5 Fab Free Things To Do In Oxford…

Other Half and I took a trip to Oxford recently to catch the end of the Spellbound exhibition in the Ashmolean – and it was fab. There were some amazing Medieval illuminated manuscripts as well as rather a lot of shoes and clothing items that had been discovered up chimneys and some really interesting engravings…

…which brings me to my first fab free thing to do – the Ashmolean itself. The museum is the University of Oxford’s Art and Archaeology Museum and was founded in 1683. They have everything from Antiquity to the modern age. On the day we visited, they had Damien Hirst’s Head of the Medusa from his 2017 ‘Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable Exhibition’ on display. You don’t get much more modern than that!

Female head with writhing snakes. Made of gold plate silver. — Damien Hirst’s Head of the Medusa

If you are more interested in the ancient past, then you won’t be disappointed either. There is an impressive collection of Mycenaean artefacts from Bronze Age Greece, from massive pithoi (storage jars) to the rather more fragile Linear B tablets…and a rather nice Black Figure cup with a scene from a symposium (which in those days was rather less dignified than the gatherings that we apply that word to!) and some ace Palaeolithic stuff – I’ve always been fascinated by hand axes though…

Pithoi – A large storage jar
Linear B fragments
Black Figure cup
Acheulian hand axes – up to half a million years old!

Or if Ancient Egypt is your thing, they have the mummy of Djed-djehuty-iuef-ankh, with a good display explaining the afterlife and the stuff you need to get you there.

Or perhaps you like Eastern Art? In which case, you’ll love the Chinese, Indian and Japanese galleries.

Carving of the elephant headed god Ganesha, dancing — Ganesha, remover of obstacles, patron of the arts and sciences and god of wisdom and intellect

You could spend hours in the Ashmolean – and we have been known to! But then you’d be missing out on all the other fab stuff that Oxford has to offer…

…If you fancy a bit of a walk, walk down the High Street from the centre of town towards Christ Church College and take a right turn into Rose Lane. This leads to Christ Church Meadow, and a path next to the Thames (aka the Isis when it goes through Oxford*) and the Cherwell.

Meadow in summer with Christ Church framed by trees — View across Christ Church Meadow to Christ Church (Photo Jonathan Bowen [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons)

It’s a pleasant walk, even in the cold weather, though it’s worth knowing that the railing gates are locked at night! The Botanic Gardens are next to the entrance from Rose Lane and are well worth a look if you did feel like spending some money; it’s currently £5.45 for adults, free for under 16s (with a paying adult) and £4 for concessions. They’re open all year around and are alive with colour in the summer, but are worth a visit at any time of the year.

If you still feel like stretching your legs some more, checkout some of the real places that became immortalised in fiction. The University Church of St Mary the Virgin is a good place to start.

St Mary's Church at night — View towards St Mary’s from Ratcliffe’s camera – I won’t spoil the surprise of seeing the door!
(Photo by DAVID ILIFF. License: CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Except we’re interested, not in the church itself, but the rather ornate door opposite. You can’t miss it, because it has an ornate lion-esque face in the centre, and two fauns holding up the porch – relatives of Mr Tumnus, perhaps?

This door, known as the Narnia door, is said to have been the inspiration behind the wardrobe door in C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Just down the street, back towards Ratcliffe’s Camera, is an ornate lamp post, maybe the inspiration for the lamp-post where Lucy first meets Mr Tumnus. Malvern apparently lays claim to that too though, so who knows… You could also wander around Magdalen College (currently £6 for adults) and look at the carved animals in the cloister. Lewis is again said to have drawn inspiration for the part in the story where Aslan brings the animals that the White Witch had turned into stone back to life. If you fancy a longer walk, you could check out this website (which incidentally, starts at my next top free thing to do). After all that walking, you might fancy a drink and a bite to eat, in which case, visit the Eagle and Child on St Giles Street. It’s where Lewis, Tolkein and other writers met regularly to discuss their works (and at the time of writing, it had two vegan options on it’s menu)..

