In the land of The Other Half's fathers

Or Yorkshire, as it's otherwise known. Yes, dear readers, I spent part of last week in the white rose county, from which The Other Half hails. And I survived – although I do now possess a tweed flat cap to show for it – but no ferret or whippet!

Taking advantage of the double bank holiday (sounds like a happy hour special), we took an extra three days off work and then took off for Leeds.

Arriving there on Tuesday afternoon, I was offered a choice of activities to while away the rest of the time before evening (and dinner).

Now how many blokes do you think would ask their bird if she'd prefer to go shopping or visit a military museum – only for the aforementioned bird to opt for the latter? Well, this one picked a visit to the Royal Armouries – after all, given that pretty much everywhere in the UK is Clone Town these days, it seemed unlikely that Leeds' main shopping area would produce anything novel.

The Armouries, on the other hand, was fascinating. Yes, it is what it says on the tin – a lot of weapons and armour, including a suit of jousting armour that belonged to Henry VIII, and a very weird and slightly creepy horned helmet that was made between 1511 and 1514, and given to the same monarch by Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I.

It's a strange piece. The spectacles may apparently indicate a fool – was Max taking the pee, so to speak? But the horns made me think of Andrew Graham-Dixon's fascinating Art of Germany documentary series a few months ago, in which he started by emphasising the place of the forest in the German imagination. The horns on this extraordinary item – which was made by Konrad Seusenhofer in Austria – seemed to nod to the fairy tale fears that hide in the dark amid the trees.

Moving beyond Henry VIII, though, there was much more to interest – not least seeing the real versions of iconic weaponary that we know through comic books and westerns: a Colt 45, for instance, or the impossibly flimsy Sten submachine gun MkIII. And given my own historical passions, it was particularly interesting to see a display of arms from the Franco-Prussian War.

It's an interesting museum – if a tad noisy from all the many interactive displays that are aimed primarily at children, which seem to overlap in your ear.

But with that experience behind us, it wasn't long before the hour chimed for dinner.

We were staying near the river and decided to pop just a door down from the hotel to Brasserie Forty 4. This proved an excellent choice.

My first meal in Yorkshire began with duck rillettes, a lightly spiced rhubarb chutney and crostini. Very tasty it was too – and while I could get pedantic, pointing out that rillettes really is supposed to be a dish made with pork, at least the meat was shredded as the pork should be.

Rhubarb, of course, is a very Yorkshire ingredient – the 'Rhubarb Triangle' is only a short distance away – and it works as an excellently tart accompaniment to duck, cutting through the sweetness of the meat.

That was followed by a rather nice piece of roast haddock with black pudding rösti, and then a dish of lemon posset with a pistachio tuile.

All good stuff. And washed down with a Sables and Galets Gewürztraminer 2008 terroirs d'alsace that offered a nice moment of personal satisfaction. Having suggested we go for that one, The Other Half nodded in my direction when the waiter arrived and was about to pour a drop or two for him a taste.

A really flowery aroma and taste brought to mind elderflower and I said so. It wasn't, but the waiter looked impressed (I hate to think what the general reaction to wine is, given his response to my novice's analysis) and told me that it was rose and lychee. But most important, it was very nice as well.

And so that was day one.

Wednesday saw us potter around by the river for a while before heading out to York, which is only a short train journey away.

This was one of the day trips that I'd most wanted to do, never having visited this historic city, and we started with a gentle stroll from the railway station into the centre of the city via a very nice park, with plenty of flowers and a ruined abbey (another bit of Henry VIII's legacy, no doubt).

We crammed a remarkable amount into just a few hours, starting with the famous minster itself – although I drew the line at going all the way into the church, having seen the prices.

The Jorvik Viking Centre offered another history hit – this a look at the remains of a Viking settlement under the present city. Excavations since the 1970s – which are ongoing – have provided an extraordinarily detailed picture of life in that time, allowing a recreation of a few streets, together with animatronic figures – and smells.

We're so absorbed with the idea of the Vikings as warriors that we forget that they were sailors and traders and superb craftsmen – some of the work that survived in the Yorkshire soil is astonishing and beautiful.

