Pig Sty Avenue

...looks as if it might be quite interesting.

I used: 5 rashers of bacon, chopped four medium potatoes 8 medium plum tomatoes, peeled cup of fresh, chopped basil one large onion olive oil cracked black pepper Method: Fry the bacon for a few minutes in olive oil. Slice the potatoes approx 1/8th" thick. Place half of them in a layer at the bottom of a roasting dish or large casserole. Slice the onion and put on top. Put in the tomatoes, slicing them down the middle if they're big. sprinkle on the basil, add the bacon, and finish off with another layer of sliced potatoes. Sprinkle on olive oil and pepper. Cook on gas mark 6 for approximately 1 hour. (After which the potatoes and onions should be al dente; you could cook it for much longer and more slowly if you wanted to). DO NOT cover it: the top layer of potato should go crispy. I used Kestrel potatoes, but main crop (King Edwards, for example) would have been better. I should explain that Panacalty (there are many spelling variants) is a North East England dish...

I've spent most of the day on this load of old toot . I really am beginning to go through the motions here, having lost all interest in ESOL teaching as practised in FE colleges in the UK. I'm itching to get on with Second Language Acquisition theory for the MA, but I need to get this Cert in FE baloney finished first. It's a chore, I can tell you, with all the charm of ditch digging in the rain.

...is blogging again. Very scatological. A parent can relate to that.

I could begin to blether-on about the misuse of the word "binge" by the media here, but I won't. Today. Maybe we're going to have an election next month. I hope so, elections are great fun, giving an appearance of meaningfulness to our participatory democracy. Or something. Headline grabbing about "binge" drinking is a fair indicator that Papa Gordon is tempted to give it a go. And this is a Middle England issue. I was visiting Newbury a few months ago and commented on how pretty the town looked, and was told that the flipside was a no-go area at night for anyone over 30, because of all the drunken carrying-on. It made me smile. At least we don't have that problem round here. To be sure, there's a river of drink consumed most weekends, but Jarrow and Hebburn town centres are such bleak spots after dark that no one, young or old, pissed or sober, would want to spend any time there, annoying passers by. So, badly thought out 1960s "redevel...

I've sown hundreds of fenugreek seeds in the greenhouse (which is going to have heating over the winter). I got the seeds from the Chinese supermarket in Town, and soaked them for three days in a small bucket of water: they are hard and unseedlike in the packet, but resemble wheat seeds after you soak them. I scattered the seeds on, and raked them over roughly, so that some are on the surface, others will be a little below. After 48 hours, most of the ones on the surface are sprouting, so I'm anticipating a good germination ratio. (I knew they would sprout. In Libya, I put some in a tin on soaked tissue paper: they indeed sprouted well and I'd trim them to put in salads as one would with cress. After a week or so of this hotel-room farming, though, I looked into the tin and was disgusted to see hundreds of little beetles squirming around the seedlings' roots, like that insect motif in Blue Velvet .) The bed in the greenhouse is garden soil which hasn't been c...

There are more than enough hatching eggs available on eBay. Here , for example. And here . The only question now is one of timing. It's probably too late to start this year. But if we get the eggs and incubate them in February, then they should be ready to lay next spring. Or something.

Yesterday was our first real Autumn day. I love it. Maybe it was the difference in the air, but when I was getting a cup of coffee at the wee shop in college yesterday, I overheard the woman there discussing "change" with another customer. "You can never have too much change." And I drifted away, as if stoned. Change . It's not so bad. I've got less hours at work, which means less money. But it also means more time with The Bairn, and with the allotment.

"You cannot breed your own black rocks..." That's from a supplier of black rocks, mind. I'm wondering, why? If you have a barred plymouth rock hen, and a rhode island red cock, why not breed your own? All googling brings one back to the Muirfield Hatchery . I've tried ringing their local agent , without success. Relatively local - well, 45 minutes drive away - are these people in Haydon Bridge . Actually, I'm rather glad to have reached some Internet parameters - this is something that'll need to be sorted IRL: hard cash passed into a shit covered hand in a bleak Northumberland farmyard. Or something.

Level 1 cinema space Baltic (1) , originally uploaded by WYGD . I took The Bairn to the Baltic yesterday, for a show of Flickr photos, including some of mine. The photos were shown in the cinema, and it was a bit freaky seeing them so big.

The Old Man has suggested we get a Rhode Island Red cockerel and a couple of Barred Plymouth Rock hens, and then breed our own Black Rock hybrids... Though this seems to suggest that you can't do that.

