Martha's Marvellous Munchies

So it's the middle of May, and Derby Museum doesn't seem in any hurry to announce the winners of their writing competition, which were supposed to have been decided by the end of April.  I wish I could present this as the winning entry, but hey, I'm proud of it anyway.  This is the letter I wrote for the 1001 Words competition. Letter from White Watson to his nephew William Inspired by the White Watson tablet of Ecton Hill Bakewell January 9 th , 1799 My dear William I take up my pen to write, hoping this finds you in good health and safely established in London.   Bookselling is a fine profession; I am sure you will soon excel in it.   If you should happen across Priestley’s Passages of Scripture send it to me, I would be most grateful of it.   Your father & sister & brother are all well & send their love. I enclose £1 in thankful recognition of & payment for your kind help with the fossils, and   beg ...

After living in Texas for a while, where any building dating back to 1900 is really old, and most of the cities were open prairie not 200 years ago, it has lent a certain depth to life to be back in a country where the dust of history clings to your shoes at every step.  Where the parks are centred on crumbling manor houses, the villages were mentioned in the Domesday book of 1086, and the public toilets are probably prehistoric.  Any given circle of, say, a 20 mile radius is likely to encompass more than a smattering of stone monuments, ancient churches, medieval field systems and such like (as carefully noted on the incomparable Ordnance Survey maps), and the circle centred on our current residence is no exception.  Amongst other things it includes Tutbury Castle, to which we journeyed one cold and sunny April morning. The entrance According to their website , the site has been occupied since the Stone Age, which makes it old in anyone's book.  However, it w...

Once upon a time, back in 1795 or so, lived a man who was always asking questions.  The kind of questions like, "Why is glass transparent?" or "Why do fruit trees grow better in that place than in this place?" or "What does the earth look like underneath the surface?"  This last question was one that he was particularly interested in, and he went so far as to work out what the rock layers looked like where he lived, and draw little pictures of them.  Now he was a marble sculptor by trade (as well as fossil hunter, mineral seller, and a few other things) so he thought it would be even better to make his little pictures in stone.  That way he could represent the layers using the actual rocks they were composed of.  Over the course of his lifetime he made almost 100 of these tablets, as he called them. Then he died.  And no one else was quite as interested in all those rocks and minerals as he was.  His collection was sold off, bit by bit, and the table...

Once upon a time (so the story goes), the owner of a hotel in a little town named Bakewell asked his cook to make a jam tart.  The cook, being rather dim, managed to spread a layer of jam over the pastry shell, and then dollop some kind of eggy almondy mixture on top.  "How do you manage to screw up a simple jam tart?" cried the hotel owner.  However, being a pragmatic type, he poured some custard on it and sent it out to table 3 anyway.  The guests rather liked the new specialité du maison and bingo! the Bakewell pudding was born. What the story doesn't tell you is that the cook was always doing things like that. "You're supposed to put the fruit on the top , dammit!" turned into pineapple upside-down cake.  "Would you like to explain exactly why you poured a mug of hot cocoa over a perfectly good chocolate cake?" led to the self-saucing chocolate pudding.  But by the third attempt, some genius had hit on the idea of naming the latest bodge-...

Toby is now at the age where he can do painting and sticking with a reasonable amount of care and precision, so I thought it would be nice to make some cards for the (grand)mothers in our lives. The original idea was to do flower prints, so I massacred a washing-up sponge to make something resembling two flower shapes, but the sponge didn't provide anything like enough definition.  It did provide some nice texture, though.  Toby chose pink, blue and white paint, and I put dollops of each in a cake pan to allow for mixing.  With the sponge and a paintbrush he managed to produce something I'm sure any modern artist would be proud of! Once it had dried I cut out a daisy stencil and produced two dozen pretty little flowers. Now time for the glue!  He's coming to realise that you don't have to glue everything right on top of each other, and did really well with the spacing for these cards. And they're ready to post!

In Texas, state parks are the main way of getting out into some countryside, and they are almost invariably centred around a reservoir.  Back in the UK, the network of public footpaths means that you don't have to go to a designated area to walk around.  However, a proper country footpath often involves mud, brambles, stiles and other such pushchair-unfriendly obstacles, so we have found that, even here, reservoirs are still quite useful, not to mention beautiful, places to walk. A few weeks ago we visited Staunton Harold reservoir, just south of here.  Rain and snow had fallen overnight and frozen, so the visitor centre car park was closed, and the circular southern car park, when we found it, was doing an excellent impression of a skating rink.  Having slid the car into a parking space, we skied gingerly down an icy hill, and a beautiful vista of the lake opened up before us. We might have been content to drink in the view for a while, but Toby took one ...