Glancing around the centre's little shop, I found pieces of stone engraved with runes – in one case, the rune for 'ing'. This intrigues me. My maternal grandmother's maiden name was Ingham. Now given the difficulty of finding out anything concrete about either side of my family, a few years ago I did a spot of research around that name, since it doesn't seem to be one that you hear or see every day.

It's made up of two parts. The first part is the 'Ing'. The second part – the 'ham' – means a 'hold' or 'home'. But who, then, was Ing that had a hold? I eventually came up with a German name for the goddess of fertility known in the Norse as Freya (whose name gave rise to Friday – Freya's day).

So it seems reasonable to suppose that at least part of my family was Saxon. Which seems pretty cool, really. And it horrified my parents when I told them (thus tickling me pink). But it's also why I find the whole northern European thing of particular interest. Any why I bought the stone with the rune for 'Ing' on it.

The Shambles offered some more non-Clone Town shopping amid half-timbered buildings that lean so far that you wonder how they're still actually standing. Around the corner at an old-fashioned market was where, in a spirit of ee-by-gumness, we both picked up tweed flat caps as souvenirs. It's hanging on top of my French beret right now.

There was also time to visit the infamous Clifford's Tower – it's difficult to look at this rather picturesque ruin now and think that this was the scene of the 1190 massacre of Jewish residents of York – and then take a walk along some of the enormous lengths of city wall that are still standing and in excellent condition.

And I cannot forget to mention spotting the best address I think I've ever seen: 1 1/2 Whip-Ma-Whop-Ma-Gate. How splendid is that?

It's a lovely city that also offered the chance for a spot of foodie shopping – a book of recipes by chefs of restaurants in Yorkshire and a packet of tea from Holmfirth, which The Other Half intends to send out to his mother in South Africa, since that is where she hails from.

Back in Leeds, we enjoyed a couple of pints of Theakstons sitting next to the river outside a pub next to the hotel in the early evening sun, and after tidying ourselves up, headed for dinner. I'd had fish and chips for lunch in York, but it wasn't particularly good.

Now we headed for a Loch Fyne restaurant in the centre.

It wasn't bad. I had some paté, which was nothing out of the ordinary, followed by dressed crab with lime. The best part of the meal was, without doubt, a blackcurrant sorbet that absolutely zinged with natural fruitness. Later this year, I may well make some of my own: it was gorgeous.

And there we were: half way through our little trip and wearily to bed, with hopes that the excellent weather would hold at least a day longer.

Supermarkets: a new totalitarianism?

Just a few days ago, the city of Bristol saw rioting for the first time since the St Paul’s riots kicked off back in April 1980.

It wasn’t triggered by ncreasing racial tension, poor housing and alienation of black youth.

It didn’t start because of the government’s cuts to public services or as a wave of radical republicanism in the face of media hysteria about the impending marriage of the heir to the throne.

The cause was simply the scheduled opening of a new Tesco Express in an area of the city that is known for being a bit ‘counter culture’, which outraged commentators in the days since have told us really means People Who Take Drugs, which in turn neatly implies that the local reaction can simply be dismissed as having no justification.

But what on Earth would cause such a response to the opening of a small supermarket?


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In 1950, supermarkets in the UK had approximately 20% of the country’s grocery shop, while independents and cooperatives had approximately 80%.

By 1990, in just 40 years, this was almost reversed.

In early 2007, when Joanna Blythman updated Shopped: the shocking power of Britain’s supermarkets (first edition, 2004), Tesco alone had 32% of the country’s total grocery shop.

In the interim, as independent businesses, farmers and other producers have gone out of business, the wide, natural variety of what we grow to eat in our own country has been massively reduced: which as anyone who knows that one of the central causes of the Irish Potato Famine was the dependence on a single type of potato will know, is not A Good Thing. And contrary to the claims of supermarkets’ defenders, it is not indicative of choice either.

