Sudan - Khartoum

BB and myself are in the African oven of Sudan. Not a holiday of course but business. Not many would come here for a holiday for a number of reasons,

   1)  No Beer
   2) No alternative to no beer
   3) Wine etc, as above.
   4) Some nasty fighting going on down South
   5) too hot.

Yes Sudan is dry and not only the desert, also the hotel bars and city restaurants. Officially that is but like anything that is banned that some thing is available somewhere if you know where to look. But I don't know where nor care now! I've adjusted to no beer.

For myself I look at coming to Sudan as a healthy option where if I don't have a drink for a few weeks then it must be good for me. Although the healthy option isn't so healthy if you should get bitten by a mozzie or order a Fillet steak done Rare. The former hasn't happened yet but the latter certainly has.
I did make the mistake of ordering a Steak done rare which was lovely at the time but for 3 following days I was sick as I had ever been ever before.

The first time I came here I came with a cunning plan I would make my own alcohol, so I brought a couple of packs of dried yeast with me. Bakers yeast, of course to make bread should I be asked.

This plan was possible as we weren't in a hotel but a guest house so the brewing could remain out of sight. There are no readily available brewing kits so it was a case of fermenting fruit juice in the carton. A bit like a 'brew in the bag' kit. The first attempt was only partially successful as the fermentation bubbled and popped but unfortunately it bubbled all the juice out of the carton leaving an inch of goo-y yeast in the bottom and the rest on the floor.

The next attempt was to decant the pineapple juice into a bottle and then have a proper airlock for the C02.

Fermentation took about 4 days. I would then empty the liquid into a container and partially freeze it. Then pour off the unfrozen liquid and half the semi-frozen ice and use that in fresh pineapple juice. It certainly works.

This is a video of the brew in action.

North Wales-- Llandudno

Off to North Wales now to stay with my lovely LJ in her cottage in the sky. Well not truly in the sky but rooted to Terra-firmer like a barnacle on a ship. The view certainly feels floaty enough to be in the sky.

So off to

Where

•  The average age is 65
•  More mobility scooter shops per square mile
•  Local Hoteliers operate a business cartel within the council
• The sea comes in on two sides
•  Has marginally better weather than other places in N Wales.
•  Wild Goats
•  Electric Tram that shuts too early (to get me up the hill from the pub)
•  A cable car that I've never been on. 
•  and LJ lives here.

There are many good reasons to go to Llandudno, clean air, real log fire, nice garden, lots of projects on the go, mountain biking and LJ.

One of the main on going projects is the creation of some terraced stone tiers in the garden (Project Gooseberry garden), where once only nettles, brambles, shrubs and midges grew plus a solitary a Gooseberry bush . With the loss of the flora the midges became homeless. Gone back to Scotland.

This project started as most do from little seeds as Acorns to Oaks. This began as " While I'm at work would you get just get those Gooseberries from down there for me please" said LJ.

After beating and thrashing my way through nettles down this very loose rubble slope to the barely visible Gooseberry bush while being stung stung stung the whole way down I suddenly realised I was in a secret garden that I never knew existed. This was a place where people could go missing for years. I called out to see if anybody was down here but only the wildlife called back, and then bit me!

Calling it a Secret garden is a bit of an exaggeration, a secret yes, a garden no! Its kind of like saying the place is a little overgrown as would be saying the Titanic is a little bit sunk.

I retrieved the said Gooseberries from the bush and formulated a not very cunning plan. The plan to clear the land and do something with it. You can see at this point the plan wasn't very well developed but had potential. So after discussing 'The Plan' with LJ I was given permission to go ahead with one condition the Gooseberry bush must survive.

It did I couldn't and still can't believe it. After all the work, beating, pulling, cutting, chopping, burning, cursing, stinging, throwing, falling, moving, building, cementing the gooseberry bush survives. Its quite incredible its resilience. It even survived the slugs this year.
 
The beauty of this little corner of the garden is its one of the few positions out of the wind. Compared to anywhere else around here it almost has its own micro-climate. The wind is a big problem for growing anything in N Wales but this one little slope is almost almost almost perfect.
There's almost no natural soil here, some but a bit claggy clay-ish so we've had to make it from what little there was mixed down with Horse Poo, Goat house wood shavings (Poo), fire ashes, old compost, and that's worked pretty well. This is okay for the top tier but we have 3 more smaller tiers to soil up that have no soil at all.

This terracing should be mostly finished this year then its onto Project Greenhouse and Project Workshop.

I only have a week here before my next trip so not much will get done.

I got a day mountain biking done at Penmachno, doing just the short loop as I was feeling a bit coldy-fluy. Unfortunately for LJ she was at work so couldn't come, never mind I told he all about it, so we both could sort of share it. I didn't ask her to share her day in the office with me by telling me all about it, was that wrong of me?

Back to London

Since my last posting I've been pretty active, best way to be of course.

I returned from Plzen back to London on a Friday afternoon. This without question is the worst time and day of week to cross London from Heathrow with 2 suitcases and a rucksack. A Black cab from Heathrow to Lewisham could take anything up to 2 hours to reach my house in Lewisham and cost an arm and a leg, twice over.

