Hasn’t the weather been awful this week? I know that’s a very British thing to moan on about but it makes keeping a toddler entertained a bit of a nightmare and while the roads to work kept flooding, which made me late for work (not actually that bad a thing) I park next to a river which made me a bit concerned that I’d come back to my car floating through Chelmsford.
So the weather being not to insanely awful this morning, me, The Husband and The Small Thing managed to make it out and as we had time to kill decided to pop along to the Farmers Market in Rochford.
I’m always slightly sceptical of going to farmers markets. I love the idea of it, ‘oh yes, just nipping along to the farmers market to get some bits’. But in this imaginary lifestyle I also drive a shiny Range Rover, wear lots of Boden and think Waitrose is reasonably priced. Obviously none of this is actually true. Farmers Markets are a bit like craft markets, vintage fairs, art fairs and all the rest of those bits in that once you’ve crossed the threshold you’re pretty much committed to buying something that you wouldn’t normally buy. You’ve committed yourself to that dream lifestyle and once you’ve had a chat with a cople of stall holders, well, you feel kinda bad if you don’t buy anything as they all seem so nice and you like to support small businesses and actually you don’t really agree with with Tesco’s anyway, it’s just that they’re rather more conviently located.
Behold! The honey....
So todays purchase was honey but by god it does look like rather special honey. The very nice bee keeper I spoke to (Ann) keeps beehives locally in Leigh on Sea, Hadleigh, Canewdon and Hawkwell. She also has one next to the prison at Bullwood Hall but that doesn’t really fit in with my Boden wearing fantasy.
What I’d never thought about before was that the honey would be totally different depending on where the beehive was. So the bee’s in Hadleigh that fly over towards the castle get a dark strong tasting honey, while the ones in Leigh that fly over and feast in Two Tree Island get a pale light honey. There’s the difference they don’t give you in Tesco’s.
I’d love to do bee keeping, its a proper craft isn’t it? I’d wear my Boden (are you noticing a theme here?) and listen to folk music and chat to my bees in my embarrassingly large garden. But the reality is that I’d worry about the bee’s stinging the Small Thing, my garden is pretty small and quite frankly if I try to fit one more job into the already crowded mum/work/housework/cooking/cleaning/drinking juggle then I’ll probably explode. So we bought the honey instead. The light one is what you have on your porridge or for honey and lemon. The dark is for the proper honey eaters. We went for the dark one. I have no idea what I’m going to do with it, but I know I’ll enjoy thinking about my fabulous life as a beekeeper when I do have a go.
Somehow, through the magical world of twitter I came across Sarah who runs Weald Handmade, living about two miles down the road and handmaking gorgeous leather handbags that were the talk of the stitch-in I ran the other week. You know I’m a sucker for local things and handmade things and now you know I’m a sucker for a nice bag too. I had loads of questions I wanted to ask Sarah and I thought they might interest you too. Enjoy, and try not to dribble on the pictures of the bags.
