The rewards of rootling, and a whirlwind video tour of the plot

I like the word "rootle" a lot. It conjures an image of pigs or boar, searching for insects or acorns in shady woodland. Or of me, once a year, checking whether the potato plants are doing the business. The latter of these things happened on our allotment yesterday. I'd normally wait at least until the flowers show on our first early varieties to have a ferret around under the foliage, but, partly in the interest of getting to eat some spuds while they are still really waxy (last years were almost all floury, and useless for boiling) I had a look yesterday.

Double Deli Alert! Rural & La Casa

It's all gone a bit Iberian of late in Newcastle, as a couple of very worthwhile delis have opened up in the last few weeks, both of which are deserving of your attention. Almost overnight, the range of charcuterie in this fair city has lengthened and deepened quite considerably which is a very good thing indeed, not to mention some excellent cheeses and other bits and bobs not previously available.

Service Station Review: Tebay Services, Cumbria

Check out the picture above and tell me what you see. It's a service station, right? Right. So: as you walk in, and past the bleeping ranks of fruit machines and arcade games there'll be a desperately grim selection of refreshments and edibles on sale to rouse the weary travelling hordes. These will be criminally overpriced, meaning that what was only meant to be a quick toilet stop for the kids ends up costing as much as a full meal out back home in your favourite restaurant. Through gritted teeth you curse capitalism for having shafted you once again, before climbing back into the motor and furiously yet impotently blasting as far down the M-whatever as you can until the kids need to pee again, at which point the grim cycle repeats itself. Right? WRONG! Because (*adopts sultry breathy tones*) this isn't any service station; This is TEBAY service station!

Restaurant Review: Jesmond Dene House, Newcastle upon Tyne

People (and when I say people, what I really mean is idiots) often calculate the extent to which a meal out provides good value by doing a rough sum of how much extra they have paid for it than it would have cost for them to assemble the raw materials themselves. You'll often find comments such as "Fifty Quid for two people??!! I could have bought all that stuff for a tennner, what a rip-off. DON'T YOU KNOW SOME PEOPLE CAN'T AFFORD TO EAT AT ALL??!!" lurking below the line of newspaper restaurant reviews. This is childishly ignorant for at least two reasons. Firstly, what kind of insane masochist reads all the way through a review of a nice restaurant when they know in advance it's going to set their teeth so thoroughly on edge? Secondly, and more substantially, it fails to recognise what a restaurant actually is.

Checking out the birds over the fence

We got a proper glimpse for the first time into the intriguing world of pigeon keeping at the weekend. The owner of the loft which backs onto our plot has been painting his sheds, necessitating the removal of part of our fence. This is fine, and I strongly suspect that they'll return to a better state of health than that in which they found it. It was an excellent excuse to invite ourselves for a look round their lofts and to find out a bit about how the whole murkily intriguing pigeon game operates.