For some time, many people have had the idea that there are problems with what has happened – phrases and words such as ‘clone town’, ‘trolley town’ and ‘Tescopoly’ have found their way into the language for a reason – but Blythman does a very good job of putting flesh on the bones of the sentiments that accompany such linguistic newcomers.

Over several years, the Competition Commission has made a number of attempts to uncover the truth about the relationships between the big supermarkets (those with a minimum of 8% of the nationwide market) and their suppliers, but it found that most were too fearful to talk, except under the protection of complete anonymity.

Blythman herself later found the same thing.

But the stories are the same, with the large multiples:

driving down the price paid to the producer (including farmers) – not once, but time and time and time again;

finding all sorts of ‘creative’ ways to hand costs back to the suppliers (such as handing back ordered goods after incorrect forecasting by the supermarkets of the quantities of a product required by the supermarkets themselves);

inding all sorts of ways to charge the producer for things (such as in-store promotions);

delisting suppliers for next to no proper reason with no proper warning;

refusing to give suppliers proper, written contracts.

Supermarket buyers regularly reject produce that is perfectly okay – cauliflowers that ‘are not white enough’ is just one example from an anonymous farmer, while Ginny Mayall, an organic farmer from Shropshire, is quoted as telling BBC Good Food magazine that she was informed by a supermarket that she supplied that they wanted bigger potatoes. So she planted some. Then they said the potatoes were too big – and rejected them. It cost her £30,000 at a stroke. They were fed to cattle.

And all this is without mentioning the issue of quality. We may already know that supermarkets are obsessed with the cosmetic appearance of fresh produce over its taste – the Elsanta strawberry is a perfect illustration of this – but the book contains plenty of further illustrations, from tasteless but visually ‘perfect’ tomatoes to experiments to breed any russet out of Cox apples.

And then there are the suppliers who have been specifically told to cut quality – because it’s too expensive.

Producers in the developing world fare no better than those over here.

But Blythman also explores the issue of the damage that supermarkets have done to our culinary heritage and to our ability to cook or even understand food.

In 2003, Tesco’s own press department issued – with a breathtaking lack of self-awareness – the news that only 17% of those aged between 21 and 35 had heard of common cuts such as briskets and loin, let alone knew what to do with them; those aged between 36 and 50 did better with 68%, but the 51 to 70-year olds came out tops by some way.

It’s hardly any surprise. As Blythman points out, younger shoppers have had less chance to experience independent butchers (ones with staff that actually know something about the full range of cuts, unlike supermarket staff who tend to be bumped from department to department and have very little such knowledge).

Supermarkets do not employ – as a general rule – properly trained butchers (or fishmongers). Blythman’s own experiments in stores around the UK reveal that it’s difficult to get anything other than what is already on display, and almost never anyone who could prepare a cut for you.

This is just one illustration of how the claim that supermarkets provide choice is a myth. They provide what they want to provide.

Supermarkets, she points out, deliberately stock primarily prime cuts. And they also deliberately stock lots and lots of ready-made meals. There’s a reason for this – or rather, a number of reasons.

The book quotes suppliers explaining that supermarkets don’t actually like dealing with fresh produce: it has a limited shelf life and is delicate, for starters. But it’s also nowhere near as profitable as a product that has had ‘valued added’.

It’s easy to see why ready meals have such added value – you can charge a lot more for something that’s actually rather small than you could for the individual ingredients. Indeed, I’ve shown this in a previous article here.

But perhaps the most farcical example that the author provides is that of Sainsbury’s, which took the original convenience food, the apple, sliced it, dipped it in a vitamin C solution and bagged it in those pillow bags that contain modified air to, in this case, stop the flesh of the apple going brown. And then charged double the cost of an apple for it, marketing it as a convenience food.

Does any of this matter?

Well, the UK has the lowest food bills in Europe. Our food buying is dominated by supermarkets (that 80%) to an extent that does not occur elsewhere in Europe: elsewhere, supermarkets are more of a compliment to independent shops – not a one-stop replacement.

