Just a reminder that all your clocks will need to be changed this weekend. I’ve just sorted out the ones at work.
Clock change
Author: Criss Crimz
H-A-L-L-U-M-I
Back in July 2020, Ian was carrying out some gentle archaeology among his possessions, which had begun to settle in accreted layers like sedimentary rock. In the midst of a rich stratum of shopping lists and half-finished song lyrics, he stumbled upon a miniature Sacred Book, and reported this to the Beans.
The booklet runs only to four pages in a bigger book that is otherwise full of other tat, and records the events that took place in the Magic Lantern pub in Whitley Bay (which later became a Harvester, and is now, of course, a Miller and Carter). In-depth scientific analysis of the occasions on which all three of us were in Newcastle, cross-referenced with the visits that had not produced a full Book, suggests that this was likely to have been in 2009.
We begged Ian to scan in these pages so they could be added to our collective store of wisdom on the Beans. We implored him. We offered him trinkets and prizes and financial incentives in discreet brown envelopes. But he resisted, and no scan was ever made.
Well, I don’t know about you, but my patience ran out, and it ran out at about 6.30 this morning. So I took the dodgy photos he had posted to the Beans, straightened and corrected them, and produced decent quality images of all four pages which I have now added to the Beans, bypassing the whole sorry business of Ian having to scan them. I have titled this new book “H-A-L-L-U-M-I”, that being the first thing written in it.
Its four pages contain an amazing number of in-jokes that survive to this day:
- Wexford and the cheeses
- Chris’s scrodsack of change
- The science of warms per air
So, there it is, a lost slice of history, saved for the benefit of the nation. You can find it in the Books section.
Toot Hill Butts
I don’t know what this means but if I were Kev I wouldn’t be advertising it so prominently.
Compute with Chris
My life is, it goes without saying, extremely glamorous and exciting. But one thing that has remained unchanged by the non-stop whirlwind of my existence is my desktop wallpaper at work. I have been looking at the same background for over a decade now, having chosen a picture on 8 October 2011.
Quince
A long time ago, Ian had a mild obsession with the letter Q, and specifically the way that the letter Q is little used and frequently overlooked. His short-lived website in the early 2000s had an entire page celebrating it.
If you were looking for the fruit equivalent of the letter Q – something obscure, overlooked, probably not very useful – then you need look no further than the quince. It even has a name beginning with a Q.
For reasons known only to themselves, the people who renovated our house about 15 years ago decided that the back garden needed a quince tree. Now, every autumn, we receive a harvest of quinces, which are all ready all at once and so have to be either used or thrown away within a very short period.
Unfortunately there’s not much you can do with quinces. They were very popular hundreds of years ago, when modern fruits like apples, oranges and bananas had yet to arrive in England. If you were, say, Henry VIII, you would have eaten a lot of quince because there wouldn’t have been much else around. Today you probably wouldn’t bother and they are one of the most useless fruit trees you could possibly plant. (The other fairly useless old-fashioned fruit is a damson, and they planted one of those in our back garden too. This year, for the first time, we got one single damson fruit off it.)
If you’ve never encountered a quince before, here are the essentials:
- Looks a bit like a big cooking apple, with yellowy green skin
- Absolutely inedible unless cooked, ideally for quite a long time
- Flesh is white when raw but turns bright pink when cooked
- Texture is grainy, like a pear, but even grainier than that
- Flavour is quite mild, a bit appley, and a bit peary
The list of things you can do with a quince is not very long. You can use it as a substitute anywhere you would cook an apple – so you can use one instead of an apple in a pie or a crumble, but you have to cook it first. You can bake one into a cake if you have one of a very small number of cake recipes that call for one, but you have to cook it first. Or you can boil it down over the course of about a month to make quince jelly, which is quite nice with cheese. Failing that you can leave it in the kitchen while you try to work out what to do with it all, until a time when it goes off, at which point you can put it on the compost heap.
This is the last year that we will be cooking a small amount of quince and throwing the rest on the compost heap, since the tree has now been cut down. Farewell, tree – and thanks for all the quince.
Jolly Good: dog news
A lot has happened over the last month, as you know. A lot.
Lost among all the other seismic news from September 2023 has been this piece of information, though, which feels quite important, so I am now bringing you the facts.
We now have a dog.
The dog is great. Here are just some of the things our dog is good at.
Milky beans are back
We all like coffee now that Kev has mended his ways, so this feels like a good time to introduce a new kind of coffee I discovered recently.
You know what an espresso is, of course. A tiny strong black coffee.
But what if I could offer you an espresso… with something extra?
The last pebble of August
This isn’t much of a day for making jolly blog posts, but I refuse to miss out on my August Bean, so here instead is a painted butterfly from the garden at the hospice.