Continuing on a literary theme, though it might be a bit of an odd choice – and let’s face it, if you don’t like books, it’s probably not going to be somewhere to wander over to – but if you do like a mooch around a bookshop, then Blackwells on Broad Street is a treat and a half! The Broad Street shop is the original Blackwell’s shop, but is now considerably larger than it was then, with 4 floors and according to this article, over 125 000 books! How cool is that?! It also has a massive basement (the Norrington room) which is in the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest single display of books in the world. It has a secondhand books section on the top floor too, so it would be pretty hard not to find something to interest you… and the staff clearly have a sense of humour!

Bayeaux tapestry cartoon
"We advanceth towards the castle'
"Ooh great! I haveth National Trust membership. 10% offeth in the cafe!"

Another place that’s worth a wander is the covered market. This can be reached from Market Street, High Street or through Golden Cross (from the Cornmarket). The market was officially opened on 1 November 1774, and was built to replace the food markets on Fish Street and Butcher’s Row . The High Street frontage was designed by John Gwynn, who also designed the Magdalen Bridge, and there was further work on several occasions to expand the building in the 19th Century.

view of shop fronts and roof beams — Inside the covered market (M Stone at the English language Wikipedia)

Today, there are a good variety of shops, from the green grocers and the butchers, to bakers and cafes, to clothes and gift shops. The building itself is really interesting with lots of different periods of building surviving – there’s even an 1830s shop front at the west end of Central Avenue (just opposite the entrance to Golden Cross), complete with moulded pilasters and other architectural details. If you fancy going architectural detail spotting, you can download the heritage statement here, which has loads of information about the market and it’s history

*According to Wikipedia, the Isis is used for the stretch of the Thames from it’s source to Dorchester, when the Thame(and that is spelt correctly) joins it. Apparently, it comes from Tamesis which is an ancient name for the Thames. In the Medieval period, it was (wrongly as it turns out), thought to be a combination of Thame and Isis.

Red Cabbage Hash and a Surfeit of Cabbages…

…resulted from a slight miscalculation in my organic box order. My Christmas veg box had red cabbage in, so did my normal veg box – and I still had one left from the previous week. Oops!

There are remarkably few recipes out there that don’t involved stewing red cabbage with vinegar, but I managed to find a few. One of my favourites was actually two recipes from the BBC Good Food website – festive red salad, the left overs from which were then turned into a hash.

This is my version (helpfully combined, so that you don’t have to flick between pages)

Red Cabbage Hash

Serves 2 as a main, 4 as a side. Prep and cooking – about 30 mins

Ingredients

1lb (450g) potatoes diced into 1/2″ or 1″ cubes
3 tbsp (45ml) oil for frying the cabbage and potato mixture
1/2 a red cabbage
1 onion finely sliced
2 apples cored and cut into small chunks
1oz (25g) walnuts

Dressing:
2 1/2 tbsp (ml) red wine vinegar
1 1/2 tbsp (25ml) cranberry sauce
1 tbsp (15ml) date syrup
1 tbsp (15ml) oil

Method

Pot with potatoes in, colander with red cabbage in and frying pan with onions in — Veggies all ready to go!

Boil the potatoes until they are just tender – you don’t want them falling off whatever you stab them with to see if they’re done, as you’ll smash them up too much when cooking in the hash.

Whilst the potatoes are cooking, cut the hard white core out of the cabbage and discard. Shred the rest of the cabbage finely. Mix the apples, walnuts and cabbage together. In a separate glass, mix the vinegar, cranberry sauce, the date syrup and the oil together and then pour over the cabbage mixture and stir well.