We have greater, and rising, obesity – including amongst children – than anywhere else in Europe. The only place that is comparable in the West is the US, which also has rising obesity and a shopping landscape dominated by big supermarkets and one vast one.

Any coincidence?


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But here we hit a little problem.

If we start saying that, for instance, the treated apple is just a rip off, then are we also not also deriding the intelligence of the shoppers that fall for such marketing?

In 2004, Dominic Prince, writing in the Spectator, conducted his own experiment. Buying the same basket of goods from a market and independent shops as from his nearest Tesco, he found that the latter cost him 42.98% more. Every little helps. He also concluded that several items from the supermarket were of inferior taste.

“We are all being done,” he wrote. “We are being misled, brainwashed, cheated and we don’t even know it’s happening.”

In the same month, an investigation by the Sunday Times found that supermarket shoppers, buying in bigger sizes in the belief that it saved money were actually paying up to 30% for the same product in smaller quantities. It found a ‘bulk penalty’ at Waitrose, Sainsbury’s, Safeway, Tesco and Asda.

It’s no sneering to point out this con – and that is precisely what it is. The only argument that can be made for knowingly paying higher prices for ready meals is the time convenience factor.

If fewer and fewer people really know how to cook from scratch, it’s doubtful that many would attempt to claim that as some sort of progress. Yet clearly is of benefit to supermarkets.


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But we've touched on the issue of the US, so let's look a little more closely at that and specifically at Wal-Mart – the US supermarket giant that also now owns Asda in the UK and has outlets around the world and growing (a model that Tesco is attempting to follow).

In The Wall-Mart Effect by Charles Fishman (2006), the author finds many of the same issues that Blythman details in her work.

He finds, like her, that the opening of supermarkets brings about the closures of smaller business over the course of the first years after opening.

He found a survey that showed that Wal-Mart causes increased poverty in areas that it opens in.

Wal-Mart’s downward pressure on prices pushes companies out of business and jobs out of the US. It also, Fishman concludes, teaches us a false way of thinking about cost in relation to quality.

If Wal-Mart can sell you a $99 lawnmower, which fails to start the following year, you can just chuck it out and buy another. Why would you spend nearly $300 to buy a Snapper machine that will last for years?

If Wal-Mart persuades Levi Strauss to make cheaper jeans to sell in its stores (Levi Strauss agreed to this because it was losing business to Wal-Mart’s ultra-cheap jeans), then what does that do to our understanding of quality and the cost of real quality?

How many people now accept this as a routine way of buying white goods? No longer do we expect something to last for years, but pretty much accept that it will last less time than a similar product a few decades ago, and then we’ll simply buy a new one when it breaks down (and there is nowhere to get it repaired and no longer any parts being made with which to repair it).

It’s not a particularly environmentally sound approach, never mind the long-term financial cost to ourselves. It doesn’t actually take very long before those $99 lawnmowers cost us more than a real investment purchase would have.

But then again, decisions taken in the UK and US in the 1980s to de-industrialise and switch to a service economy mean that retail now has considerably increased importance to the national economy (there’s a reason that quarterly retail figures make the news headlines these days and that cheap credit has been made so widely available).

We need to spend – it’s almost our patriotic duty. Indeed, only last autumn, a senior figure at the Bank of England urged us on to the high streets to spend, rather than saving our money (with negligible interest). Who’d a thunk it?

But in a way, our spending is still not quite enough. The reason that the likes of Tesco and Wal-Mart cannot stand still, cannot say, ‘okay, we’re making enough profit, we don’t need to open ever more stores’ is that if they do that, their share price will be hit. They need to grow for the Stock Market.

So when these behemoths drive other, independent businesses to the wall, it doesn’t matter economically. Unlisted businesses could almost be viewed as economically inactive: clearing them out of the way as the listed giants take their business is like today’s version of the enclosures, driving the self-sufficient into the industrialising urban areas to make them ‘economically active’.

They are the insignificant collateral damage of the growing might of a handful of mega corporations.


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I suspect I’m not alone in having entertained a rather naïve idea that supermarkets, while far from ideal, were ultimately really rather benign. But that charge for growth – at any human or environmental cost – is far from benign.

