Summer Holiday

We landed in England on July 19th, and we're just starting our final week before heading back to Frigiliana in time to enjoy the Festival of Three Cultures. It's been a time of high spots. I wrote about our time on the Isle of Wight which confirmed our desire to settle there when we leave Spain, but we also took a flying visit to Lancashire. We based ourselves in the lovely market town of Clitheroe in the Ribble Valley for three nights which allowed us to meet up with my cousin and her daughter for lunch at a local pub. My brother, who lives in Nottingham, was in the Lake District the weekend before we went north, and was able to delay his return home by a day to join us all. The following day we went to Rambottom, where we lived before moving to Frigiliana. To be precise, we went to Chatterton on the outskirts of Ramsbottom to have lunch with neighbours. It was strange to be walking up a street which had been home for thirty years. Today, back in the south, some friends who left Spain eighteen months ago and now live in Eastbourne, came over and joined us for a pub lunch nattering away about life then and now. So we've got some good memories of this trip to take back with us.

But we've also had the great good fortune to hit a particularly warm and sunny summer for our holiday, and so we've been able to make the most of our time.

There are other experiences to carry home, mainly to do with food. I love Spanish food and the typical Mediterranean ingredients that we have such easy access to, but this holiday has been an opportunity to indulge in British foods that are difficult or impossible to come by in Spain. The most obvious is the variety of traditional regional cheeses - proper mature cheddar, real crumbly, tangy Lancashire and the like. Then I've had Melton Mowbray pie, Cornish pasties, black pudding (quite different to morcilla), oak-smoked kippers, smoked haddock ( and not the died yellow apology), crab sandwiches, crab cakes; the list goes on and on!

And in Clitheroe I rediscovered a small regional supermarket chain, Booths. Booths began life as a grocer's and provisions merchant and still retains that ethos of a genuine interest in trading up to a quality, not down to a price; they offer the option to buy 'fair milk', sourced from local dairy herds and sold at a premium price, the premium being passed back to the producer. Another wonderful shop on Clitheroe's High Street is Cowmans, a butchers selling only sausage, but in an enormous range of varieties. I had forgotten their existence, but when we went out to lunch with the family at the Waddington Arms just outside Clitheroe, I was able to choose Cowmans Cumberland Sausage from the menu, and I was in my own foodie heaven.

Lovely memories to bring back to Spain, but also to look forward to being able to repeat when we return to live in the UK. A great holiday - and still another week to go.