Shelter

I was walking through Belsize Park at the weekend on my way to meet my Son and I noticed this rather strange looking building. It looked very 30s/40s in style and although now a data-storage facility I did wonder what it was originally built for. A bit of googling revealed that it was originally a WW2 deep bomb shelter, connected to the Northern Line which runs parallel to Haverstock Hill it also goes much deeper than the underground. Amazingly it was designed in 1942 and could accommodate 9600 people and extends to 140ft below ground. There are a couple of these in London, built in residential areas and consisting of sleeping quarters, medical facilities, kitchens and self contained power units, hopefully consigned to history such shelters will only now ever be used to store things like computer data archives etc., but the way the world seems to be headed at the moment who knows!

Beak People

Tried one of these at the weekend, it's from  my favourite Sussex brewer Beak and is their table beer. Excellent flavour and mouthfeel for the low ABV, not quite as good as PMST from Verdant but not that far off! Good work Beak people!

Testing Times

Spent a great day at Lords with my Son yesterday, we were watching the test match between England and New Zealand and it was day 2 in the series. We were very lucky with the weather as the rain (only just) held off and a full day of play was possible (day one was shortened by rain). I snapped the picture above at around 3pm, as  you can see the clouds look ominous and the light was so bad that the floodlights had to be switched on (incredible for the middle of the day in June!) Anyway, we had a good day and England did ok, they looked like collapsing in the mid-order and had four batsmen out with ducks, all in a row (as the saying goes) but the tail end did a good job and in the end leaving NZ with 254 runs needed in their second innings, today was a washout, let's hope we get some clear weather tomorrow as I think England could just about win this one..

Friday Smirk

The boys talking about memorising holy books, kind of misses the point of books really, oh and it's usually beneficial if you read more than one..

Midweek Mirth

The excellent xkcd.com. How many times do apps and operating systems "update" themselves these days, I reckon it's a measurable percentage of available time to use them. Good job software developers figured out how to shift the onus of responsibility for bugs from themselves to you.

Where's the passion?

While in Madeira last week I tried the in-house IPA from our hotel. It was called "Passion Fruit IPA", now, usually, I worry that when beers include actual fruit as adjuncts they tend to be a bit on the gimmicky side, i.e. the beer's not up to much so the brewer adds fruit to "spice" it up a bit. I was wrong on that score with this one, it had no fruit adjuncts at all, the passion fruit flavour was coming entirely from the generous dose of Australian Galaxy hops, which do lean toward tropical fruit flavours when used on the cold side. A decent local beer, obviously made by craft enthusiasts!

Madeira - Part III

Madeira is a truly beautiful place, geologically part of Africa but culturally part of Europe, a volcanic island around 200 miles off the coast of Morocco it's a little green haven in a vast sea of azure blue. There are many microclimates here, the North side gets the rain and the South side plenty of sunshine, in the West there are big Atlantic rollers beloved by surfers and in the East the only piece of land flat enough to host an airport. It's only 286 square miles, which is about the size of Anglesey in Wales but it seems like every square inch of the place is producing some kind of crop or other, from bananas to grapes or sugar cane and as can be seen in the picture above the mountainous terrain is extensively terraced and subdivided into smallholdings many of which go back centuries and are passed down through the generations.

One of the days we were there we took a boat trip along the South West coast of the island and luckily spotted a whole pod of Bottlenose Dolphins and a rather huge Bryde's Whale ambling along, amazing views. On the way back to Funchal port we passed the little fishing village that Winston Churchill spent a lot of  time painting in the 50s, called Câmara de Lobos (see above) it's a quaint place where last year we had a splendid lunch, fish as fresh as it could be and a delicious local white wine. The picture below shows Winston's go at painting the place, it's totally recognisable although there are obviously a few more buildings these days.

We were all sad to leave the island and head back to a drizzly and grey Gatwick, although from chatter on the plane on the way home I suspect it will be more an "au revoir" rather than a goodbye, until next time!