Sunday 29 April 2012

17 miles, jackdaw kindling and French macarons

On Saturday, I decided I needed to work on my stamina. So I set off to do the famous 4 trigs gritstone challenge. "4 trigs?" I hear you say, "don't you mean 5 trigs?" Well, actually it is supposed to be the 5 trigs - running to the trig point on 5 hills that are local to my house. The challenge traditionally starts from the Cat and Fiddle pub and takes in the peaks of Shining Tor, Burgage Edge, Axe Edge, The Roaches and Shutlingsloe.

I knew my legs wouldn't be up for 20 miles, so I had to shorten it a bit, and miss out Roaches. This still meant it was about 17 miles, which is a long way for me. I was very pleased to finish it in a reasonable state. Not like a stumbling fool, which is how I normally look after long fell races.

Then we were amused to find the jackdaws had built a 5-foot high pile of kindling in the barn. Normally you can see that it resembles a nest, but this didn't at all. This is probably for the best, as it's level with a raise floor that the cat can get to.


Today, because it was quite windy and rainy, we took the opportunity to stay in and make some French biscuits from a packet recipe. We brought this back from France thinking they were biscuits, but it turned out we had to make them ourselves first. I think you'll agree, they are completely indistinguishable from how they should look. Thankfully, they taste nice.