Tag Archives: Parliament

The Lyric Theatre Café

13 October 2016 billpaterson1@me.com 5 Comments

Earwigging Swahili conversations

London means many different things to many different people. From our point of view it has too many cars, too many people, not enough time. And not enough scones.

Scones can be remarkably difficult to find in what is supposed to be one of the world’s leading cities. This is largely down to the same reason that Pat finds the capital so frustrating. Her remarkable ability to earwig other people’s conversations at one hundred paces is largely useless down here because they are almost all held in Swahili … or what might as well be Swahili. Scones suffer in the same way. Unless you go to a particularly English restaurant or café, and they can be relatively few and far between, you are unlikely to find a good old-fashioned scone. Now all this diversity may be cause for celebration but for dedicated sconeys it can be a teensy bit frustrating. What happens though is that you sometimes find scones in unexpected places and that is always a pleasant surprise.

View from the roof terrace of the Lyric theatre Hammersmith — The garden terrace

Arts and Culture

London has lots of theatres, a fact not all together surprising when you consider that this city absorbs more than 75% of the entire UK Arts and Culture budget. Suffice to say that we found ourselves here at the Lyric Hammersmith, not expecting it to be a scone adventure. Lo-and-behold, however, there they were, plain and fruit, in the ground floor café. It had to be done.

The Lyric was built in 1895 slightly further up the street from where it now stands. After it was scheduled for demolition in 1966, a campaign was launched to save it, resulting in it being moved brick by brick to its current location. The café is run by Peyton & Byrne, a company which holds the catering contracts for places like the Royal Academy, the National Gallery and the Orangery at Kew Gardens .. so you would imagine that it would be good. However, even though our scones came well presented with lots of jam and cream they were not exceptional. Enjoyable enough but nothing more. Just in case you think we are getting a bit highfalutin, we were here to see a production of the Ugly Duckling in the middle of the afternoon.

Royal Prerogative

We will leave you work it out. It was fab … we understood it all! Understanding, however, is much more difficult when it comes to the current government position on Brexit. Our ‘unelected’ prime minister is invoking the ancient ‘royal prerogative’ in order to circumvent any consultation whatsoever with our ‘elected’ representatives in Parliament. Thank goodness Corbyn seems to be getting his act together at long last.

W6 0QL tel: 020 8741 6850 The Lyric

ps: a bulletin has just arrived from our ‘south coast’ correspondents regarding the scones they found on a weekend visit to Torquay. They thought these Devon beauties were great, but not quite up to our topscone benchmark. We have never been to Torquay but now we may have to go and test them ourselves. Many thanks for the report. It looks suspiciously like they have put the cream on first … what are these Devon folk like??

TQ2 5QB tel: 01803 294396 Dot’s Pantry

Ordinary, Scones

Inchbae Lodge

26 April 2015 billpaterson1@me.com 1 Comment

This place is interesting. A young couple from the North of England have had it about 7 months. Through the winter, they have managed to transform it into a pleasant guest house and bar/café. Previously, it had become very run down and attracted some pretty poor reviews. Now, however, it’s a fresh start and you cannot help but wish them all the luck in the world

Inchbae Lodge is on the road to Ullapool out of Garve and it would not be unreasonable to describe it as being ‘in the middle of nowhere’. Far from being a disadvantage this could be exactly what many people are looking for so lets hope that their first summer season is a good one. Unfortunately, when we arrived we seemed to be the only people around.

This may be due to the fact that we drove past it before we realised what we had done. We had to stop and turn back. Maybe a few more road signs notifying drivers in advance would help? Anyway we were made to feel very welcome as were ushered into a very comfortable conservatory at the back of the Lodge to await our scones and coffee.

Now here I have to say that I really really wish this review could be better. However, when our scone arrived it was of the bought-in variety. It tasted ok but the cream that came with it was aerosol ‘scooshie. As a result it fairly quickly turned to watery white liquid in the warmth of the conservatory. In spite of these things it was pleasant to relax in the coziness and catch up with the news.

Outnumbered

What oh what is happening in the election? It seems that the party with ‘Unionist’ in its title is determined to break the Union apart with their proposals for English only votes for England. If I was being kind I would say that they simply have not thought the scheme through. If I was being unkind I would say that they are trying to undermine basic fundamental democracy and becoming more nationalist than the nationalists. Either way it can only end up in tears for the Union.

Don’t they realise that according to Parliament’s own figures Scottish MPs traditionally only have a deciding effect on 0.06% of parliamentary business. In other words, in the past Scottish MPs may as well not have bothered. That figure will probably not hold true after this election but it will still remain that Scottish MPs are vastly outnumbered by English ones, as has always been the case. So what on earth are they on about?

SNP to the rescue

In the meantime it looks as if you will have to vote SNP to save the Union. It’s a mad world! We feel that our English friends at Inchbae Lodge need to find a way of tapping into the large visitor numbers at Rogie Falls. It’s just down the road and there’s nothing in the way of cafe facilities that we could see. We wish them every good fortune but ditch the scooshie cream!

IV23 2PH tel: 01997 455070 www.inchbaelodge.com

Ordinary, Scones, self-service

Blossom’s Bistro

21 April 2015 billpaterson1@me.com 1 Comment

Blossom’s is situated within the ever popular Torwood Garden Centre at Larbert between Falkirk and Stirling. Like the Centre itself the bistro is big, over 200 seats. Now you would not normally go to a garden centre specifically for a scone but at this time of year garden centres are going to be hard to avoid. You may as well try a scone at the same time. I have to say that Blossoms tries really hard and for the most part succeeds. There is a wide range of food on offer.

They even do an afternoon tea with generous helpings of sandwiches, cakes, scones, tea or coffee for £15 … for two people! Don’t think you can do much better than that! No surprise then that it’s a busy place, We suspect that many folk just come to the Bistro without going out to the plant area. They also support Central Arts. An organisation of local artists, displaying and selling their artworks to benefit various charities. Highly commendable!

A Parliament of scones

It’s a beautiful warm day but I gather that some folks are getting a bit overheated regarding the upcoming election. Let’s look at it sensibly! Lets imagine Parliament being made up of scones. There would be about 650 plain ones, some of them pretty half baked. There would be another 900 or so fruit ones in ‘the other place’. All of them are half baked and we don’t really need them at all. At this point in time, before the election, all 650 of the plain scones have been discarded … binned. We only have the 900 fruit ones. Now much as I like a fruit scone many of these are well past their sell-by but there is no way of getting rid of them. Even the pigeons won’t take them.

No worries though, on May 7th, a new batch of plain scones will appear from all over the UK and normality should then be restored. However, the problem this time around seems to be with the Scottish scones. Seen by some, to be of inferior quality, hard to digest and best ignored if possible. Of course this in turn would be tricky for Scottish people to digest because they will have gone to a lot of trouble to make them and they know their scones are as good as any.

There are scones and scones

The democratic process that produced all these scones used to see them all as equal but maybe not anymore. Us sconeys have known for a long time that scones are not all equal, far from it. The scones we had in Blossom’s Bistro were better than expected but maybe tasted a little bit floury and slightly more cakeish than we would have liked. Nevertheless we enjoyed them, the coffee was also good, the service was very helpful and friendly. All in all, very good value for money. More than can be said for those in Parliament.

FK5 4EG tel: 01324 557710 Blossoms Garden Centre

Scones, history and a dollop of politics