Restaurant Review: Neptune Fish Restaurant, Seahouses

Neptune. To the right, the competition. To the left, a small abandoned child: welcome to Cameron's Britain.

After a premium morning of poncing around the Farne Islands, what better way of satisfying the resultant hunger than eating something that came out of the very waters that surround them? This is a rhetorical question, so you don't need to actually try to think of a better way, unless you really feel like you have to, in which case keep it to yourself. The whole premise of this introduction is that there isn't a better way, and I don't need you ruining it for me, smartypants. Anyway, I digress. Sand eels weren't on the menu anywhere, so I'm still unclear as to why these appeal so much to the Puffins we had spent the last couple of hours gawping at. What I can recommend however, are the fish and chips at Neptune, which are right on the money.

Lovely things to do #1: Get a boat to the Farne Islands

Ahoyhoy, and welcome to the first in an occasional series of posts here on Patchy Growth which are related directly neither to eating out or our allotment, but are still, I think, worth noting for one reason or another. I'm calling it "Lovely things to do". You know how when you go to work on a Monday and someone's all like, "hey, I did this lovely thing at the weekend", and then they tell you what they did and you think "hmm, maybe I'll do that sometime"? Well, that's the kind of thing that'll be going on here. There are literally loads of things to do, so I doubt I'll ever run out of ammo for these pieces. When a man tires of things to do, he is tired of life, as the poet once said. Well, I'm not tired; I'm full of vim and raring to go. Let's do this!

A lunch to end all lunches: Cal's Own, Jesmond

One man and his restaurant

I somehow managed to miss my twitter invite to the opening of the new Cal's Own in Jesmond. Gutted, I was. The only positive to come out of the whole debacle is that I've gotten a whole lot better at checking my Twitter DMs as a result. We've been in since and I need scarcely tell you how brilliant the Neapolitan pizzas are (especially that margherita), but anyway, they completely bloody are. They're definitely on a par with anything we tried when in Naples last year. When I got another message off Cal on the Twitter asking if Kasia and I fancied swinging by for a "tasting of treats", I definitely did. I had assumed, fairly, I think, that this would involve pizza. The fact that we sat for four hours stuffing ourselves but didn't consume a single slice serves notice of just what a great place to eat this already is, but also, excitingly, of how it may get even better over time. Here's what we had.

Super-fun allotment tour May 2016

Ahoy there! Partly to save me typing up a whole bunch of stuff and partly because it's about time, in 2016, that Patchy Growth went for full digital media integration, I took a quick video of our plot today. We spent four or so hours up there today and managed to get the place whipped pretty much into shape.

New season's greetings

Ahoy there. You'd be forgiven for thinking we'd given up on the old allotment game, what with the complete dearth of gardening-related entries on this page. Not a bit of it! Although the fluctuating priorities of life have prevented us getting to the plot - never mind writing about it - as much as I'd like things, are still happening. Now that that we're at the point in the year at which stuff is starting to grow, I'll show you what we've got going on so far.