MaW’s Blog

The stats compiled from the last few days show that about 70% of hits from identified browsers are from IE, or from things pretending to be IE. I can see I’m going to have to make the markup more Firefox-specific.

Interesting search terms… ‘police eyesight standards’ is one that’s been hovering around in the stats for a while, largely due to me moaning about them. One hit from ‘first day cachelogic’ — I wonder who that was? We’ve not had all that many people start lately. By the way, I’m leaving CacheLogic in about a month’s time, so that’ll be completely irrelevant by then anyway. Ho hum.

And someone came here looking for a way to cook pork fillet. I wonder if my recipe was successful or indeed even slightly interesting. Leave comments, random visitors! Don’t worry about being offensive, if you are I’ll delete them.

So, day two of the Folk Festival. Today I went for the start of performances at two, and saw Hayseed Dixie, who I missed last night. They were okay, but I wouldn’t seek them out again. Then it was The Cat Empire, an Australian group who had some very strange load of reggae and ska thrown in. Talented, but I wouldn’t seek them out either.

Then The Bills, who I also saw yesterday. I didn’t pay much attention to their performance, except to enjoy the first song, which was the one I liked most last night (last night they didn’t do it first though).

Fourth band of the afternoon (this is all on stage one, very conveniently, although I did wander around the festival during the intervals and less interesting groups as well, for food if nothing else!) were the marvellous and amazing Kathryn Tickell Band. One of the main reasons I bothered to go the festival at all, they completely failed to disappoint in every possible way. Although their first number (Herd, from the album Air Dancing) had some sound glitches, by the end of it they’d got it all sorted out and stormed their way through an excellent set, gaining the most positive audience reaction of the afternoon. A couple of good new tracks in there as well as fantastic older ones, so things bode well for their next album. They finished their set with a rendition of Peter Man, which can also be found on Air Dancing, but extended and considerably faster at the end, getting almost the entire tent to their feet and stamping and clapping and dancing along. Fantastic.

They were followed by The Unusual Suspects, a 22-piece folk big band from Scotland including four singers (who also play assorted instruments), a pianist, a harpist, three pipers (Scottish bagpipes of course, quite a startling sound after the much mellower Northumbrian smallpipes played by Kathryn Tickell), a horn section, a strings section, percussionist and drummer, and a few other people too. At least part of their closing number appeared to be the same basic melody as part of Peter Man, except their version was considerably louder, due in part to the horn section and the advantage of numbers (Unusual Suspects 22, Kathryn Tickell Band 4).

Then we had KT Turnstall. Nominated for the Mercury Music Prize this year, she made me think that she’s probably what you’d get if you got Katie Melua and added about half a folk singer and a Scottish accent. She garnered a response from the audience which topped Kathryn Tickell’s although I don’t personally think she was as good. It’s all down to taste of course, she was easily the second best of the day.

I didn’t see the final two acts (Mavis Staples and the Proclaimers) because I left, being quite tired and having not much interest in Staples’ gospel/soul music, or the enough in the Proclaimers to stick around while Mavis Staples did her set.

Tomorrow I’m off to x3ja’s wedding, so back at the folk festival on Sunday for Karine Polwart, Kate Rusby and Blazin’ Fiddles.

The Family Mahone — very entertaining. The Bills — top-notch hideously complicated music from Canda. Martha Wainright — heart-stopping emotional stuff, just a voice and a guitar. Beautiful, although a little too much reverb…

This afternoon the loud noises start at 2, and I’m hoping to see a fair few acts. The one essential today is Kathryn Tickell. The Bills are on again, KT Tunstall should be good… and there are THREE celidhs. One would probably be sufficient.

Tomorrow morning the 41st Cambridge Folk Festival begins, and I’ve got a full festival ticket and the appropriate time off work. Wahooo!

Might not be masses of excitement tomorrow, not sure, depends what unlisted artists play I suppose. Friday should be ace though. Saturday I miss because of x3ja’s wedding, but Sunday I’m back and will be lapping up Kate Rusby, Bellowhead and assorted other must-sees.

And mud, of course. The weather forecast looks… less than encouraging.

We tried guinea fowl for the first time today. The recipe was semi-made-up and worked very nicely. Here we go:

Take one guinea fowl. Plucked, gutted and prepared for eating, preferably.

Put it in a roasting tin which has a cover, breast up. Lay some rashers of bacon over it, and brush it with some olive oil.

Take two red onions. Peel and chop into largeish chunks. Place these around the guinea fowl in the roasting tin.

Put the tin in the oven at 200 degrees centigrade for twenty minutes. Then reduce the heat to 160 until the bird is cooked.

While that’s cooking, prepare some potatoes and put them in a tin with some olive oil. Once the heat is reduced, put them in the oven to roast.

When the bird is done, put it on a carving board to rest. Take the roasting tin and put it on the hob. Add a few handfuls of chopped dried apricots, chopped prunes, raisins and chopped mushrooms. Take the bacon from the bird’s breast and cut it up. Place that in the tin too, and fry off the mushrooms.

Add some water and some jam or jelly of some sort — we used some blackcurrant jelly, and the remains of some rather nice raspberry jam which was nearly all gone. Let it boil a bit, and add some cornflower paste to thicken, and a bit of balsamic vinegar. Let the flour cook out.

When the sauce is done, carve up the bird, pour the sauce over it and serve with the potatoes and any vegetables you fancy. We used green beans picked fresh from the garden.

Anyway, guinea fowl is nice. I strongly recommend it.