Ujala Update

Ujala fans of York... You've probably all been a little bit worried recently about the fate of The Ujala after its recent rebranding as Delhi Spice.

We checked it out this evening and the good news is that it's exactly the same (apart from the name). Same food, same decor, same Sambuca. All is good.

Thank the curry lord.

Hot Meat

Red Chilli for tea tonight. I thought I was hungry but it turned out I could eat little. The soup was hot but filling and the main course was huge and featured a selection of meats and fish that were mostly off uncertain origin. Tasty though and very spicy. I think I ate a quarter of it. If I'm optimistic.

K did slightly better. But not much.

Afterwards I felt hugely bloated but am not too bad now. I think it must be great food for dieters.

Monks and an Astronomer at Byland Abbey.

It feels like it's been raining forever. Despite that, I've done reasonably well at escaping it over the weekend. On Sunday morning (ish) we went for a walk near Byland Abbey in North Yorkshire.



It's an old ruined Abbey in a tiny village. I don't think much monkery goes on there any more, what with it having no roof and all.

The walk was out of the AA book. This time we didn't get lost (much), partly due to choosing a walk with a map (it was walk number 21, fact fans). It was lucky we missed the rain as certain parts of the walk would have been very slippy and dangerous had there been much water underfoot. There was a steadyish (200m up) climb to the top of a hill where through a forest is an old abandoned observatory. So far, so fine. But the walk down again is very steep and can only be done very slowly with a fair amount of tree-grabbing for balance. Kinda fun, but not if it had been wet. I think we'd have died horribly, impaled on branches after slipping over and tumbling out of control.

After that it was mostly ok apart from the heavily overgrown forest path that was filled with prickles, brambles, flies and bees. And the two fields labelled "Warning: Bull" at the end. I think they just put those up to scare people. I saw no bulls.

Lunch was at The Abbey Inn (next to the Abbey, believe it or not).



It's much more of a restaurant than a pub but the food was tasty and reasonably priced. Good old antique chairs too!

It started tipping it down about five minutes before we got to the pub. Could have been worse.

Revolutionary Food

Went to the new Revolution in York for lunch today. I haven't had a drink there yet - I had been in once before but we left soon after because it was too slow and busy. This time we got served a bit more quickly (at table) but it still then took an age for the drinks to come. I had a Staropramen which subsequently seemed to give me a stinking headache - that's probably more linked to last night than the actual beer itself though.

When you order food they give you a 15 minute hourglass and and let you have the food for free if it takes longer than that. It's quite exciting. 15 minutes isn't actually that long so it must be quite hard for them to stick to it at busy times. Today, our hourglass actually expired and so we didn't have to pay for it - they were actually really good about things and didn't try to make excuses or wriggle out of us getting the freebies. Food then came quite soon after.

I as wondering whether it would be a good tactic to order a steak with every meal and ask for it to be really, really well done.

I didn't do that today - I had Thai fish cakes which were very tasty. Burgers looked ok (and big too).

Top Labels

Here are the top 10 labels I have used on blog posts since Blogger introduced them.

1 Wii (7)
2= Food (6)
2= Music (6)
2= Pubs (6)
5= Christmas (5)
5= Metroid Prime (5)
5= Prague (5)
8= Toilets (4)
8= Trains (4)
8= York (4)

I find that quite a depressing list.

Drivetime

I went go-karting on Thursday night, over at Monks Cross. We had (what felt like!) a long session (a "Monza Grand Prix") - 5 heats each, 2 semi-finals and a final. Each of the heats probably only lasted for under three minutes though so I guess it can't have been as long as it felt.

As ever, the karts are pretty scary to start with. Once you get used to them and start to go see what they can do, it gets a bit easier. But still scary. Thirty miles an hour is pretty damn fast when you're only inches from the floor.

My driving was actually pretty decent. I didn't make any mistakes of note and people found it almost impossible to overtake me as I was sticking to the racing line. However, my actual lap times weren't too great so I wasn't catching people up and overtaking them much either (except when they crashed). Of the five heats, I maintained my position in all of them except for one where I gained a place (but only because somebody was penalised a lap!).

This put me into sixth place out of eleven. Bang in the middle. In the semi finals, the first two finishers from each race were automatically put through to the final, and the fastest of the two third place finishers joined them. I came third in my race and lost out on getting into the final by about 12 hundredths of a second. Annoying, but I was pretty tired by then so didn't mind too much.

