04.24.08
Posted in Food, Travel at 7.10 pm by Caitlin
I am blogging about my recent trip over on Roaming Tales. The most recent post is about Granada in Nicaragua, a beautiful colonial city on the shores of Lake Nicaragua. There is more to come, both from Nicaragua and Asia, so please subscribe to the Roaming Tales feed to keep up to date.
The blog posts have photos but you can see all my photos as they are uploaded on photo sharing site Flickr under user name Niltiac1.
In other news, I have started a cookery course at Leiths. We have made choux pastry, aubergine and prosciutto gougere and chocolate and cherry biscuits so far. I am blogging about that over on The Gooseberry Fool, so please subscribe if you are interested.
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04.20.08
Posted in Family & Friends, Food, Travel, Writing at 9.07 pm by Caitlin
After my lovely food writing course at the Arvon Foundation last year, I really wanted to do one of their fiction courses.
One of my big goals this year is to edit my NaNoWriMo novel, which as you’ll recall, I wrote in 30 days. It’s been languishing in a drawer (or rather, elsewhere on my hard drive) ever since but as I was booked on an Arvon course in April, I knew that I would come back to it.
The week has been absolutely brilliant. Both the tutors (Alex Wheatle and Tiffany Murray) were great and there were some really talented fellow students on the course – I’m looking forward to reading 15 debut novels in the next few years! There was no internet and no mobile phone reception, which was great because the escape from work and blogs and friends and family really stripped away all the reasons not to write, while the beautiful surroundings and creative company inspired me to write. I feel really energised and inspired by my novel again and I have a bit of faith in the writing as well.
Arvon has several centres around England and Scotland but I returned to Totleigh Barton in Devon where the food writing course was also held. We stayed in a pre-Domesday farm house with a thatched roof deep in the countryside, near a village called Sheepwash. The site has been under continuous occupation since 1086 but probably several hundred years before that and the present building was built in the 16th century. It’s very quaint and full of random steps and low beams and secret passageways.
The countryside is very picturesque. It’s England as you’ve always imagined it – rolling green hills and cows and hedgerows. It’s a bit less cultivated and far less touristy than the Cotswolds. All the spring flowers are out and the shiny copper-backed pheasants are getting fat. I was told there were otters in the river and went down early to visit them. They weren’t at home but it was worthwhile because I saw a beautiful misty sunrise over frosty fields. We had four days of brilliant sunshine and the weather turned on the last day.
On Saturday, I met up with my friends Katrina and Dylan, who are temporarily living and working in Exeter. Unfortunately it was raining but we had a fun time driving around the local area, down to Dawlish and up to Dartmoor, and stopping for a cream tea along the way.
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04.11.08
Posted in Career, Life, Travel at 1.03 am by Caitlin
I’ve turned into Phileas Fogg, except intercontinental jets mean that my globe circumnavigation has taken only 30 days.
I left London on 8 March, almost exactly one month ago. Since then I have been to two states of Australia, the United States, Nicaragua, Hong Kong, Cambodia, Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok.
I realise Nicaragua and Thailand are opposite directions from Australia and yet I flew to Hong Kong and Bangkok via Nicaragua and the US. Crazy! It was for work, not pleasure.
Yes, I’m buying carbon offsets for the flights and yes, I know that’s a waste of time and money.
There has been a lot going on in my world. I shall try to blog again soon.
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