Catching up (again!!)

December, 2009 - Several people have complained that I don't update this blog often enough, and the reason has been that I've just been almightily busy, out of town, out of the country, out of my head... I've been to Jersey, Nice, Corsica, Glasgow, Navarra (featured in the January edition of John Radford's WineWire which will be published here next month), Dorset, Northamptonshire and been stranded in Buckingham by the snow after putting YES CHEF! Magazine issue number 12 to bed. Details of some of these exploits will appear on the blog in due course (and, no, I still haven't forgotten the second half of my trip to Catalunya last June). January is a quiet month and I should be able to catch up. But that's what I said about August. In the meantime just a couple of quick catch-ups:

01-Dec-09 - Another year, another birthday, and rather gratifyingly lots of birthday wishes from old chums, including many who used to listen to me on the BBC. It's now three years and nine months since the night of the long knives, and people still remember. I look back on those days as a golden age which, sadly, has been destroyed by incompetent management. I draw special attention to the work of Lesley Harvey, who is an artist and caricaturist (and former listener) from Seaford who used regularly to send in pictures of me and the team, and who has done a a lot of work for me: The Eversley is full of her caricatures of us and the family, and she came up trumps again with the following birthday œuvre:

You can see more of Lesley's work at www.lesleyharvey.co.uk