Maybe it's because I'm getting old but it did seem a lot more hard work than I remembered. I'm still aching in various places now. And it was very sweaty. Lots of us had shaky hands and found it hard to lift things.

We went to Maxis afterwards for a Chinese. We almost all had cokes to drink and so combined with the shakes it must have made us look like an AA meeting.

I like Maxis. But whilst the food is good, it does make you feel like you're in a Saga holiday to China. My, those oldies can shake it on the dance floor when they get going.

Easter Closing

It's Easter Sunday which means that the supermarkets aren't open. As ever, I only realised this today, Easter Sunday, the day I had planned to go to the supermarket. So that scuppered my plans for food.

Luckily:
a) I checked opening times on the interweb before leaving the house
b) I have a chocolate egg
c) The local corner shop is open
d) We have some frozen chilli-c-c in the freezer

So it could be a lot worse really. It's definitely better than in the olden days when I was young when nothing would open, ever, or at least that's what it seemed like. The slightest excuse and all the banks, shops and buses would just stop. Easter, Spring, Christmas, the Queen's birthday, my birthday, a hot day, they'd all just close and stop. I think.

Now it's much better because it's pretty much just the three days, Christmas Day, New Year's Day and Easter Sunday, where most things are closed. And on Christmas Day I get fed, on New Year's Day I aim to be too hungover to eat and at Easter there's Chocolate (and the corner shop).

Rapping In The Pub

We went to The Yorkshire Hussar for lunch today. Although it was quiet upon arrival, it quickly got busy with a few large groups who arrived just after us. Food was good, and cheap as always.

We sat in the main bar but could see through into the front bar. What we could see happening in there was a little odd. Here's the view:



Look carefully and you'll see a number of men dancing in a circle with swords, performing the Northumbrian Rapper Sword Dance. They had brought their own music and everything. Apparently they were practising for a competition.

I don't think people should be allowed to take swords into pubs - any pub worth its beer should ask you to check in all weapons at the front door. Swords are dangerous at the best of times, but the combination of swords, dancing and alcohol can only lead to "accidents".

The people there appeared to have all their own limbs, and none of them were missing chunks of ears, noses or fingers so maybe they were relatively safe. I'm glad I was in a different room though.

Tasty Tasting Rooms

We went to The Tasting Room for dinner last night. I've been there a couple of times before, but not for a couple of years ish. It was very good. The food was excellent and the service was great - really friendly and helpful (though I think they did forget our cheese for a little while).

There was a whole series of these in the toilet, doing the alphabet thing in a rhyming fashion:



This one was my favourite. All of them depicted children coming to a messy end though.

Food Labelling Wars

A year ago I complained about the labels that Sainsburys are using on their food these days. They look like pie charts, but the segment sizes in no way correspond to the amounts contained in each slice.

These things have actually been in the news today as two new systems are being launched in competition with each other. The one that Sainsburys supports is the traffic light one as this is most similar to what they currently do now. I was suprised when I read this as I'd never noticed any traffic light colouring on the current pie charts.

However, looking at one now (on a pizza!) it is quite clearly colour coded red/amber/green for bad/medium/good. I feel quite stupid that I had never noticed this before, but it's possibly because on all the food I eat, all sections are normally green (ahem).

The other new system (that Tescos likes) is the GDA system which uses pastels and shows things as a % of your total recommended daily intake. I'm not sure which system I like best. It seems an odd thing for them to be arguing about when it would be easy for everyone to adopt the same standard that would have all the information. But I know that the electronics industry has had these kinds of problems for ever. It's easy to say that everyone should just use one format, but doing that in practice? Hard.

Mind you, whatever they do, I doubt I'll pay much attention. It's kind of obvious to me that some foods are healthier than others. Grapefruit good, Brie Bad.

Slug & Late-uce

We went to the new Slug & Lettuce for lunch yesterday. We tried to go to the Yorkshire Hussar but it was fully booked for Christmas lunches and so could not accommodate us.

I ordered a steak (rare, obviously) and chips. Then we waited for a long time. And then a long time more. And then some more. One of our group had to leave (unfed) to go back to the office for a meeting. He'd not had a good day - earlier his bacon sandwich had gone cold due to him being in other meetings.

The main waiter guy eventually came to speak to us and apologised profusely for the delay (though he didn't seem to know why it had happened!) and he said that we wouldn't have to pay anything (not even for the drinks!) so in the end that is quite hard to complain about.

When the food eventually came it was good too. And all the better for being free! And who wants to work on a Friday afternoon anyway :-)