Rhubarb cake and a pilgrim

 

Last night W and I had dinner early so that we could take Lily for a walk on the beach by Oostvornse Meer, a nearby lake. As we drove out of the gate, a young woman came up to us and asked us whether she could stay in our garden - she had walked, she said, from Edinburgh. She was French, from near Versailles. 

Feeling slightly nervous, but also thinking of the times when we have camped around Europe, we said yes, and showed her places she could put her tent up. We went off to the beach wondering whether we were crazy to trust her. However, we have comparatively little worth stealing, no valuable jewellery or electronics. My stereo is 12 years old, and do people even steal stereos any more? My iPad is a second generation one, and incredibly slow. Still, people will steal anything. I was most scared she would take Lily! 

However, we felt we were probably ok. When we came back from the walk, we asked her whether she wanted to come and have a cup of tea. 

This is where the cake comes in. W hates rhubarb, and I like it. I've not had much in the last 10 years because I rarely cook things he's going to turn his nose up at. But this spring I've decided twice to cook with it, because the stalks on sale in the supermarket have been so temptingly, lusciously pink-and-green. The first recipe was a bit of a disaster, but the second was this one for Danish rhubarb cake with cardamom and custard. 

It took longer than expected to cook, and the custard definitely didn't float, it ended up in streaks through the cake, but it tastes great. It may be the first time I've properly creamed butter and sugar to light and fluffiness as well, as usually I'm a bit slap-happy with that. This cake makes me think that really I should do it properly more often. 

I offered our pilgrim a piece of cake to go with her tea and she accepted - in the end she had three! So I feel fully justified in making cake and fairly pleased with myself. We talked about her trip, and it turns out that she is a genuine pilgrim, taking the different paths through England, the Netherlands, Belgium, then going onto the Compostela way through France and Spain. After that, she will travel back and perhaps head onto Greece and Jerusalem, she was unsure. I asked what she would do afterwards and she said she thought about becoming a priest, having converted to Protestantism. 

She was 23 and very happy that on the trip thus far she has rediscovered her faith. She fairly glows with it, almost enough to rekindle mine, but I struggle too much with the historicity of the Bible at present. 

This morning, I waved her off after breakfast with an apple and a tracker bar, and coming back into the garden saw a single poppy. Now, there are poppies alongside the Erasmus hospital where I've been having the fertility treatment, and on Monday I walked past them feeling so sad and wishing that I could be pregnant with poppies in my garden. I put too much faith in signs and portents, so I'm trying not to go overboard, but perhaps this is a little nod in my direction. Maybe a 'hey, things will be ok. You will have poppies'. 

It was good too to help someone a little, to give them shelter and food, to hear their story and to wish them 'bonne chance' on their journey. Perhaps there's also a lesson there to learn about how helping others feels good, and how I can take care of something as a substitute for taking care of a child. I don't know, of course, but I hope so. This chance encounter has left me feeling slightly more hopeful. 

Where can I get the best cup of coffee in Victoria, London?

Today’s random question comes from my recent experiences buying a cup of coffee on the way into work. Despite the fact that this is an expensive and not particularly environmentally friendly habit, I do love getting a cup as I walk to work from Victoria Station. There’s just something good about walking along with one, and in the colder months in the UK it’s a nice way to keep your hands warm as well. Bonus!

Not strictly much to do with coffee, but this is some 
Victoria Street street art and I rather like it.

So what are my criteria for a good cup? I try to consume minimal cow dairy products as they definitely give me stomach problems, so I tend to ask for soy milk.^[1]At home I drink much more almond, hemp, oat etc milks as I’m also not wild about drinking too much soy, but those don’t tend to be on offer in cafes.^[2]

I prefer flat whites. I’m not sure why, but I like the texture better than a latte, and the volume is right – much larger and I feel as though I’m drinking a milkshake. For me, a really good flat white is velvety, not too foamy, and even with soy milk, there’s a kind of creaminess.

I also have decaff most days. A bit like the milk, this isn’t a preference, but I quit caffeine while trying to get pregnant. Since I’m still trying, I’m mostly still off the caffeine. Weirdly, I’ve now got used to this emasculated flat white to a degree that one with real milk and real caffeine tastes odd.

In Victoria Station there are approximately 20 places where you can get coffee, including Cafe Nero’s, Costa, Starbucks, Pret and a few other places. Walk down Victoria Street and you pass at least another 20, including Starbucks and Pret twice each, Leon, and various other chains. If you have a Waitrose card, you can get a free latte (no flat white) but these are milk only and decaf, although that was a happy purse month the month before I quit milk.

In Strutton Ground, there is a stall called Flat Cap Coffee, which I call out because it’s pretty good, although sometimes the coffee tastes a little burnt. It’s also on the pricey side at £2.80 a cup.

