides, as they are different)
Haddenham
About halfway between Stretham and Waterbeach, there’s this pub/lodge/restaurant called the Travellers Rest. I had planned, with some Ordnance Maps, to run from there along some fen trails back to the house after work yesterday but left the map and got turned around at the intersection of some farm roads and wound up trapped by drainage canals and running–quite illegally–along the right of way for the railroad.
The camera I generally run with has seen better days and failed on me during the run so I can’t post the pictures of long dried up morels (stock photo above) I found on the side of the tracks. But, when they are in season, I know exactly where to go to collect some and am looking forward to some tasty wild mushrooms at that time.
But the morels are only the start of my mushroom anticipation, as it turns out that Midsummer Common, across from the Jesus Green and pretty much in the city center of Cambridge, is used for grazing beef cattle from spring until fall (here’s an article about that from the Cambridge News). The temperature is wrong, but the humidity seems like it could be perfect later in the year. And, unlike in Georgia through the 70’s and 80’s, I shouldn’t have to deal with angry farmers firing shotguns my way (merely competition from the student population).
Waterbeach continues to surprise me. About 7/8 of the way through this article on the lack of St George Day celebrations I spotted this line:
“The village’s Beach Social Club will host its second annual sausage competition….”
I got no indication that Waterbeach was at all that way the last few visits, not that there’s anything wrong with it.
I’m entirely in favour of community volunteer service but this article would be easier to take seriously if it had less in common with Tom Sawyer tricking the other kids into whitewashing a fence (“Like it? Well, I don’t see why I oughtn’t to like it. Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?”).
It is a short article, but essentially it is basing family fun around the entire clan helping to muck out a clogged waterway, then spending the afternoon picking up litter. In Arizona, this is the sort of fun reserved for guys wearing orange jumpsuits, and in Georgia you’ve usually got a “camp director” with a shotgun and some dogs to play with if you are clever enough to slip your chains. But, this is a more egalitarian community, and like they say in the article: “Everyone is invited to take part.”
I saw this article a few months ago, but forgot about it until I was heading down the A-10 to Waterbeach, yesterday. Again, I like the small town atmosphere here, but this story is really adorable.
Click on the article for a full sized and easy-to-read version (from the Ely Weekly News 16 april 2009), but the gist is that an ugly crime from years past appears to have been solved. Good thing, too, since:
Coming to Europe from Atlanta Georgia (by way of a number of other violent-crime ridden American shit holes), it is easy to get lost in the bucolic simplicity and utter safety of small town England. But, it’s not all tea cozies and Women’s Institute meetings, here, no sir indeed. The complete disrespect for order and the rule of law here in the fens is illustrated here in this photo lifted from the Ely Weekly News (16 April 2009) showing the depths to which the village of Stretham has sunk:
From the Ely Standard, a page devoted to news from Littleport has an unfortunate edit in it’s banner (perhaps the editorial staff is made up of pre-menopausal women):
The Endless British Pub Crawl 
Here’s an article wherein a couple receive suspended sentences for growing 83 marijuana plants because they are heavy users and the judge found it plausible that this was meant for personal use.
Cannabis growers with £26k stash spared jail
First consider that the plants were valued at £26000, total…that’s a little less than $500 US. The newspapers in the US typically value a cannibas stem as $5000 to $6000.
Then, consider that even crappy growers are going to bet an ounce of buds off each plant (dunno how I know that). If half are males and discarded, the 41 ounces (forget that they could easily harvest up to as much as 300 ounces) they have sitting around the would easily keep two stoners going for 6 months to a year if they lost half of it (and what are the chances of that).
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