However there is an alternative that is rife with its own problems but much cheaper and quicker. Train-Tube-Train-Taxi. Depending on luggage this is fast and convenient, but convenient on a Fri afternoon it isn't.

Blocking and hindering peoples fast escape to the weekend with cases and bags on the trains and tubes is at the very least frond upon and at the worst going to get you into some heated verbal exchanges. However on this particular trip across town there weren't any dramas.

There is one other time of day when it is morally wrong in other passengers minds to be carrying suitcases on the trains and tubes. This is between the hours of 8-9 am on any working weekday. People maybe in a hurry to get home at the end of the day but they are 10 times more panicky and aggressive when trying not to be late for work. The tube system is in a state of stampede at this time, don't get in their way with your cases or your be trampled. There is no mercy shown at this time of day.

 Once back in culture

                                                                                    the first thing to do is empty the suitcases into the washing machine and hit the pub for a beer, preferably a strong IPA.

The most recent to open and probably one of the top 3 pubs in Lewisham is the Ravensbourne Arms. It use to be the Coach and Horses under different ownership and was claiming to be a sports bar. Most of the sport was probably running from the police. I'm sure some fine sprinters come out of the Coach and Horses Academy. 

Fortunately its all changed now and worth a visit. The pub is much better than their website.

RavensbourneArms.com

Ditton Swimming Pool

Well it sort of started for me just a few years ago around 1967, just a few years?? It was about then that I went to Ditton Junior School but I think it was called Infants school, it's really hard to take on board I was actually an Infant. Seems like a another person in a different time, the link between that person and me is very faint and distant.

My memory of places is still strong but the memory of me, of being me is becoming faint and ghost like. Talking of ghosts I did see one once not far from the school and not at all in any way where would you expected to see one. I'll show and explain in another post where it happened.

Ditton School was a marvellous place especially at 15:45, or as we use to say when the big hand is on the 9 and the little hand is on the 3, it was going home time! Our school was lucky and unusual as it had its own swimming pool not that we could use it much as it always had a leaky roof, leaky pool or no heating. I believe it suffered all 3 complaints  almost always simultaneously, occasionally consecutively and certainly at least two problems were overlapping. Much like a Venn diagram, (I didn't know what a Venn diagram was in those days). We never actually used the pool enough to learn to swim but our parents (of all Infants that is) learnt that it took a lot of collections to keep the pool running.

The pool building was and is a lovely old building, here is a recent picture that I took from the web.

© Copyright Stephen Craven and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence

Of course in the 60's it didn't look like this it looked more like this,

There was no door at the front nor the other paraphernalia that has materialised since. But I'm being cruel it never had these black lines either. So to do the lovely old building some justice I've attempted to reconstruct its appearance to a point, as it was when I was a child.

Yes that is a lot more like it, okay the window wasn't modern as it is now but it was there. the new blue door would be the boys changing area, the girls at the other end with the said pool occupying centre stage. Yes this pool needed a whole pool of money to keep it open which wasn't very forth coming, hence I learnt to swim at Maidstone and Swanly baths.
 

Plzen Cz rep, another beery time

8:30 am in Plzen, Czech Rep. That is where I'm at on this Sunday morning. I went down for Breakfast but aborted and returned to the room when I found no tables available, bringing a coffee back up with me.
I need more than one coffee this morning after enjoying an evening in a local brewery (Groll Brewery) followed by a walk back to the hotel across the town square which happened to be having a Wine festival with live music on a stage. The backdrop behind the stage being the Cathedral which gave the place extra atmosphere but none of it at all religious. No the only spirits here were from the bottle, or would have been if the government in Prague hadn't band the sale of Spirits last week across the whole country.
This is not a disaster for the country because one thing the Cz Rep isn't short of is beer and wine, and at prices that Britian enjoyed in the early 90's.
Its certainly with good fortune that BB and myself arrived at the square with just 30 min left on the clock before they pulled the curtain on the  festival. Nevertheless we still managed to have one large plastic cup full to the brim plus another for the road. Literally for the road I was still nursing the cup when we arrived back at the hotel.
If you visit Plzen you should seek out the Groll brewery near the river (one of the rivers) and enjoy for me a jug of the Black Unfiltered lagers. Forget lagers as we know in the UK this lager is nothing like those. This is a lager for beer drinkers not lager drinkers. Check their website.

>>>> Brewery Groll Website 

Or

>>>> to see a map

Time for another breakfast attempt followed by a medium distance bike ride (pedals no engine) and to be sure to be back in time to watch the F1 GP from Singapore. Weather looks good today, high thin cloud, neither hot nor cold. A perfect day for taking out the white 'Focus -lost Lagoon' pedal machine for a spin. A strange name for a bike, but oh well it does its job whatever it's called.

       

All Posts May Appear To Be

Almost random by nature. The only guaranteed connection between posts is the fact they are my posts. Subjects will vary wide and wildly and may only make sense to me.

Out Of Ditton is just the starting point of the Blog as it is and was my starting point.

So where is Ditton?  It's a small Village near Maidstone, Kent, UK. A largely unremarkable place that exploded in size in the 1960's.