But as cultural commentator Jonathan Meades put it in his review of Blythman’s book, she “demonstrates the proof of what many of us have long suspected – that supermarkets practice a douchly tyrannical form of totalitarianism”.

If you think of totalitarianism as control over the total, then it becomes clearer what he means.

This is a new stage of capitalism, made possible by the de-industrialisation, deregulation and globalism that were paramount in the political and economic ideology of the 1980s, an ideology that has, for the moment, become the orthodoxy: ‘there is no alternative’.

Fishman is nobody’s leftie: he wants to believe in Wal-Mart as an all-American success story; as shining with what he considers to be great American values. But there is great discomfort in his story as he uncovers the truth behind the low, low prices that he and others pay in stores.

Just over a week ago, The Other Half and I dined with neighbours, one of whom is a Romanian who escaped from the Ceaușescu regime. Her family also got out, and many of them made their way to the US, where she visits them regularly.

It was intriguing to hear her describe how she sees the US as being very similar to the Romania she fled. For instance, the culture of absolute dedication to the company – not least because of the fear of losing your health insurance (if you’re lucky enough to have any) – is something she sees as a form of totalitarianism.

And perhaps one only needs to think of company towns to take that analogy further. Indeed, in many places, Wal-Mart is the largest employer in an area.

How can you fight against it?


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In Bristol, campaigners against the new Tesco pointed out that there was already one a few minutes walk away.

They got petitions signed (with substantial majorities of signatories against the new store). They did a survey that showed the same response. They took the legal route to objecting.

But councils, as Blythman shows, are terrified of saying no to a supermarket giant. They’re terrified because they know that the supermarkets don’t believe in taking no for an answer. They keep coming back, appealing and appealing again, costing councils hundreds of thousands of pounds – money that councils would really rather not spend.

And if they have to sweeten the deal with promises of a few flats or a new sports stadium, then they have the financial power to do exactly that, just as they have the financial power to crush prices.

In chasing after the benefits (for their profits) of ‘economies of scale’, the biggest of these corporations have lost any human dimension.

As both Blythman and Fishman point out, it’s not even as though shopping in these industrialised big boxes is even a pleasant experience.

Blythman’s book is deeply depressing. Fishman’s is not much better, even though he desperately wants to have his faith in Wal-Mart renewed.

But as Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall says of the former: “Don’t read it and weep. Read it and change the way you shop”.


• You can find out more at Tescopoly.

Getting passionate about meatballs

I love meatballs. There are no two ways about it – I love them: it's as simple as that.

And not just because meatballs are great food – which they are – but because it was one of the first things that I really felt that I could make well.

That was thanks to a recipe that my friend George gave me: a version involving paprika and sherry, and with the nuggets of tastiness cooked together in their sauce with small potatoes.

I've tried other versions since and those too have worked, and I still regularly cook that Spanish-style one. But tonight, it was meatballs with a tomato sauce and pasta, and for the first time, it was cooked without as much as a single glance at a recipe book and absolutely no recourse to the scales or a jug or anything else to measure with.

So, here's what I did.

For two people:

Take around 150g of pork mince and 150g beef mince. To these add, one thick slice of stale bread that has had the crusts removed and been blitzed into breadcrumbs.

Add a good teaspoon or two of paprika and around the same of dried oregano.

Meatballs don't need to have egg added – this is a myth (and the same goes for burgers too). Thankfully, this was a hint that George included with that recipe and it's never served me wrong. After mixing together the ingredients, keep your hands just moist and roll into balls about the size of a walnut. The above quantities gave me 10 and a baby one.

Gently heat some butter in a large sauté pan. When it's starting to foam and you can smell that lovely aroma, add the meatballs. Don't move them around; let them caramelise. When one part is done, turn them gently and so on, until they've got a lovely, golden surface. Remove to a plate.

Next, add a chopped onion, a chopped stick of celery and a finely chopped clove or two of garlic to the pan and soften gently. If you need it, add a little more butter or some olive oil, although apparently it's also a myth that adding olive oil stops the butter burning – but that's why you need to go gently (thank you, Raymond Blanc).

