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 ...

Here's a post I should have done AGES ago. I have a couple of friends, Paul and Kelly, who have moved out to Okinawa, a beautiful remote Japanese island.  As far as I was aware before Paul left his diet mainly consisted of cheese and onion pasties and baked beans (a very healthy balanced diet, I'm sure you'll agree), and in an effort to soothe their homesickness I'd send them beans. A great substitute for friends and family I'm sure. Anyway in a more adventurous moment inspired by the blogging by mail I was involved with earlier in the year we'd arranged to do a swap, I sent them some local delicacies (erm.. baked beans, salad cream, cream eggs and the like) and they sent me this amazing box of Japanese treats! Now the first thing I have to say about when I opened the package is that I had absolutely no idea what anything was! Going on visual clues from the packaging they could have contained small toys, joke shop tricks, pop up snakes or firecrackers. It was great to try something with no idea of what you were about to put in your mouth would taste like. Must be like ...

More from Sheffield Abundance project, they now have space in a shop for a month or so, well worth popping down if you're in the area

Clachan was to be our next stop in Kintyre. We'd seen various posters about for a smallholders gathering to be held in their village hall. It was quite a way from our campsite, so I called the organiser to see if they knew of any good spots nearby where we could pitch a tent. In what now seems to be the theme of the trip despite them having absolutely no idea who we were we were told we'd be welcome to stay in their garden, or a friend's garden up the road. So when we arrived we pitched the tent in their garden, which promptly got invaded by some very inquisitive playful kittens. Very cute, however seeing them leeping around the tent, clawing at the ropes and running backwards and forwards in the gap between the inner and outer tent made us a little nervous that by the end of the night our reasonably expensive lightweight storm tent would be ripped to shreds. Our hosts kindly offered that we could sleep in their office, so yet again we found ourselves in a house for the night, rather than out in the tent. It's a hard life. This was the first year ...

I started this post weeks ago, then got distracted, so it's now well out of date and the recipe for summer pudding using the then seasonal fruits is not seasonal anymore, but since I've got his chance to catch up I might as well do it as it was really easy and a lovely treat. It's a couple of months since we were there now, here is a little post about our stay at Plan-it Earth in Sancreed, which is pretty much at Land's End in Cornwall. I think I might have mentioned it before, it's a seven acre small holding which runs eco-education courses and has two yurts for holiday rentals. We'd gone there wwoofing, intending to stay for just three days, but ended up staying over a week. It was a really great place. We learnt loads and had a great time. As an added bonus for the first couple of days we were able to stay in this lovely yurt before the next guests arrived. The first day there was a bit of a downpour and we spent most of the morning weeding the polytunnel, dashing out into the garden to pick artichokes and redcurrants in any dry spells. ...