TomBoy

I have a feeling this little man is going to be beating me up the hills on his own bike before long...

Northcote Manor, Lancashire

I have never eaten in a Michelin-starred restaurant before. I kinda imaged you would need to buy chips on the way home after eating all those insubstantial little towers of food from oversized white plates. My other-half, bless her, bought me the best surprise birthday present – lunch in the Northcote Manor. When you get past the fact you could feed a smallish family for a whole week for the price of lunch here, it’s actually very good value. They are known for celebrating British cuisine, but perhaps more accurately they are able to capture the essential flavours of home-grown British produce and then turn the flavour amplifier up to eleven. It’s just so refreshing to eat somewhere where you know that you couldn’t have sourced or cooked a single ingredient on the plate as well as they do. Best of all though, you actually don’t need chips on the way home.

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Portrait of an Old Cow

La Machine, Liverpool

Not every day you get to see a 50 foot high spider trampling through the streets of Liverpool.

Half Light

A dear old friend, Finola, told me about Ironbridge a long while back now. It slipped my mind to ever go there, but by chance, I found myself there on this last rainy and overcast weekend. While looking around at the tourist cafes and gastropubs, I wondered what the attraction of the place was. But on the route out of town, I followed the one tourist sign that had been drawing me in afternoon, the [Museum of Steel Sculpture]. The museum was firmly closed, but the gardens and woodlands where these eighty outdoor steel sculptures live among meadows and woodlands was not only open, but in the persist drizzle, totally devoid of visitors. A wonderful place. Thanks Fi.