When all this has softened, add a tin of plum tomatoes (preferably ones in their own juice). If you only have a tin of complete ones in the cupboard, just cut them up roughly in the pan.

Rinse the tin out with hot water and add that (no need to waste that juice and no need for any stock). Check the taste and add salt as required. Grind in plenty of black pepper, add some more paprika and a little touch of dried chili, then a good squeeze of tomato purée.

Next up, a glug of milk – yes, you read that right. Tinned tomatoes are great – no less a culinary luminary than Escoffier championed them – but they can be a touch acidic, so the milk will counter that, and you won't even notice it. Finally, a teaspoon of brown sugar.

Stir it all gently – and taste again – bring to the boil and add the meatballs. Cover and turn the heat down to a minimum. Give it 20 minutes.

Then cook your pasta. I used linguine, with a recommended cooking time of 11 minutes. But since visiting Italy last year, the realisation has dawned that such timings do not actually produce pasta as you find it there. It might be supposed to be al dente, but in Italian reality, that doesn't seem to mean what is produced when you cook something for the time listed on the packet. Or not in my experience.

So it needs a minute or three more. While that's happening, take the lid off the meatballs and sauce, and turn up the heat.

Take a colander and rinse it under hot water before decanting the pasta in it to drain. Plate up the pasta.

By this time, the sauce will be velvety smooth, with chunky bits. Blanc says not to cut onion two finely if you don't want it to melt away but to give you some texture.

And that is that.

The meatballs were light and the sauce full of layers of flavour – the paprika really adds something. That was a darned good dish.

And if I loved meatballs before, I think it's even more the case now. Because cooking like this – without a recipe, without scales – is what Nigel Slater talks about. Now, finally, with some real knowledge and understanding, and some experience, I can cook with passion rather than simply by rote.

A dish full of spring flavours

After such a long winter and with spring barely seeming to have sprung, we now seem to have leapfrogged most of the latter and landed straight in to the summer.

So the start of the Easter weekend meant a need to consider far lighter food than one might, just a few short weeks ago, have expected.

Perhaps it was predictable that, on a bank holiday, I woke barely half an hour later than I would for a working day. And once awake, there was no going back to sleep again.

So the coffee was brewed and Jamie’s Italy was dragged off the shelf in the hope of finding inspiration.

It followed after only a limited amount of pleasant browsing. A risotto.

Now, regular readers of this blog will possibly be a bit surprised at that, since I’m something of a risotto fan, but I’d spotted an idea for a really fresh, seasonal version of a dish that seems infinite in its versatility.

This dish used artichoke hearts, lemon and mint.

I had been meaning to go to Borough Market, but since that wasn’t due to open until noon, I pottered up to Broadway Market first with the aim of getting a few basics in. And it soon became clear that I could buy everything I needed today right there.

So, to the risotto. I didn’t follow Oliver’s recipe to the letter, using it as a general guide.

Take a large shallot and a stick of celery and chop them finely. Heat olive oil in a large saucepan and pop the vegetables in to soften.

To this was added a few finely chopped cloves of fresh garlic: lovely stuff.

Pop some stock (chicken or vegetable) in a saucepan and bring it to the boil.

When the vegetables are softened, add your risotto rice (I used around two small handfuls for two people – you don’t need a lot, just around 45g per serving) and let it absorb the oil.

Then add a glug of booze – Noilly Pratt or Vermouth are perfect. It’ll fizz and hiss and give off the most glorious aromas.

Let that absorb and then start adding the bubbling stock, a ladle at a time. You don’t have to stir every single minute, but you do need to keep an eye on it.

Check the seasoning and add salt and pepper as needed.

When that stock has been absorbed, add another ladle and keep on doing that until the rice has reached its capacity.

Now at this point, I usually give it up to 10 minutes with a lid on the pan and the heat turned down.

I had quartered four artichoke hearts from the deli and added these, along with a squeeze of lemon juice and some grated zest before doing just that, so that the ‘chokes had the time to warm through.

