venta

Since I'm not the rabidly posting monster I once was, you're forgiven for having not noticed that I've just been on holiday for a week. Obviously, I've been in Whitby for the folk festival - I'd write about it, but you've read n similar entries from previous years. It was quite like the others, only with a bit more Tai Chi. I am, to misquote

chrestomancy, now slightly more able to fight invisible enemies who move very slowly.

However, things I ate on holiday:

Strolling past the sweet shop on Golden Lion bank, I observed that their blackboard listed among the sweets available "invalid toffee". Being of a curious nature, I went in to investigate. Having enquired of the sweet shop lady, I can confirm that it is not in fact toffee of dubious validity, but toffee in a permanent state of ill health.

More usefully, it's an old recipe designed to provide toffee for invalids, to make them better (according to the slightly odd Victorian values of what you should give invalids). It's a boiled sweet consistency rather than chewy, and tastes a little like a more robust Wurther's original.

On Thursday, Will and I were questing for an evening meal. Walking past a new Italian on Grape Lane, we found ourselves summarily grabbed and yanked through the doors by the smell of garlic. Sadly, the resaturant was fully booked. At lunchtime the following day, we managed to snag the last table for Friday night.

I ordered a carpaccio salad, and the waitress anxiously enquired whether I knew carpaccio "wasn't cooked". I did. That's one of the reasons I'd ordered it; as the sort of person who likes their steak to moo I thought I ought to investigate carpaccio. It turned out to be (a) lovely and (b) not at all how I'd expected. The texture is somehow soft, and not actually like meat at all. It's also not a hugely strong flavour, though it coped well standing up to the garlic and parmesan it had been given as platemates.

Also, they do root ginger ice cream! And black pepper ice cream! And they let you have these together! I believe there was chilli on the menu too, though I didn't try it, and some mundane stuff like chocolate.

So I'd thoroughly recommend the restaurant, but only quietly, because I don't want those filthy goffick types booking it up in October and preventing me from eating there. Warning: their plates of pasta don't muck about. If in any doubt of your Fat Knacker status, order a half portion.

Eating a nice meal out while in Whitby, I was served fish with a sort of knobbly, spriggy version of fine green beans. I was mid-claim that it was salsify when the mother told me not to be ridiculous. She didn't know what it was, but someone else did: samphire. Yeah, I knew it began with s.

I like samphire, but it rarely comes out on menus. In fact, barring posh places serving it with fish I've never seen it except in one Whitby fishmonger's.

However, more than anything I like its name; samphire is such a wonderful word (though, in my opinions, a bad name for a vegetable). It has a distinctly old-fashioned sound - mentioned by Shakespeare in King Lear and everything - but also a marvelously rich aura. It makes me think of sapphires, and fires, and general oppulence. I bet if you dug around you'd find records that Henry VIII wore at his coronation a robe trimmed with ermine and samphire.

On Monday, I popped into one of Whitby's excellent bakeries to buy a sausage roll for lunch. At the last minute, I spied a sign advertising corned beef pasties and asked for one of those instead. Southern nancy bakeries don't sell corned beef-related products (except I have an unconfirmed report from

onebyone that the Co-Op might).

No, said the lady, whisking the sign away, they'd just sold the last one. A bit perfidious of them, I thought, but accepted that these things happen.

On Wednesday I went again to the bakery. Such was their perfidy that they claimed again to have sold out. On Thursday, suffering from a surfeit of bakers, perfidy, etc, Will and I went into The Pier for lunch, and I ordered corned beef pie. Will returned from the bar to tell me that they were... yup, out of corned beef pie. Ruling out enemy action on his part, I was beginning to fear some form of conspiracy.

On returning to the parental house on Saturday, the conspiracy theory was confirmed when I discovered that the mother had, before leaving Whitby, managed to extract a corned beef pasty from the perfidious bakery. I sat in a stripey deck chair amongst the carnage of my parents' semi-completed house extension and ate my pasty. Just to prove I was still on holiday.