Ooh, la la

No, not a revelation that I'm really a renowned French chef...sorry regular reader(s).

Bumped into Jean Christophe Novelli at the Ideal Home Show at the weekend and what a nice chappie.

Typically, apparently, he turned up late - over half an hour. He bemoaned the state of West London's traffic.

I felt like shouting out loud about Bury St Edmunds' traffic and parking but felt it would fall on deaf ears.

When you think about it, a few months of pain on the Cattle Market, King's Road shut for 12 weeks, above-inflation hikes in parking fees at St Edmundsbury's car parks and today, Parkway multi-storey closed to early morning drivers...

Living in Bury St Edmunds (sorry, Ruby) sounds just peachy!

New camera

I've given up coffee - well, at least the hard stuff.
Hence no posts.
I have just got my hands on a pretty nice new camera, though. Thanks, Jessops - never been into your Traverse shop before but what a cornucopia of goodies.
Seen around Bury . . . please bear with me while I get used to the settings.

These posts will all soon be underground - they have a real beauty of their own though.


Texture always intrigues me. This one is in the Abbey Gardens. I was attacked by a low-flying duck for my art.

Wild flowers gone to seed.

Had a decent cuppa here in years gone by...shame. What sort of person will end up living here - and have all us tourists in their back garden?

Shrubs in the foreground - and the foothills of Bury in the background (ok, it's a cloud, but nice all the same to think we are in a hilly area)

Month off

Back again.

I've been trying to detox, but it's no good.

I saw 21st Century Mummy's post about Tickety Boo and the cakes on offer therein and knew I had to get out there again.

Nero in Abbeygate Street was the bad boy - and I now have a card full of little stamps to enable me to get a freebie next time I go down there.

Popped to one of those huge out-of-town shopping centres last night and the appeal of good old Bury St Edmunds was really missing.

They are impersonal, shopping wastelands - not a bit like Hatter Street, St John's Street or Langton Place, all of which I love.

Frankie & Benny's

This is the men's - quite a shock to the system when you first go inside...

Frankie & Benny's got my custom in recent days - and what an impressive set of toilets (men's and women's).

The men's are a riot of black and white (very this season, I gather, darling) and the tops of the walls are decorated with old newspaper cuttings.

In the women's, apparently (I didn't venture in, but had a spy) there is the option to learn a dash of Italian while you, err, do whatever women do.

The coffee (espresso) wasn't great though - bit stewed and bitter. Probably had it on boil for too long. Not strong enough, either and no water provided with it.

And while we'er on it, the £10.95 sharing platter was a real disappointment. The chicken wings were ok-ish, but the chikcen pieces were more frozen nugget appearance and taste. One of the reasons for going for the dish was the lure of the onion rings - and, sorry, they were very poor. Need improving. If you were a school report, you would get C+ (Could do better).

Atmosphere nice, kids' meals ok and bottomless kiddie drinks were well received by both young and old.

Well fancy that . . .

Coffee shops are now Britain’s fastest-growing retail business.

There are already more than 3,000 on the High Street, clocking up sales of £1.3bn a year — and experts say those numbers will double by 2017.

As a nation, we polish off 70 million cups of coffee a day and health specialists YorkTest reckon as many as one in 20 of us has an intolerance to it.

Well fancy that . . . now Waterstone's is moving to the new Cattle Market development and Debenhams is moving in, too, does that mean we will get two 'new' coffee shops in Bury?

Hold on to your cups - we could be heading for a coffee price war.

RIP

Another reference on today's Google alert for coffee - I'll raise a cup to you later, Alf.

Alfred H. Peet, the son of a Dutch coffee merchant who pioneered a revolution in roasting exotic dark beans that led to America’s love affair with high-end coffee, has died. He was 87.

Alfred H. Peet is often called the “grandfather of specialty coffee”.

The cause was cancer, several friends said. His death was announced Friday by a representative of the company he founded, Peet’s Coffee and Tea Inc.

Did you know?

My Google alert on coffee tells me today:

Coffees and tea

• Decaffeinated coffee is only 97 per cent free of caffeine.

• While the average iced tea has 47 milligrams per 12 ounce serving, Snapple contains 31.5 milligrams per 16 ounces and Lipton Brisk has only 9 milligrams per 12 ounces.

Sweets

• Dark chocolate has considerably more caffeine than milk chocolate. A 60-gram bar of Hershey's Special Dark has 31 milligrams; the same size milk chocolate bar has 9 milligrams.

I'll be ordering some of that Hershey's stuff - they make those delightful little 'Kisses' shaped like a bell dome and wrapped in silver foil. Scrummy.