Winter Treats

Some time ago I booked for us to go to a concert at Snape Maltings, thinking it would make a festive treat for us.  This was all before a family member, in another part of the country, was taken seriously ill and hospitalised, involving heavy duty visiting - just in case you thought we moved from one treat to another, in a kind of golden haze.  However, we decided not to cancel and set off for the Suffolk coast.

We will be spending Christmas Day a deux, and expect to eat a roast pheasant and, later, some smoked salmon. On our trip, we called first at the Suffolk Food Hall where we were stunned by the Dickensian excess of the comestibles on offer.   In my family, my mother had a set of recipes for the Christmas items, many of which were made at the last minute.  So, we would eat a roast capon, followed by Christmas pudding and rum sauce.  Tea would bring on the rum butter and Christmas cake and there would be a sherry trifle fitted in somewhere.  Dried fruit, brown sugar and black rum figured quite heavily.  We had no idea that this was historically linked to the slave trading activities of the local port in the eighteenth century - we just ate to the point where we all had indigestion.

After we had pottered around Aldeborough, we went to check in to our B&B.  Fortunately the weather was unseasonably mild as we were shown out to the car park where our room was an eco-pod - a self-contained unit, like a little chalet, with its own en-suite facilities.  It was very clean and we slept surprisingly well, just a bit strange.

As we walked to the concert hall we were struck by the closeness of the reedbeds - quite eerie at night time, the idea of being so close to a kind of edge.  Next day we drove to Minsmere, the RSPB bird reserve, for a spot of walking and bird-watching.  Very calming, as an environment to walk in.