TRAVELLING chef Philippa Davis was back in Dorset in time for the annual Great Dorset Chilli Fest at St Giles Park near Wimborne – and the hedgerow harvest of blackberries … The tropical sun set a thousand colours over the lush vegetation as the choruses of tuneful birds swooped through the warm evening air back…
FANS of TE Lawrence and excellent home baking have a double treat at Moreton Tea Rooms – the delicious cakes at the award-winning tea rooms are displayed on the bier on which Lawrence of Arabia’s body was carried to the funeral at nearby St Nicholas Church with its beautiful engraved windows by Laurence Whistler. Moreton…
IT’s a sad fact that Britain’s biggest selling “smoked” cheese isn’t actually smoked: look at the labelling and you’ll see that Applewood is described as “smoke-flavoured” and “smoky”. We won’t sell it in our shop – if a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing properly. Our suggestion to anyone who arrives looking for this…
STORM on the Lawn, now in its 17th season at the ball court at Prior Park college above Bath, is always an exciting enterprise. The public show is the culmination of three short weeks of intensive work by the young actors and back-stage crew, bringing together a new work in an atmospheric setting. With a…
HOW you feel about Judith Bliss and her flamboyant, warring, ultra-theatrical family probably depends on whether you actually know people like the Bliss family in general – and Judith in particular. If you view them through the prism of “normality” and imagine that such behaviour is (a) grotesquely exaggerated and (b) dreadfully self-indulgent, you laugh…
TO say that my husband is fanatical about beans is an understatement. He collects them as a numismatist collects stamps. When abroad he seeks out shops which sell the seeds, a hobby which has taken us to some interesting back streets in major towns and cities abroad, while our friends spend time in galleries or…
SHREK is a little like Sondheim’s Into The Woods – with familiar fairy tale characters linked by a new story. From my first knowledge of Shrek I was intrigued: a cinema trailer with famous fairytale characters started appearing in late 2000, even before very grown-up films, and I was hooked. When the film came out…
ALAN Ayckbourn had already written as many plays as Shakespeare by the age of 48, the age at which the Bard died, and has now completed almost 80 plays. He enjoys gimmicks, such as his Norman Conquest trilogy, in which the action takes place in three parts of the same house, living room, dining room…
ALAN Bennett’s 13 television plays Talking Heads are widely regarded as mini-masterpieces, and marked the beginning of his recognition as a major playwright. Now the Bournemouth based ImpAct Theatre has chosen three – Her Big Chance, originally performed by Julie Walters, A Chip in the Sugar, which Bennett performed himself, and A Lady of Letters,…
PHILIPPA Davis, the adventurous travelling chef from Shaftesbury, has now finished her month in Boston. She had intended her final postcard would be about night fishing – but the photographs didn’t work! She says: Maybe I should have thought it through a little better? I had visited Harvard a few days prior to this and…