FINDING somewhere to stay for a pre-Christmas London shopping or theatre break can be quite a challenge – so we want to share a real find! There are the great hotels, but these are outside the price range of most people; there are basic chains, which are OK for the quick overnight stay if all…
DAVID and Karen Richards, of Capreolus Fine Foods at Rampisham, have won the prestigious Champion Product Award in this year’s Taste of the West food and drink awards for their Guanciale, a Dorset version of an Italian classic. Chef and food-writer Mitch Tonks, who was the champion product judge, said: “This really shone out as…
BETH Stewart’s production of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, on stage at Shaftesbury Arts Centre until 19th October, is full of invention and stylish interpretation. From the opening moment, as the returning army strikes a tableau on stage to sing the traditional English song Rose Red, it’s obvious that the setting is the 1940s and…
IT is hard to believe it is over 30 years since I first saw Cats in 1982 in its New London Theatre home, where War Horse now resides, and today it was time to see just how this piece of theatre history is standing up to the test of time. The last London cast I saw, in 2000, was…
HENRIK Ibsen’s play Ghosts was greeted with fury and disgust when it was first published in 1881, and it was many years before it found favour with the theatre-going public, although it is now regarded as a classic of European theatre. In this new translation by Steven Unwin, who also directs the English Touring Theatre…
WITH a sunny, watery poster recalling David Hockney’s A Bigger Splash and a cast including Maureen Lipman, audiences at Bath this week could be forgiven for thinking they had booked for a comedy set in Florida. But by the time Oliver Cotton’s remarkable and thought-provoking play Daytona reached its enigmatic conclusion, they realised there were…
THERE is something special about autumn, that “season of mellow fruitfulness” before the razzle-dazzle and expense of Christmas and the long cold grey months till spring. Partly it is the gorgeous colours but also it is that slightly melancholy time of saying goodbye to migrating birds, seeing the cows go back into their winter quarters…
TELEVISION cookery shows often give an unappetising impression of high tension and drama in the kitchen, with foul-mouthed testosterone-charged superstars splattering four-letter words like burning oil across the worktops. Masterchef paints a less aggressive picture but it is still pretty fraught and even the altogether gentler Great British Bake-Off ends in tears as well as smiles….
ATHELHAMPTON House, just outside Puddletown, must surely be one of Dorset’s most beautiful manor houses. Comparatively unsung, it is a place of under-stated but pure beauty and stands in the most breathtaking gardens. Built by Sir William Martyn, the earliest parts of the house are Tudor, and it was restored and transformed in the late…
NEW Zealand famously has more sheep than people – and it also has a lot more cattle than human beings. So it is not surprising that the resulting surplus of dairy products has made this small country a major exporter of butter and cheese. And it’s not just a big export industry – many rural…