These creatures, which live in the Grove, eat with great intensity. As they rotate an acorn between their paws, they look as though they are praying. Or sometimes give a passable imitation of Jonny Wilkinson about to kick a penalty. Occasionally they are so busy that they forget to scamper away at the site of a bloke with a camera. "It would make a good coat, " says Heidi.A review of a book called Magic Moments by John Sutherland fills me with longing and nostalgia. The following quotation from the book, (at the top of my wish list) sums up its subject matter - early reading: "...between the ages of 10 and 13, bookish children can be observed experiencing reading rages. They grind their eyes and push their noses against the page. They hoover up, obsessively, everything by their favourite authors ... they slow their furious pace down as they near the end, so as to savour the last, delicious drops of narrative. At no stage in life is reading more intense."
A new shop opens today in Chapel Place today. It is an old fashioned butcher's shop. Strange to say it fills a gap in Tunbridge Wells, where you would have expected old fashioned butchers' shops to flourish like retired colonels and rich, but frugal elderly ladies. Meat, poultry and game are engagingly displayed in a way that no supermarket quite manages to do. And, parked outside the shop, as though as a symbol of integrity, is an old fashioned butcher's bicycle with a large basket on the handlebars.
2 comments:
I take it you'll support this new enterprise as much as you can. The test of an up-market butcher's shop is whether - given the hoo-ha over the years - they're still prepared to do sweetbreads. Hereford has many good butchers but for ris de veau you need to go north to Ludlow - possibly the West Midlands equivalent of Tunbridge Wells.
I'll enquire after sweetbreads. Almost certainly, if they don't have them readily available, they will offer to get them for anyone who asks for them, because they are in that mode of willingness at the moment. Alas, Tunbridge Wells compares unfavourably with Ludlow in having no really exciting restaurants.
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