Peyote , originally uploaded by Drunken Monkey . They are beauties, eh? And a snip at 20 Euros.

I took this with the cameraphone, so the quality's not great. The cleft was infested with woodlice.

Little Gwion tells me that he's writing a film script, with the putative title When Mary Jane Met Sally D. He was off his head, of course.

Few blogs, and no news outlets will not refer to this story , so let's get it out of the way. At the end of our working day, most people head for the exits asap. But last night was remarkable because we started to discuss this and all continued to debate it, whilst our own hearths or the pub beckoned unsuccesfully. One person thought they couldn't have done it, one person thought that they probably did, (me, as it happens), and the rest were thoroughly nonplussed.

Silly sheep , originally uploaded by jakerome . There's quite a long back-story, if you don't know Flickr.

I'm going to call it the lean-to from now on: half shed, half greenhouse. I've already blogged about what-to-plant-over-winter, and now I'm getting there. Yes, basil in pots. I've got a lot of fenugreek seeds; (not from a garden centre, but from the Chinese supermarket in George St in Newcastle - I bought a packet of coriander seeds there in spring and masses of them germinated: you pay 35p for a bag of maybe a thousand seeds, rather than £2 for 50 or so). Also cardamom from the same source. Best of all, I was given five strawberry plants the other day. They apparently do well under cover , though I need to consider whether to let the frost at them first...

That's Your Own Correspondent with the pair of leeks I'm entering this year. For the last time. Showing leeks - and anything else - is, we've decided, a pain in the arse. It takes up too much time and space. And you can never win against "gardeners" who are really quasi-professional leek-showers, growing hundreds of flawless leeks in huge poly-tunnels, entering dozens of shows (whilst playing no active role in the working men's clubs that hold them), and hoovering up big piles of cash. These two are pretty poor - I lost interest when I saw an allotment near ours with nothing but the said huge poly-tunnel and fuck-all else. So I put them in the show today, as I've paid to enter it, but I know they'll be pretty far down the table. And next year our leek trenches, full of hops, horse shit and God knows what other goodness, will produce instead masses of firm young carrots . Or something.

That's a barrow full of King Edwards, from one row about 14 foot long. Not bad, eh? We've cropped well this year with King Eddie's, Pink Fir Apple, Osprey (main crop), Kestrel and Arran Pilot (2nd earlies), Swift (1st earlies). We're eating the 2nd earlies now, the 1st are finished. The main crop should see us well into the new year. If we're eating the last (perhaps rather wrinkly) main crop as we dig up next year's 1st earlies, then we've cracked it.

This will be visible from our house. I don't get the objections to these things: they have a strange gracefulness. I do understand why the residents of Hebburn Village are objecting - they are people who bought houses next door to a shipyard in order to have a whole series of things to complain about for the foreseeable future. This is Hebburn -on-Tyne, not Henley-on-Thames, ffs.

exhibition park skateboarder , originally uploaded by /pɪgstaɪævnjuː/ . Yet another scandalous example of over-reliance on autofocus :-(

toby with his ancestors , originally uploaded by /pɪgstaɪævnjuː/ . That's me with the grandson, and The Old Man in the background. He's the most gorgeous thing (the baby, not The Old Man).

Not content with studying teaching and linguistics, I need to get the gen on poultry over the next few weeks. So here are some links. I haven't spent much time with them yet, and so can't evaluate their content or usefulness. The classroom @ The Coop. PoultryOne.com - "the top online community for raising chickens!" poultrymad.co.uk The British Poultry Council. Traditional British Fowl Company. We might consider a traditional breed for the meat chickens - but we're pretty well sold now on the (hybrid) black rocks for eggs. However, I nearly didn't link to this because I saw the phrase "passionate about poultry" somewhere. FFS! Passionate ? In passing, I quite like the look of Ixworths ; (that's them in the photo).

The Old Man and I thrashed out a poultry strategy in the Iona on Friday over a few pints. We're going to get Black Rocks for eggs, after first making the bottom end of the allotment into a permanent fox-proof hen run. We'll buy them locally , and probably get new lain eggs and bring them to maturity on the incubator. That should be fun for The Bairn. We'll probably get a couple of dozen eggs, and thereby end up with at least a dozen hens. We'll get the eggs in midwinter, and that should mean they'll be at point of lay around Easter. We'll also build a small portable run for meat chickens. Large areas of adjoining allotments are choked with weeds, and we'll get permission to put the hen run in those areas: the hens will pick them clean. I need to do some research on the best breed for eating. Sorted.