The day after arriving in Nettleham we took a cruise on the Boston Belle down the River Haven. The weather was fairly kind but the sky was not brilliant blue, neither did the sun beat down as in the river cruises I just experienced in the Top End of Australia. We saw cormorants, herons, black-backed gulls, egrets and seals. No crocodiles. I saw the Boston Stump (the cathedral) up close for the first time and thought about the pilgrims leaving from here to make a new life in America.
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| Boston Stump from the river |
Food:
En route to the pier in Boston we stopped at a great butcher/deli at Navenby (Odlings) to pick up meats and pies. I couldn’t resist getting stuck into a pork pie then and there. What makes these Lincolnshire pork pies great? Apart from Lincolnshire producing good pork products, it is the crust that does it for me, crunchy and fresh. Yumm! Speaking of pork products; dad bred pigs for a while and a local farmer (who had such a broad accent I could never understand what he said) helped us make sausages, hams, haslet and brawn etc. I never knew what was in the brawn but we ate it for weeks there was so much of it.
[I just called dad to find out what was in brawn: 'pigs' snout and ears' was the reply They were tough and had to be cooked for a long time. Prolonged cooking produced a jelly in which the pink bits sat. I had no idea]
Wikipedia tells me that Haslet, pronounced 'Hacelet',[2][3] or azelet, though sometimes 'hazlet' in areas outside Lincolnshire) is a herbed pork meatloaf, originally from Lincolnshire. It is typically made of stale white bread, pork (traditionally the entrails), sage, salt and pepper, and sometimes onion. (We ate lots of this too!)[4]
The next must on the food agenda is fish and chips. We had to queue up for about 25 minutes at the fish shop on the way home from the cruise. It’s worth the wait. Proper size chips, not those weedy, skinny McDonald types, and fresh North sea fish, not to mention the mushy peas and salt and vinegar sprayed on top.
A stay with my sister is not complete without one of her gargantuan roast dinners. The meat was chicken but the piece de resistance were the veggies, eight of them: roast potatoes; baked squash, parsnips, yams, egg plant; stuffed marrow; cauliflower; carrots.
Of course I’d already sampled the steak pie at the Plough in Nettleham. We’d met dad there on our arrival from Sheffield. It has real meat, well cooked in tasty gravy and topped by a delicious crust, not too thick and not too much of it. That is definitely going to get a second visit before I leave.
Another must is Malt loaf, a rather sticky dark brown loaf with raisins, eaten with butter. Not good if you have false teeth. Blue Riband chocolate wafer, and of course Cadbury’s chocolate. It definitely tastes better here. My sister had Bassets Jelly Babies waiting for me when I arrived bless her!
Of course, apart from the veggies, none of these foods aren't what you could call healthy but what the heck, as Maxine says, ‘I’m on ‘oliday, I can do what I like!’
Ancestors:
The day after the cruise we drove to Southwell in Nottinghamshire, specifically the Minster where some of my ancestors are buried in the church graveyard. They are the Brailsford family and Mary was the originator of the Bramley apple. Wikipedia tells us:
The first 'Bramley's Seedling' tree grew from pips planted by Mary Ann Brailsford when she was a young girl in her garden in Southwell, Nottinghamshire, UK in 1809.[2] The tree in the garden was later included in the purchase of the cottage by a local butcher, Matthew Bramley in 1846. In 1856, a local nurseryman, Henry Merryweather asked if he could take cuttings from the tree and start to sell the apples. Bramley agreed but insisted that the apples should bear his name.
On 31st October 1862 the first recorded sale of a Bramley was noted in Merryweather's accounts. He sold "three Bramley apples for 2/- to Mr Geo Cooper of Upton Hall".
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| Look, there's Mary! |
(Cooper was my maiden name, I wonder if an ancestor from the other side of the family bought them!) You do not want to eat one from the tree, they are sour. They are very good for cooking and comprise 95% of cooking apples used in England. My niece has a Bramley apple tree in her garden.
Last year Southwell Minster had a ceremony to consecrate a stained glass window dedicated to the Bramley apple.
All this for a cooking apple.
As to the living ancestors, namely dad, now 97, we listen to the Premier league football matches together in his hot living room. He feels the cold now and is a little deaf so the radio shouts at us. He’s still enthusiastic about the game as he is about MotoGP and Formula 1 racing.
Lincoln City:
Stokes Cafe no longer wafts coffee over the High street. It is still there but they’ve taken the coffee grinder out of the window. In the days before I knew what good coffee was I used to love that smell, breathing it in as I lingered for a while on the bridge, watching the swans. They are still there.
I suppose you can say Lincoln has 'arrived' - the University of Lincoln has expanded, there's a proliferation of student accommodation and there is now a Holiday Inn and a Nando's! But really not much has changed since I was here 2 years ago. The cathedral still dominates, geographically at least.
I discovered that while the High Street is a pedestrian precinct, if you go there between 9-10 it is not. I found myself dodging delivery vans and feeling cross about it. There is a new phenomenon known as 'Lincolnhire Day.'
There is a Nero’s in the upper High street. They make the only good coffee I’ve found in the UK. They advertise that they use a double shot of espresso in their coffees. I think the others use half! Fortunately Neros are all over the place so I know where to go for a decent coffee when I’m out and about.
Edinburgh Woollen Mills (EWM) are still there and I found a couple of bargains on the ‘Buy one get one free’ rack. I did not bump into my cousin, the ‘pseudo nun,’ she was busy chasing after the pope who’s been visiting the UK.
I notice the Liberal Club is up for sale. My mother used to sing there when she was a young woman. Her father, my grandfather was secretary there, and I think it's where my parents met.
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| The Liberal Club |
The Ggreen Dragon Pub is still around, not a bad pick up joint, especially for RAF guys, the scene of many a fun night!
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| The Green Dragon |
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