Bowl containing prepared shredded red cabbage, apple, walnuts and dressing — Red cabbage and all salad ingredients mixed together

If you wanted to eat it as a salad (kind of a Waldorf salad without the mayo, celery or grapes) throw in the onions now as well and serve. As I’m not a fan of raw onions, I cook mine first. The original recipe added a peeled, segmented and chopped orange as well. I did try it with orange the first time I made it (I did have three cabbages to use after all!), but I found that the orange tasted quite bitter when cooked – maybe it was just my oranges – so if you want to put in oranges, add them before you fry the cabbage (below).

Melt the butter in a frying pan. If you’ve got an ovenproof pan, that’d be fab. Otherwise, just use what you’ve got. Fry the onions for 5 minutes or so, until softened (and not so stinky!). Add the cabbage mixture and fry for a few minutes more until the cabbage is slightly softened. Basically, you want the cabbage about as soft as you want to eat it, as the potatoes are only added long enough to colour and absorb some of the flavour of the cabbage.

Red cabbage and potatoes frying in a pan — Potatoes added to pan and stirred through

Stir in the potatoes and season well. Cook until the hash is heated through. If you used an oven proof pan, you could pop the whole pan under the grill for a few minutes to colour the top.

Serve with whatever you fancy – Other Half and I had it as a main, but you could serve it as a side and it would feed four.

How else could you vary the recipe?

Toasting the walnuts before adding them to the cabbage would add an extra flavour dimension

Use a different flavoured condiment – the original recipe used redcurrant jelly (but I was feeling festive!). As long as the condiment is a bit astringent/sour tasting, it should work. Raspberry jam wouldn’t work

Omit the dressing and mix a tablespoonful of mustard (Dijon or wholegrain – unless you like your sauce really hot and want to use English mustard!) with 200ml soya cream and add to the cabbage mix once the cabbage has softened slightly. You’ll get saucy cabbage then, so cook until soft – don’t try to crisp it!

Add a segmented orange to the salad as described above

Turn it into naked Waldorf salad – ignore the potatoes and just do the salady bit – add some chopped celery and grapes to the cabbage mix before dressing it.

With or Without You – running to your favourite tunes or not?

Seven months after Other Half and I started running regularly (for ‘regularly’, read at all…) we finally did 10K in one go. Which is a good thing really, as that marathon that we signed up for is six months away and there’s plenty of training to go between now and then. We’ve signed up for the Liverpool Rock and Roll Marathon and that brings me to the subject of this week’s post – to listen to music whilst running or not? I can think of three main reasons you’d want to listen to music when running.

You want to distract yourself from what you’re doing and take your mind off the effort
You want something to hold your interest on a longer run
You want to use the beat of the music to drive you on and improve performance

So I did some digging through the research to see what the thinking on running with music is…

In a Guardian article Prof. Karageorghis from Brunel University says that performance benefits of up to 15% could be yours if you listen to music whilst exercising. He says that you’d get enhanced performance and a reduction in the perception of effort. In the same article, a study by Prof Lane showed that motivating music unsurprisingly helped to improve the performance of the runners, whilst a research project at Liverpool JMU looked at 12 cyclists who rode for 30 minutes whilst listening to a song of their own choice. The second part of the experiment was to look at what happened when the tempo was increased or decreased by 10% without the cyclists being aware of it. When the music was slowed down, distance travelled and heart rate slowed down, whereas the opposite was true when the music was faster – and they enjoyed the music more. This didn’t stop the participants finding the workout harder, but it did mean that the participants “accept, and even, prefer a greater degree of effort”.

