Since leaving university Andy and his friends have met up once or twice a year in a gathering that has come to be known as "Harcourt" (named after the house/street they shared). Each year they take it in turns to organise the weekend, and this year it was Andy's turn, which meant I had the task of feeding this gruesome looking crew. Originally a strictly lads only affair the arrival of various small people has led to the invite being extended to wives, girlfriends and children. I'm pretty happy about this as although I've only known them for about 2 years rather than the 10 or more years they've known each other, it's a brilliant get together, always loads of fun, really nice to see how much of an effort they've made to stay in touch for all this time. Harcourt has become a definite highlight of the year for me. As we've not been working over the summer we've had a lot of time on our hands to organise things and after a brainstorming session at the pub we got a little over excited (drunk) and decided it should be a Hallowe'en themed fancy dress weekend, hired a clown and set ...

I went to a lot of festivals last summer, one of the best was the Green Man. It chucked it down solidly for 3 days and I got covered in mud, but I saw some amazing bands, had a brilliant time wandering around aimlessly bumping into random friends here and there, and they had pies. Pie Minister pies. Mmm mmm mmm. When I got back I thought 'mmm... pie minister pies... yummy tasty pie minister pie... I want one'. So I went down to Wet and Wild (actually called Wild at Heart, but I prefer the idea of cows, so free range and organic they get their own water theme park- mooweeeeeeee!), bought some cheese and eggs and looked at their lovely range of pie minister pies. I felt like Charlie looking at the chocolate through the sweet shop window. Ahhh. So anyway instead of buying one I decided just to look at the ingredients of the Heidi Pie and well basically rip them off. It is pretty handy that stuff like this has to list each and every one of their ingredients. You can have a guess at the festival, but the sneaky sweet chilli sauce- I recon it's ...