Some progress of our own

Interested onlookers

It's a pleasure to report some significant progress on the allotment that happened while we were actually there. We took the last couple of days off work in honour of my completing another lap of the sun, and spent sizeable chunks of both putting in a bit of old fashioned graft on the plot. With so much work having been done for us so far, it seemed only fair.

Restaurant Review: The Raby Hunt, Summerhouse

When revisiting a restaurant, it's a pleasure to find the things you enjoyed the first time just as good as they were. It's even better to find that they've been joined by other plates of searingly good quality. When we ate at The Raby Hunt for the first time a little over a year ago we were fairly bowled over by some stellar-level cooking from James Close and his small team. Things have moved on since then. There are a couple more staff both in the kitchen and out front, and, when visiting for a birthday lunch at the weekend just gone there was a palpable sense of assurance about everything going on under their roof. The following words are in danger of sounding like the worst kind of fawning, hagiographic brown-nosing, but there's no getting away from the fact that pretty much everything we ate at The Raby Hunt was - spoiler alert! - flat out brilliant.

Restaurant Review: Sunday Lunch @ Vallum Restaurant, Vallum Farm

Another Sunday, another lunch. There are other things to do on a Sunday of course, but in these relatively godless times, lunch is a better and more rewarding thing to do than most. Aldous Huxley said something about how a lunch can turn a pessimistic determinist into an optimistic believer in the will's freedom. Quite right, but I wonder if he specifically had beef and Yorkshire pud in mind? We did, at the terminus of a fun weekend when we had friends up from darn sarf.

Here's one somebody else made earlier

We've been absentee allotmenteers this last week and a bit, as visitors from near and far claimed our attention. And yet significant progress has still been made, as if by magic. A path has been laid, a water gathering system set up, a gate installed and beds laid out. If you've followed any of what we've been up to with the new plot in Benwell since we took it on in January, you'll know it came with the added bonus of some unbelievably helpful neighbours who have catapulted its progress on way beyond what we'd have been able to achieve ourselves.

Restaurant Review: Irvins Brasserie, North Shields

This was supposed to be a review of The Staith House's Sunday lunch, but a couple of messages left on their answerphone and a tweet brought no response, and by the time we finally managed to make contact with them they were fully booked. I've heard the food is great there; I'll maybe find out some other time. Happily, this riverside section of North Shields is up to its bollocks in restaurants these days, and a call to Irvins secured us a table there. We went for a quick and entirely tokenistic walk along toward Collingwood Monument amid the freezing gusts of a hoarily northern kind of afternoon - you have to do some sort of walk before a Sunday lunch, don't you? - before scuttling back to Irvin's to eat.

Restaurant Review: Bierrex Smoke and Tap House, Newcastle upon Tyne

This write-up completes a personal trilogy of Newcastle's current line-up of American-style barbecue-focussed outfits. First there was Hop and Cleaver, then Bierrex opened its doors in September, followed, more recently, by Longhorns on Mosley Street. From zero to treble-smoked inside of just a few short months; aside from snidey observations about trendy bandwagons, this seems to me to be A Good Thing. People are surely likely to find something to enjoy within at least one of these joints, and it all adds to the variety and gaiety of Newcastle's fodder scene. But would Bierrex complete the triumverate triumphantly or atrociously? Would it be Last Crusade or Matrix Revolutions?