But it’s not just tempo that’s important – this article looked at Edworthy and Waring’s 2006 study which examined the effect of loudness too. This study looked at the effect of 5 different combinations of loud, fast, quiet, slow and no music at all on the 30 subjects. The subjects selected their own pace to run on a treadmill for 10 minutes. The results showed that there was a correlation between increased volume and tempo, and the heart rate and speed that the subjects ran at. The louder and faster the music, the faster the treadmill pace chosen to run at. However (there’s always a ‘but’, isn’t there!) some have questioned whether the effect that music seems to have is actually down to increased motivation caused by listening to music. Brooks and Brooks suggested that the studies which do show a positive effect on performance have used inexperienced participants exercising on their own in a lab. Where trained (exercising for at least an hour three times a week) and untrained participants were compared, there was a smaller effect on the trained group. Basically, working out in a lab on your own is boring, so the music helps you work harder. When you’re in a race, you’re already in a high state of excitement (or anxiety!) so the music has a negligible effect.

The memories and the emotions that a particular piece of music evoke are also key. Making you feel good when you run improves your mindset and therefore that improves performance. This probably explains why one of my running playlists is very 80s heavy! (But without Eye of the Tiger or the Rocky theme…) Lyrics might have an effect too, eg words on the theme of keeping going might just push you through a tough run, though how effective this is might just depend on your gender. Chris Lawhorn suggests that men and women process music differently, with women focusing on the melody, and men tend to focusing on the lyrics. In my highly unscientific study with a sample size of one (ie me!), I would agree that I definitely focus more on the melody whilst running, though this may be because I tend to lose myself in my thoughts too, so the lyrics tend to fade away.

A couple of penguins standing on a shingle beach

Then there’s tempo to match your stride. A strong beat *should* help you to drive along your stride – your foot should hit the ground with every beat, so a faster beat = faster running pace. I have never found this to work for me, but that’s because I run like a penguin, it in what is possibly the most inefficient manner ever. No, I really do! I take lots of small, quick steps when I am walking and this has translated into my running. A comfortable running pace for me is about 9 minutes a mile, or around 6.5 mph. The only thing that has a fast enough beat to match my foot strike is ELO’s Mr Blue Sky, at 178 beats per minute (BPM).

This article suggests that music that is around 160-180 BPM will keep you running at a good pace. Unfortunately, there isn’t actually that much music in the mainstream that goes that fast – and I don’t want to be listening to the same 5 or 6 tracks on repeat.

So what to do? Women’s Running suggests that the characteristics of good running music are

fairly loud volume
high tempo
rhythmically constant beat
affirmative lyrics

They also provide a range of BPMs for different types of running

150-190 BPM for running one step per beat
75-95 BPM for one stride cycle per beat
120-130 BPM for low to moderate intensity running if used as background music
130-140 BPM for moderate to high intensity running if used as background music

Nike, EMI and Ministry of Sound have all responded by creating or compiling music specifically for running, but you can easily create your own playlist with the aid of online databases of BPM, such as Song BPM and Get Song BPM. I really like Get Song as you can look up a whole album at once which is useful if you want to create a playlist database of your own. As for my 10K this week, I did exactly that and created a playlist based on my favourite OMD songs. They start fairly slow at 106 BPM and gradually increase to 176 BPM before dropping back to 110 BPM ish for the cool down. It fulfilled the first three of Women’s Running’s criteria and I reckon it certainly helped me battle through my run, up a hill and whilst the wind was running at 22mph and gusting up to 40! And of course, the wind was only behind me for about 5 seconds so was no help whatsoever (well, that’s what it felt like anyway!) So here’s my play list – but you’ll want to create your own because these songs will evoke different emotions for you.

5 minute warm up walk

Was it Something I Said?

Robot Man

1 hour run

Garden City*

Apollo

88 Seconds in Greensboro

The New Stone Age

Love and Violence

Heaven is (Highland Studios demo)

All Wrapped Up

Mystereality

New Babies; New Toys*

Dresden

Bloc Bloc Bloc

Georgia

Radio Waves

Electricity

Red Frame/White Light

5 minute warm down walk**

Joan of Arc

VCL XI

* these songs have an explicit lyric in them.

** this is actually slightly longer than 5 mins – useful if you slightly misjudge your route 😉

Safety note: I never listen to music with ear phones in both ears. Quite apart from the fact that I can only get the right one to stay in, I want to be able to hear the traffic around me and keep myself safe.