Once that’s done, add butter. I usually add a spoon of crème fraïche, but it struck me that, with the sharpness of the lemon, some sweetness would be a good balance.

Then all that remains is to tear some fresh mint into the mix, give it a gentle stir, and serve.

And that really is rather good.

Off to the Fens

It has been a crazy week – brilliant in many ways, but nonetheless crazy.

And while there hasn’t been much to report on the food front, the time has not been without its moments on that score.

Having said farewell to the old offices last Wednesday and recovered with an asparagus-hunting trip to Borough Market on Thursday, Friday brought a new challenge on the work front.

My mission for the day was to catch a train to Peterborough, meet up with shadow chancellor Ed Balls, follow (and observe) while he hit the campaigning trail and my photographer photographed, then get in a car to Kings Lynn with him, his assistant and a driver – this offering the longest time available to do an actual interview for one of UNISON’s journals.

An hour later, after crossing into the flat country of a region I’ve never seen before, past farms with hand-painted, roadside signs offering asparagus for sale, we were in Kings Lynn itself. It might not have quite been The West Wing, but the interview was in the bag; the experience had been an interesting and pleasant one. But it was just turned 2pm and food was required.

Two sizable streets lead away from the square where we’d pulled in. One was Clone Town, but the other was a step back into times long gone. Running parallel to the river Ouse, as it wends its way gently to The Wash, it includes an arts centre and two or three eateries.

Finding a restaurant I liked the look of – it served a tart with local brown shrimps – I was stymied by the discovery that many such independent places close at 2pm. Which is entirely fair enough.

I wandered down the shopping street, looking for anything that didn’t represent Clone Town. There were maybe three shops I spotted, including a small cookshop, which actually provided me with a decent sized piping bag and the largest, plain nozzle I’ve been able to find. But the only obvious places for fodder were fast food joints. I wasn’t actually on the verge of collapsing from starvation.

And so, as I wandered, I found myself back at the far end of the first street I’d explored.

Once more at the arts centre, I decided that the café there would simply have to do. In the event, it offered the promise of a “Norfolk ploughmans,” which seemed ideal.

The menu said that it came with either Stilton, Cheddar or ham. I asked which of these was the most local – it did describe itself as a Norfolk dish, after all. The waitress seemed slightly confused. The ham, she told me, was from a local butcher, who seemed (if I understood her correctly) to either have a farm or get his meat from a local one.

The Stilton obviously wasn’t local. The Cheddar possibly, if it was simply a reference to the process of cheddaring. I asked if I could have a little of each of the ham and Cheddar.

I knew she was slightly thrown by my question because I overheard her, a moment or two later, commenting to a colleague. It simply wasn’t a question they’d heard before.

In the event, the ham was a little dry but very tasty and the cheese wasn’t bad at all. The real revelation was the salad, which was tasty and impeccably fresh. In other words, worth eating. And the pickle was enjoyable too.

Thus sustained, I set off to find the railway station and head back to town.

It was a journey that dragged a tad, on a slowish train with few carriages and lots of passengers – several of whom seemed to think that holding a personal conversation on their mobile phone, loudly, is a good idea.

I spotted a number of birds, however, as we sped through the countryside. A grouse and a pheasant, I think – both at the edge of fields, near hedges and trees. And Ely's cathedral looked incredible.

But as we crawled back into the dismal mess that is currently King’s Cross station, and I fought through crowds and building work to get outside, desperate to get home and flop in front of the telly, it was with a nagging feeling that perhaps the country isn’t as bad as unattractive as I’ve thought for many years.

Bring on the asparagus

Sat on a wall at Borough Market, late this morning, quaffing fruit juice and with the sort of feeling that you imagine is reserved for children on Christmas morning, it dawned on me that this was the sort of moment that renders the idea of ‘seasonality’ as a mere affectation utterly groundless.

In the shopping bag next to me were a small bag of Jersey Royals and two bundles of English asparagus.

