Every Day an Adventure

D was with us last week, Monday to Saturday: he's an easy enough guest, familiar enough with the house to look after himself while he's here, and with other friends in the north to visit, to keep him entertained. Despite which, I seem to be catching up with things that I have been neglecting. And this journal is one of them. Where was I...?

Well, even before D arrived, we spent Saturday at the County Durham Archaeology Day; we have attended something similar in the past, though I can find no record of it here. That was in Bishop Auckland Town Hall; this was in a lecture theatre on the Science Site, and the more local venue did not make things as much easier as you might expect. One of the talks I found most interesting was on a bare hilltop near Newton Aycliffe, which found the boundary enclosure of an Iron Age fort, with a large unidentified structure in the middle. But others were on high-profile subjects - the Stockton & Darlington 200 celebrations (and how to exploit railway archaeology all the time, not just every 50 years), the wall painting discovered at Durham Castle (as reported by the BBC) though I warn you, it's a painting of one flower, don't expect too much; and an update from the always riveting Gary Bankhead about recent discoveries including a whetstone factory on the banks of the Wear.

I was sniffling through much of this, and hoping it was caused by spending the day in an enclosed lecture theatre, but no: by Sunday it was obvious that I had a streaming cold. Luckily, that was also the worst of it, and by the time D. arrived on Monday, he was asking why I had thought it worth warning him.

Thursday was the day none of us had any other engagements, so we went out to lunch. We thought we had identified somewhere (the Vane Arms, at Thorpe Thewles) that was new to D, but of course as we came into the village he realised "Oh, yes, I recognise it now...". The menu has perhaps skewed further towards the things-on-flatbreads than we were expecting, but we enjoyed it nonetheless. And afterwards we indulged D's desire to frolic on a beach by taking him to Seaton Carew, for the full Out of Season vibe:



On Saturday morning D set off for home, and we headed out for lunch with the pub quiz team. We operate a kitty, paying our winnings in and our entrance fees of a shared purse, and win (or place) often enough that we build up a surplus. From time to time we take ourselves out for a meal to spend it, and since we don't manage to organise this very often, we feel an obligation to be as extravagant as we can. On this occasion, we decided that lunch at Isla would be a good compromise between comfort, convenience and grandeur - and I'd say it delivered. The food was very pleasant: I had the first asparagus of the spring, a handful a thin stems (perhaps you should call it sprue) with a perfectly boiled egg; and grilled cod in a sauce billed as rhubarb, but in which the rhubarb was subdued by just slightly too much cream. I should have ordered chips with it - or actually some more of the bread we'd shared as a starter - and then I would have mopped up all that sauce, so the cream can't have been disastrously excessive.

The particular pleasure that follows a restaurant meal with the smug feeling that yes, I made precisely the right choice there, though, came not from the food but from the wine. It wasn't a long wine list, but it had some good things on it: we had a bottle of cava, more or less out of a sense of obligation - we ought to start withsome fizz - and it got us off to the right start; since everyone was eating fish, we went for a Swiss white, and enjoyed it enough that we had another; and my dessert was a glass of Uruguayan dessert wine. This was wonderful, but also completely unexpected: I've had dessert tannat before, but I wasn't expecting anything this rich, this dark, this caramel- or even coffee -flavoured. I am embarrassed not to have realised (blame it on the excellence of the lunch) that this had not been attained by tannat alone, but also involved fortification and aromatics...

We went on to the even fancier wine bar along the road, and since there was no going back from that dessert wine, I had a glass of muscat, which at first seemed thin in comparison, but I lingered over it, and it became rich and grapey and a pleasure.
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