Travel cross country?

Two things on the TV sparked a discussion today. Firstly the early morning news about refugees finding their way across Europe and walking across countries and Michael Portillio taking trains from Pembroke Dock to Cambridge in another of his Great Railway journey programmes on BBC2.  We love "geography", traveled a lot in the distant past and are interested in learning more about the world.

Firstly we had to imagine a map of Europe and then update ourselves on modern countries and borders. At which point we decided we needed to get up and find an atlas! We saw some refugees were using SMART phones GPS to find their way by road which is something we could not do! We need paper maps!

Not quite finished watching the railway programme but we could not work out the railway routes. We want to go from the east coast to the south coast (Hampshire)  without going through London and can't find enough information to crack it!  I wonder if the programme researcher would do the leg work for us and come up with a reasonable route and cost??  Travel in England is silly - there is no easy way to go across the country by road, rail, canal, or river!  We have some friends in the south who declare they will only visit us by using their small light airplane as it will be easier!


Can't afford to go anywhere this month - car is repaired and collected at an eye watering amount.

Collecting tomatoes from the 20 plants in the poly tunnel in a bucket now.  Will be making passat tomorrow as that will keep in fridge and be useful in a variety of dishes.

Tried a new recipe today to work through the various piles of veg in the kitchen! One branch of one of my bell pepper plants broke off this week so there as a pile of green peppers, some were a bit mis -shaped! Some of our sweetcorn are not perfect either so I stripped off the kernels with a sharp knife.  I found this on an internet search.

Soak the sweetcorn in some olive oil and then fry in a little more oil with some herbs, Put to one side. Blanch a green pepper after removing the stalk and the seeds. I cut mine in half first. I drained them and sprinkled salt on the inner side. If I had wrapped them in a cloth I think I could of got the outer skin to peel off - but it did not matter.  I then packed the halves with the sweetcorn and topped with cheese. They went in the oven to brown and cook through. Quite nice, I will try to improve on the dish next time by adding some garlic to the sweetcorn as suggested.