I’d felt the same utter delight last year after a fruitful search for the same items. I knew, then and there, how they would be cooked. I knew too, how much they would be enjoyed. And on both occasions, they came with a joyful sense that the long, dark winter was truly behind us

And so much of that pleasure comes from the wait; the long months without such culinary jewels.

Setting aside any ethical issues (and there are a few) of buying imported asparagus, if you ate it throughout the year, why would you feel any such pleasure at the start of the English season?

Surely the only coherent reason would be that you knew that asparagus grown here has less distance to travel and is fresher. And, therefore, tastes a deal better.

In which case, why bother eating the imported product for the rest of the year?

Seasonality gives us these real pleasures. It gives us a sense of time and place. It helps to give us a sense of rootedness; of belonging.

Asparagus – or to give it it’s proper name asparagus officinals – is a cousin of the alliums, onions and garlic, and has been used as a medicine and vegetable for thousands of years: it features on an Egyptian frieze dating back to 3,000BC.

Indeed, there’s a recipe for cooking it in the oldest surviving recipe book, De re coquinaria, Book III, written by Apicius in the third century AD.

But the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans not only ate it fresh when in season, they also dried asparagus for use in winter.

In many places, white asparagus is more popular then the green that we’re familiar with. In Germany, spargel is a delicacy that is celebrated with relish throughout the short season: restaurants add special extra menus to make the most of it.

My menu for this evening was as simple as possible. I may get experimental as the season develops, but at this stage, I want my asparagus to be pretty much neat.

So, the potatoes were scraped and then boiled whole.

Some farmed salmon fillet was placed in a small sauté pan with a little Vermouth and a couple of bay leaves, lidded and left on a low heat for around 10 minutes. And those glorious green spears were carefully snapped and then laid into a pan with boiled water for four minutes.

Actually, they could have done with a minute less. Every year, it’s as though I have to learn again exactly how little cooking asparagus needs. But the taste was wonderful.

The only thing I added was a lemon butter: grated zest, mixed into unsalted butter, rolled in a little foil and bunged in the freezer to firm up.

Nothing else was required at all.

• You can find out more, including recipes, at British Asparagus.

Plus, grilled asparagus and hollandaise, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall asparagus recipes.

The best laid plans of mice and cooks …

There were plans for Monday night – food plans. The reduction of a small amount of Sunday’s chicken stock, with the addition of a couple of things, including fresh orange juice and zest, and tarragon, which would act as a dressing for some of the cold chicken.

That was going to be served with new potatoes (possibly roasted and crushed with oodles of garlic) and some fine beans that I found on Broadway Market on Saturday – the first English ones of the year.

But it came to pass that, only a short while before my scheduled departure from the office, the word want out that our presence was required in the bar at 5.15pm.

Now, this was, to say the least, unusual, since the staff social club’s bar only opens on Tuesdays to Fridays. What was going on?

You may recall that the bar, in its current incarnation, is nearly at an end, as we ready ourselves to move into a new building, where a café bar will be run in the early evenings, not by volunteer bar staff, but by the same people who run the staff ‘deli’.

Tomorrow night is the final, FINAL hurrah, but since several of the regulars are, even now, en route to a brief sojourn in Sicily (hopefully not to run into any dodgy Godfather types), Monday provided the sole remaining opportunity for a final get together – on the pretext of making presentations to Sam and Ben, the club treasurer and chief bar steward.

That the book club were also meeting to discuss their reading for the past month, while assorted national executive committee members also popped in over the course of the evening ensured it was a lively affair.

But by the time we got home, I was hardly much inclined to much in the way of food prep – buttering two slices of bread, slapping a load of cold chicken in between them and sprinkling with salt (chicken sandwiches absolutely require additional salting) was the height of culinary endeavour.

Tonight, because this is the first of two planned final bashes, I have no concrete plans. We shall just have to see.

But in the meantime, if any of you are curious enough, here is a little pictoral homage to the almost-closed-for-the-last-time bar, as appeared this afternoon on the blog of our club icon, Colin.

It may explain why Cloud Nine will be missed. Or then again, it may not!