So after all that, this study rather throws a spanner in the works. Pre-run motivational music of 110-150 BPM aroused the runners and better prepared them for the 5K time trial than the no music group. When the runners listened to music during the 5K, they ran the first 2 laps of 12.5 faster than with no music, but after that the difference in lap times was negligible. This suggests that the higher the level of effort, the less effect the music has. When runners listened to music before their run they averaged times 26:45, but when listening to music of 140-160 BPM, the average time was 26.00. Weirdly, the fastest average times was when runners listened to music with a BPM of 80-100, which the researchers didn’t really explain. Maybe I’ll add Autobahn to my playlist and see what happens… Perhaps most interestingly, when runners listened to music after their run, it had the opposite effect to the pre-run music and internal systems, eg heart rate returned to normal more quickly.

So what have we learnt from this? If you like listening to music when you run, carry on and if you don’t, it’s unlikely to be having a detrimental effect overall! As for me, I shall be giving my 80s playlist an airing tomorrow – Just Can’t Get Enough!

Happy Running!

Dahl-licious Curry at Mowgli

Other half and I took a trip to Oxford this week, which was fab and which will be the subject of a later post. It pays to be organised when you’re vegan – I hate having to cobble something to eat together from uninspiring options – so we booked into Mowgli, which we’d heard good things about.

The restaurant is in the new-ish Westgate Centre on the roof terrace. The roof terrace offers good views across the city, sadly none of which are photogenic due to the placement of the metal supporting the panes of glass in the barrier, ie right across the middle! So no photos, I’m afraid. Mowgli* itself is near the lifts, so the views of the city are minimal, even if you did choose to sit outside.

The smell emanating from the restaurant as we walked up to it was gorgeous, and as we were about to discover, it the food tasted as good as it smelt. The interior was very modern with lots of wood and was brightly light with fairy lights. Some of the tables around the edges had seats suspended between two ropes. Curry on a swing? What could possibly go wrong…? Well, quite a lot if you are as uncoordinated as me, and thankfully, we sat in the middle. Other half breathed a sigh of relief…

The interior of the restuarant

There was a separate menu for vegans with lots of choice, which was fab. Indian food is famously vegetarian, but often uses ghee, so it was nice to be able to go for a curry and have options. We started with drinks and went for ‘Proper ginger tea’. We’d expected hot water and ginger, but what we actually got was black tea brewed with ginger and lemon. It was lovely and we shall be trying that at home!

Dark grey tea cup and tea pot containing black tea with lemon and ginger — Proper ginger tea

Services was quick and efficient, pretty much the complete opposite of our attempts to decide what to eat… We eventually managed to decide on our order, though it was so hard to choose. Tea steeped chickpeas almost tempted me, but I went for the Temple Dahl instead. The dahl consisted of red lentils with cumin, coriander and lemon, and I also order a plain rice and two roti. Other Half went for Holy Chow, chickpea, potato, spinach, ginger and mango curry, described as being served in a loaf. We were most intrigued by the ‘in a loaf’ description. We wondered whether it was going to be shaped into a loaf, but no, it was actually served in a big slice of crusty bread, with the scooped out bread insides on top.

Chickpea curry in a 2 inch thick slice of bread. Scooped out inside of bread is placed on top. — Holy Chow! It’s a curry sandwich!

We shared all the dishes – we really couldn’t choose – and so I can report that they were all gorgeous. The dahl was creamy with just the right hint of spiciness provided by the fresh red chilli garnish on top. Crunching through one of those was fine – unlike the unfortunate bird’s eye chilli incident at the Chilli Pickle in Brighton, where I mistook the chilli for a green bean and ate it. With fairly predictable results…

Dahl, chickpea curry, rice and roti on a metal plate — Curries artily arranged for a photo – it didn’t last long!

