Walking the tightrope

It's true walking a tightrope is tense. Having a nine year old and soon-to-be eleven year old can be the very definition of being on that taut stretch of rope. Say one thing to one of them and it's peace between the two but another and you wobble and off the rope everyone plunges...in our case into full scale arguments and fisticuffs.

Well...I can now safely say that being on a tightrope is indeed a tense business. Yesterday we braved the typical Arctic April showers weather to watch an actual tightrope walker traverse a lake and it was tense. We went to the Day on the Lake festivities at Rudyard Lake in Staffordshire and watched the great and fabulous Bullzini balance his way elegantly across the water. I was enraptured. He lay down on the rope, he hung (intentionally) from the rope and he did a headstand on the rope. It was great. He appealed to all: I was marvelling at his skill and watched with mouth open whereas I think my son did have a genuine interest in him falling in the water - each to their own.

Apparently Rudyard Lake in Victorian times was the Blackpool of Staffordshire, attracting thousands and thousands of Victorians to the lakeside. In 1864 Carlos Trower traversed the lake on a tightrope and returned a few times over the subsequent years to wow the crowds. The Day at the Lake, running over the bank holiday is a celebration of those heady days. We ooed and ahhed at the tightrope extravaganza; my children heltered full kilter down the helter skelter; they rode on donkeys; we looked round a very wonderful craft market and enjoyed the beautiful surroundings of Rudyard Lake all to live music.

Apparently Rudyard Kipling's parents met here ...hence his name. My son would have been called Stalybridge if we'd emulated the Kiplings.....

Hope the weather is kind today and tomorrow for the Day on the Lake and that Bullzini wows audiences again and again.

Cake mixture

Mix your ingredients for a cake: butter, eggs, sugar, flour. Pop it into your cake tin but do not use a spatula. Such an implement is too efficient, wiping the bowl clean of mixture. Instead use a spoon and hand the mixing bowl over to your daughter, eagerly awaiting to devour the mixture remnants......that is if her Dad doesn't get there before her. Smile when you see raw cake leftovers, smeared around her mouth or his.

September harvest

We tried our first bottle of 2015 elderflower fizz yesterday in the lovely sunshine and it's glorious. The same can't quite be said of the blackberries this year methinks. I went out blackberrying yesterday and was very disappointed, either bushes with no blackberries or very small ones. Now I may either be too late to the table and they've been picked or the wet August has played its part. I eventually did find a swathe of bushes which reaped a tub full and they are currently dripping through a jelly bag with some apples to make blackberry and apple jelly. I'll go out again later in the week and fingers crossed the sun we've been promised will have ripened some more and we can have a blackberry crumble.

We've had quite a good year in the garden, considering we do the minimum to care for it, having busy jobs and family life. At the moment we have sweet peas, chard, kale, beans and beetroot so no complaints and we have tomatoes on the way as well as celeriac. And all to be washed down with the sparkle of elderflower.

Ooops..forgot!

Turns out the forks were a pink herring

Boy or girl?

I rely on my 20 and 30 something nieces and nephew to keep me informed of the latest trends. One of them is expecting a baby and one is getting married so there will be ample opportunity over the coming months I expect and perhaps fear for me to get bang up to date with the latest must-haves and ways of doing.

For instance on Saturday I went to a picnic where my niece and partner let us know the sex of their unborn child through the medium of cake. Now I am always more than happy to explore any subject through the joys of cake and this was a particularly welcome exploration. The idea is that a very neutral looking cake is produced and cut into to reveal a slice that is either blue or pink thus telling the world whether the babe is a boy or girl.

One of my nieces told me she was completely left non-plussed when a colleague at work said she was going to a 'Gender Reveal Party'. Even my hip and trendy niece was at a loss and asked whether the person at the centre of the big reveal was coming out as a man or woman. My pregnant niece's 'come to a lovely family picnic where I'll let you know whether we are having a boy or girl according to the colour of the cake' party seems a much more friendly title.

Apparently sometimes even the parents don't know the sex of their own child at these 'reveal' parties. They get the scan person at the hospital to pop the sex of their baby into an envelope and then they take this to a cake shop and the appropriate coloured cake is duly made. Can this really be true?

Anyway we had a lovely time in Derbyshire, together, eating, laughing. My niece made the cake although she didn't quite know how much food colouring to put into the mixture so that once cooked it would be perfectly clear whether it was pink or blue but she ensured the butter cream filling left us in no doubt. The cake was all the sweeter for the excitement that it held for the coming months.

Pool Bliss

Just back from holiday where we had a full sized open air pool all to ourselves. It was brilliant. It had a springboard from where I made a huge splash and water rushed up my nose and from where my husband did a dive but didn't quite compensate for the spring. It had a little slide, depositing you into the water which the children loved and which I longed to go on but felt that it might just collapse under my weight.  This oasis was heated too. It was fun, fun, fun and it was really really cheap.

My tip for the summer is when it rains and you are wondering what to do on holiday venture to the nearest heated open air swimming pool. It's warm once you are in, it's great swimming in the rain and there'll be very few people in the pool with you. Bliss. The only drawback is you'll have three very bored lifeguards watching your every move...wobble...inferior stroke...funny dive....but what the hell. Take your contact lens out and you won't know they are there.

I know which cake I prefer to eat

If I asked my husband to go to the local fish n chip shop and get me fish cake and chips over here on the Lancashire side of the Pennines, he'd come home with chips and probably a small round soft burger-like 'cake' often coated in breadcrumbs and consisting of flaked fish and mashed potatoes.

If I asked my brother to get me cake and chips over on the Yorkshire side of the Pennines, he'd come home with a small parcel about the size of a large flattish potato, made of up of a piece of fish, sandwiched between two scallops of potato and then covered in batter and deep fried. Ahh...the taste of a special treat of fish n chips and/or cake as a child.

I wonder at which point along, across the border the one transforms into the other?