Slow Life Blog from the Lake District
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Tax Freedom Day

30/5/2012

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There are lots of Australians around in the Lake District at the moment, which is great for the hotel trade. And the Damson Dene is getting more than its fair share of Aussie visitors as The Hotel was shown there recently and they are flocking to meet Wayne and his crew. A trip to England from Australia has suddenly become affordable because their dollar is very strong against the pound. Another reason is that their government isn’t as rapacious as ours.

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Get Carter

26/5/2012

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“We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.”
            -  Duck Dunn – The Blues Brothers
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Duck Dunn, who was bassist for Booker T and the MG’s and the Blues Brothers (he played himself in the film) died in Tokyo on May 13th, after playing two gigs at the Blue Note Club.  I happened to be in Tokyo that night and what would I have given to have been there at one of his last gigs.

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Give the Mammoth Onion a Chance

24/5/2012

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I think it’s about time the Mammoth Onion (or W Robinson and Sons, as they are officially known) were given the credit they deserve. For many years the vegetable displays at Chelsea were dominated by Medwyn Williams who got gold after gold for his flamboyant displays. Medwyn retired in 2010 with 11 golds under his belt. This year the quality and variety of the vegetables shown by the Robinsons at Chelsea was every bit as good as Medwyn’s ever were. Probably better. ​

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Chelsea Flower Show Preview

21/5/2012

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There’s been a delicious sense of anarchy about the Chelsea Flower Show today. I first encountered it in the most unlikely place, the garden sponsored by the Caravan Club, whose sense of daring is normally limited to doing 35mph in a 50 mph zone. I was delighted to see them breaking, for the first time in the 99 years of the show, the rule that animals aren’t allowed in Show Gardens, with the appearance of a simply gorgeous creature called Cawdaw (Cawdy for short) in a kennel cunningly disguised as a miniature caravan. I was introduced to Cawdy just after the judging and there was relief all round that the judges hadn’t spotted her. Jo Thompson, who designed the garden, richly deserves the gold medal and the People’s Award which she is tipped to get.
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The other contender for the People’s Award is Diarmud Gavin with his towering 7 storey garden. Diarmud took me up in the lift to the fifth floor, from where you have to tackle a series of ladders to reach the top. His people told me that there had been a lively debate about health and safety before the unhealthy side won. What a marvellous victory. It’s a long time since I’ve enjoyed such a scary afternoon. The best part was the downward journey, where you get the chance to insert yourself into a steel tube which propels you down four storeys in about four and a half seconds. I’d love to read their risk assessment and I take back all those scornful words I wrote about how feeble Chelsea is, when it comes to safety.


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The Lakes Waterbird

17/5/2012

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When Waterbird’s replica takes flight on Lake Windermere it will be an astonishing sight. Its flight will commemorate the first ever flight by a seaplane, which took place here 100 years ago, piloted by Captain Edward Wakefield of Kendal. The flight will, without any doubt, attract the attention of the world’s TV and newspapers and, because it can only take place when the weather is clear and calm, it will show off the Lake District at its best.

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Asparagus

13/5/2012

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Shirley Conran famously said that life’s too short to stuff a mushroom. Not if you follow the Slow Life it isn’t. But I would draw the line at peeling asparagus, which is what Simon Hopkinson recommends in his new column, “Simon’s Kitchen” in Country Life magazine. In fact I think he makes rather a mess of this simplest of vegetables by recommending that the asparagus, once peeled, should be cooked at a rolling boil for 5-6 minutes. I think that after 5 or 6 minutes the tips will be over-cooked and there’s a danger that the rest will be mushy. ​

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Martyn Crofts – Britain’s Got Talent

11/5/2012

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When we were in the audition room last October Martyn Crofts told us that his stage name was Armitage Hanks “because my act is toilet”, but he used his real name on stage in Britain’s Got Talent. Martyn lives in my home town of Skipton and he told Ant and Dec that his ambition was to be asked to open the Skipton Gala, to which Dec replied: “If you’ve got a dream, you may as well dream big”. At the auditions we thought it would be the lovely Hero who would go all the way but it was Martyn who got to the semi-finals, and was only thwarted by Simon who said that his was “arguably the most stupid act I’ve ever seen on the show”. Perhaps his judgment was influenced by the thought that a man who sang like a Dalek with a saucepan on his head isn’t obvious Las Vegas material.