The Holy Chow was hotter than the dahl, but the heat didn’t overpower the flavour. Potatoes are sometimes hard to get right in a curry – cook for too short a time and they’re like rock, cook for too long and you might as well be eating mashed potatoes. These were cooked just right, as were the chickpeas. The basmati rice was cooked to perfection and wasn’t sticky at all, and the breads were good too, so all in all we were very impressed with the food.

We didn’t opt for dessert, as the only vegan option was watermelon sorbet which neither of us are keen on. That’s the only thing that could be improved upon – perhaps the option of a non dairy lassi, or maybe even a non-dairy khir (but that’s just because I’m biased, because I love rice pudding!)

Our bill came to just under £30, which for two curries with good portion sizes, bread, rice and 3 pots of tea in a restaurant. We thought it was very good value, especially as it included a £1 donation to a local charity and a service charge.

I think we will be visiting another branch closer to us in the near future – I’m intrigued by those tea steeped chickpeas…or possibly the picnic potato curry…or even the Calcutta tangled greens. Decisions, decisions!

*Other Half has already started calling it Mogwai. But you’ll be fine, so long as you finish your curry before midnight 😉

Happy 2019!

It’s the first day of the new year – hope yours has started well.

I’m not big on setting goals at the start of the year, but I do have four things I’d like to achieve this year

Grow my blog and share lots of ideas with you
Continue my quest to live a more sustainable life. I’m looking at ways to reduce waste generally, but especially my use of plastic
Complete a marathon within the cut off time of 6 hours and beat my personal best for a nonstop 100km walk
Indulge my love of 80s new wave/synth pop and see some live bands – – well – all work and no play… 🙂

They’re all SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time bound – everybody loves a SMART target…), perhaps with the exception of number 2 – though if I have managed to reduce my use of plastic by December 2019, I’ll know I have achieved it…

So I’ll share my progress with you throughout the year and we’ll see how it goes!

Hope you have a fab year and achieve the things that you want to.

Fab Vegan Donuts in West Yorkshire

Orange cream donut with orange icing and gold glitter on and a cup of rooibos tea with the tebag still it. — Orange cream donut and a lovely cup of rooibos tea from Temple Coffee in Leeds

Found Temple Coffee in the summer and as we were in Leeds last weekend, we visited again. Just to see if the donuts were as nice as I remembered…

It’s in the shadow of Kirkstall Viaduct and is a bit* of a walk out of the town centre. It’s quite well hidden unless you know what you are looking for – look out for the Shell garage on your left as you come from the city centre, take the first left down Burley Place and then the first right. You actually have to walk into the trading estate that GSF car parts is on. Took me ten minutes to figure that out first time I visited…

The cafe is really popular and all the donuts are vegan. They come in two sizes as well – this was the larger of the two – I was very hungry after my morning run! Hot drinks come with non-dairy or dairy options and there’s a range of teas and decaff options, which makes me very happy!

The donut flavours change regularly, but the orange cream one is definitely worth the effort of walking out there. The cream filling was just the right side of sweet and the orange icing wasn’t sickly at all. And it had glitter on top (and who can resist glitter?). And I almost persuaded myself that I’d walked it off by the time I got back to the centre of Leeds 🙂

*about a mile and half. Or you could cycle or drive.

Welcome to my blog

Thanks for joining me!

I’m Charlie and I’m doing my best to live a sustainable lifestyle in the North of England. I’m plant based and like to craft, recycle and upcycle and am always on the look out for new ways to be sustainable! And not a nettle suit in sight (for those of you that remember the Good Life – and for those of you that don’t, click here and enjoy!)

I’m also fascinated by the past and our cultural heritage. I love prehistory and industrial archaeology whilst my other half loves medieval stuff. Any trip out usually turns into a compromise…and often involves a garden…and a cup of tea.

So my blog covers a bit of everything really – hope you enjoy it!