Flamborough Head
Yesterday’s plan was to go to Hull today and this remained my plan when I woke up, it was still the plan while I was eating breakfast at the country park cafe, but my plan changed not long after I programmed the satnav and set off. It changed because the sun came out, there wasn’t much wind and it seemed such a shame to waste a cycling day. So I parked up, got the Brompton out of the boot and cycled off towards Flamborough Head.
Everything was going well for the first couple of minutes but my ‘spider sense’ started tingling when I saw the little blue signs with bikes on them showing me that I was on the Wold Way. Still I carried on up and down a few small hills until it finally dawned on me, THE WOLDS, that means constant ‘rolling hills’ his all the way there, dozens of them! Rolling hills are quite good fun on a normal bike, but on a Brompton that’s not changing down into it’s lowest gear (note to self, get it adjusted at Apple Bikes) they were torture and they went on and on. Well suffice it to say, I don’t need a lower body workout at the gym this week.
Fortunately the sun continued to shine, the wind stayed low, the cafe was open and my legs were up to the challenge. The 16 mile ride provided a superb opportunity to listen to the wonderful audiobook The Pleasure Of Finding Thing Out, which was compiled from a set of interviews that were filmed by the BBC for Horizon and some other material. I absolutely loved it, I like to think that I’d have turned out a bit like Richard Feynman if I’d been a genius (that’s a big if), regardless he’s always been an inspiration to me, up there with John Seymour. The one black spot of the morning, apart from the hills, was the lemon meringue pie I was tempted into eating for fuel, sadly if there’s one cake that can be ONLY either superb or horrible it’s lemon meringue pie, guess which it was?
I arrived home just after lunch and made myself a big fry up, although I cooked the meat in the oven! It was great and spurred on by this culinary success I decided I would make myself some sour dough bread. I’d picked up a packaged mix a few weeks ago, that actually has real Rye starter in it, and I fancied giving it a try because unlike bread raised by yeast, sour dough is raised by bacteria and they eat all of the gluten during the rise. The process for making it seemed fairly straightforward, although much longer and harder work than I’m used to. The knead was a full 25 minutes long, that’s one arm aching challenge of wills with the dough. The rise is then 90 minutes, following by forming the dough into rolls and another 90 minute rise. I really hope it’s worth it, but if it’s not I’ve learnt something and given myself an upper body workout. making it got me thinking though that not many years ago all bread was made at home like this and it was one of oh so many chores that homemakers had to get through every day just to put food on the table. It’s no wonder our health has declined so much in recent years now that everything is so trivially easy. I’d certainly be thinking twice about eating that extra bread roll, the one I didn’t really need, if I knew how much effort I’d need to put in to replace it!
During the first of these rises I went out for a walk to collect photos of beach debris for Debbie, I really enjoyed photographing all of the bits and pieces of dismembered crabs, I really did, it was quite intriguing, not sure what Debbie will be doing with them though. After 3 attempts to email the photos, all ending in several email apps crashing, I realised for the hundredth time just how much I need a new iPhone, one with more memory. It’s really incredible – given how much profit Apple makes – that they can be so stingy on memory in their older phones, condemning people like me to endlessly crashing apps and slow performance. My new phone has almost 8 times the memory of my 4S, it’s going to make a world of difference!
I’ve just had my bread and it was surprisingly good, so good in fact that I would have been tempted to massively over indulge on it if it weren’t for the useless oven in the apartment burning half of the rolls, lucky escape! I’d purchased mini pots of strawberry jam and lemon curd on the way here and I still have enough left, along with a Ciabatta mix, for later in the week. Next time I’m going to set the oven way lower!
I normally go for a beach walk in the evening and talk to Debbie on the phone, last nights walk by starlight was superb, but tonight I’ve been tempted by the lights of Filey prom (that I see in the distance from the beach) so I’m going to pop to Tesco in the car and then walk down to take a walk along the prom once it gets dark.