The latest news is that although Martyn didn’t get through to the final he has received his invitation to open the Skipton Show. Next stop, Las Vegas.
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Gordon Ramsay in Tokyo

9/5/2012

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It can be sobering to see how others see us. Last year in Japan everyone was asking about the riots. They could understand why the Greeks or the Spanish would protest in the streets against their government’s austerity measures but they were non-plussed by news footage of the British going on the rampage just for the fun of it. This year the Japanese are equally puzzled by the news reports that it can take 3 hours to get through immigration control at Heathrow.

We may try to persuade the Japanese that British streets aren’t really unruly and that our civil servants aren’t bolshie and inept, but one image which it’s almost impossible to throw off is our reputation for bad food.


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Miyajima

7/5/2012

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Where were all the tourists who should have been visiting Matsushima, classified officially as one of Japan’s best three views? Most of them, it seems, were visiting one of the other “best views”, the famous “floating” torii at Miyajima, which is one the most photographed images in Japan. It serves them right. What they got to see was a massive piece of scaffolding sitting in mud flats, surrounded by people holding umbrellas.

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The Shukkeien Garden, Hiroshima

6/5/2012

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The Shukkeien Gardens at Hiroshima were created in the 1660’s for a feudal Lord in the Chinese style which is now recognised as quintessentially Japanese, with its constituent parts representing broad expanses of lakes, mountains and seashore. It succeeds very well, creating a quiet haven in the midst of a madhouse metropolis. Of course it was wiped out by the atomic bomb, every plant, every structure. Everything that is, except for the one thing which needed to be destroyed, an incongruously ugly bridge which looks as if it’s made out of concrete blocks. ​

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The Adachi Museum of Art Gardens

5/5/2012

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You’ll never see a photo of the gardens at the Adachi Art Museum gardens with people in it. That’s because people aren’t allowed in it. You can only view the gardens from indoors, for the most part through plate glass. The mood is set at the entrance by a statue of the founder, Adachi Zenco, who has his right arm outstretched, alarmingly like a Nazi salute. He must have been a control freak in his lifetime and now, 20 years after his death, his memory is respected, to the letter. ​

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The Makino Botanical Gardens

4/5/2012

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“Midlife Ambition”
My greatest ambition is to document, with utmost meticulousness and accuracy, the entirety of Japan’s flora. I want to publish it as a book and have it distributed in countries around the world, as a way of demonstrating the capabilities of the Japanese and elevating the status of Japan’s scholarship. What I want to do is create something to be proud of, something that will amaze people everywhere. I has to be something worthy of showing off, something that says “This is the kind of work the Japanese are capable of!”

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A Teenager’s Treat – Raw Minced Beef with a Raw Egg on Top

3/5/2012

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If you asked the average English teenager what they’d like for a special treat the chances are they’d say a burger- probably from McDonalds or Burger King. They’s expect the burger to be well cooked through and be served in a bun with fries on the side. I think it’s a pretty safe bet that they wouldn’t ask for the meat to be served raw, with a raw egg on top and no bun or fries. Yet this is what the two teenage children of my Japanese host ordered, at their favourite place, the Korean Barbecue restaurant in Kochi. Their choice was Yuckhoe, the Korean version of steak tartar.

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Aubergine Wars- Part 2

2/5/2012

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When the aubergine growers of the Aki region began their war against whitefly they had to import the predator insects from Holland. Now they’ve learnt how to grow their own stock of predators and their expertise is shared with other vegetable growers of the Kochi region. One such is Frenchman Matthieu who, with his Japanese wife and her family grow sweet peppers (which are smaller and tastier than the “traffic light” capiscums sold here) at their farm in Usa. They keep a small green house aside to grow the plants which attract the predators, such as the sago plant. ​

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Aubergine Wars- Part 1

1/5/2012

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This aubergine grower is no eco-warrior and yet he persuaded more than 400 of his fellow farmers to stop spraying chemicals. It’s a brilliant story. The Aki region, on the southern coast of Shikoku island, is devoted to the growing of aubergines. They are grown in greenhouses and seeds sown in July will produce plants which will crop continuously from September for ten months. Pest control was never a problem until 1982 when white fly was introduced from abroad (probably by an Englishman seeking revenge for Japanese knotweed). Initially whitefly was controlled by chemical spraying but over time the spraying became less effective and crop yields suffered. ​

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    ​About Slow Life

    The idea of Slow Life is to take the principles of Slow Food, which are “good, clean and fair”, and extend them to life in general.

    Here in the Lake District, the air is clean, the pace is slow and the atmosphere is calm. If we don’t grow food ourselves, we can buy it in friendly small shops, where you know the quality is going to be the best.

    This blog is a celebration of the Slow Life, with forays into the world of design, music, the arts, gardens, and my particular weakness, Japan.

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