Probe Records

Posted on May 7, 2016 by Ralph Bullivant

I took some records down to London with me last weekend. They were due for onward transmission to Brighton where a new record player had been acquired and was sat in a kitchen waiting for something to be played on it.

The records had been extracted from the few thousand that reside in the attic. Over the years a number of collections have been passed on to me and I had been able to fillet out a few duplicates that would not be missed too much.

They were a motley collection and had amongst them a Liza Minelli live album, Making Movies by Dire Straits, a couple of Talking Heads albums and Ian Drury’s New Boots & Panties.

To get them down to London I used an old bag from Probe Records and took a silent bet with myself as to whether it would get a comment as it spent a day travelling around London.

I won.

We were on the Tube heading towards Liverpool Street when the man sat opposite cocked an eye at the bag and asked, “Is Probe Records still going?”

I was able to reassure him that it was still going strong. It transpired that the last time he had been there Pete Burns and his hair was still working behind the counter insulting the customers on Mathew Street.

A long (but good) weekend

Posted on May 2, 2016 by Ralph Bullivant

That has been a long weekend.

Saturday was spent travelling to London, looking at art and eating oysters all before drinking beer and eating ribs and then dancing until the early hours of the morning to Prince and other collected disco greats.

The art including our tramping along a walk given over to Princess Diana and being given the opportunity to admire a rack of red shoes.

Perhaps not surprisingly Sunday was spent on recovery and travelling back up north.

The Bank Holiday Monday started with me discovering what the squirrels had done with some of the tulip bulbs they dug up from the couple of dozen I planted under the apple tree. There is a perfect tulip growing in the moss and detritus that lives on the garage roof. It is just a pity that the only place it can be seen is the loo.

Elsewhere the garden is still full of bluebells and I spent some of the afternoon planting out the veg patch. There is now a mixture of salad, artichokes and beetroot out there about to sacrifice themselves up as food for the pigeons.

Food has been lamb burgers with pistachio nuts, tomato salad and good flat bread.

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Crab linguine

Posted on April 24, 2016 by Ralph Bullivant

There wasn’t much colour in the garden when we left four weeks. Now we are back the daffodils are almost done and a large part of the garden is a blaze of blue. I have a mixed relationship with bluebells. They fill the garden with colour for three or for weeks but then a weekend has to be put aside to scrub them out and I am left unsure as to how to fill up the space they have left behind.

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The good news is that some of the tulip bulbs appear to have survived the ravages wrought on them by the squirrels last year.

We wanted something simple to eat in the evening so we had crab linguine. No cooking required apart from the linguine. The crabs were bought ready prepared. All I had to do whilst bringing the water up to boil was scoop out the brown and white crab meat into a bowl and stir in a chopped red chilli, some garlic squashed in salt, chopped parsley, olive oil and lemon juice.