While thinking about how to enjoy coffee on a semi regular basis without wasting too much money, I decided to research. This demonstrates just how nerdy I can get about this kind of thing. I had a little table set up on my iPhone and everything. Over a couple of weeks, I bought coffee at all sorts of different places, and I’m proud to present the following table:

Demonstration that I probably take this too seriously

Until I tried Ravello today, I had decided to go for Pret on the basis of both taste and cost, but Ravello surprised me and I may have to rethink...

What does this tell us? First that I really need to get out more. Second that coffee can be enormously variable in price and quality. I did a similar exercise a few years back when I had to travel to Milton Keynes every Tuesday for work, but based only on cafes in Euston station. 

And there for the captive market all the cafes were exactly the same price. Whereas in Victoria, where people are roaming about much more, the prices range considerably. Hmm, there’s some kind of paper in there.

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[1] The Dutch call coffee with milk ‘koffie verkeerd’, which basically means you’re drinking it wrong. I disagree, and I think this says a lot about the Dutch – no half measures, there’s a right way and a wrong way to do things!

[2] There is a lovely little cafe near St Martin’s in the Fields that makes fresh almond milk every morning. I haven’t tried it yet, but I need to do that before I leave London.

What to do after Couch to 5k, Part Deux

About 10 weeks ago, I decided to do Couch to 5k again. I keep reading studies like this and suggestions that the Duchess of Cambridge was advised to exercise less before getting pregnant. (No links to that, as I don't want to link to red-tops, but I'm sure it's Google-able.) Plus my mum kept telling me she thought I was exercising too much. This demonstrates more that she has an overblown idea of how much exercise I actually do than anything else. But these things did have an effect and I would start running and then think: 'I'm stopping myself from conceiving!' and feel very guilty. 

However, more recently, I read an article or book about running stress. I can't remember where, but it may have been in Tread Lightly. (will try to come back and edit) Anyway, this noted that although stress hormones are raised when running, the overall effect on the runner is lowered stress hormones as a result of running. Epiphany! Not exercising was doing my head in. Running is my favourite form of exercise, and I missed it. And I was getting fatter, which also couldn't be good for fertility. So let's do a little running - enough to do say a 5 or 10k - but no marathons for a while. 

So I started again, this time using the NHS podcast. Although I think some of the advice given is a bit odd, e.g. the firm advice to heel-plant and to breath on a four steps per full breath (both inhalation and exhalation), it's encouraging to have someone telling me she thinks I'm doing well, and reminding me that the main think is to run and not to fixate on how fast I am. I actually shed a few tears on one of the runs when 'Laura' said "you're doing really well". I kept wanting to say, "yes, but I used to be able to run 20 miles!" but I didn't. 

Mentally, it's quite hard to start from scratch for the 6th or 7th time. To acknowledge your past, fitter self. But I knew that if I was going to make it without injury, I was going to have to take things really slowly. There was no harm in taking my time. As the runs went on, I enjoyed them more. This particular version of Couch to 5k, as opposed to the one in Runner's World's Run Your Butt Off, seems more satisfying. Rather than continuing to use a walking break until about week 9, the NHS podcast calls on you to run continuously from week 7, which is mentally challenging, but physically pleasing. 

I managed every week on schedule, and without injury, which is astonishing. And my reward? A beautiful new running watch. In many ways this is over-engineered for what I need, but I love seeing the data and frankly I think it's a thing of beauty.

My new toy. Honestly, who wouldn't be motivated by this?

So that brings me back to the original question, nearly two posts later. What to do after Couch to 5k? 

The short answer, evidenced by all the times I quit running only to start again (more than the times I quit smoking = twice, the second time being successful for the last 12 years or so), is 'Keep running'. But that covers a fairly wide span. 

I had been thinking I would pick up on the plan for my current speed in Run Less, Run Faster. I even went to the extent of working out my schedule in a spreadsheet. And then I ran my first run with the Garmin. I wasn't paying any attention to my heart rate, and at the end of the run I was shocked to be told by the watch's Recovery Advisor that I needed to take 72 hours to recover. Apparently I had been running at 90% of maximum heart-rate for nearly the whole run. 

My real max heart rate is definitely higher than the one the usual formulae give. In that particular run, which felt hard-ish to me, but not flat out, I peaked at 187 BPM, which is 7 BPM higher than the traditional 220-age and 11 BPM higher than the gender-adjusted 209-(0.9 x age). But even so, I found myself thinking 'What if I trained in the zones appropriate for me? Would this help avoid injury?'. Today I ran 30 minutes aiming for 142-144 BPM. It was the easiest run I've done in ages, and I found myself really enjoying it. 

So I've shelved my plans for Run Less, Run Faster for at least a month. I don't think there's any harm in going slow a little more. At some point I want to move into interval training proper, but I think I'll play with these heart rates for a while and build my base.

I'm a big fan of blogs. I love reading other people's life stories, and I can get sucked into spending a lot of time with them so easily. I find myself spending an evening cantering through the last 5 years of another human being's life - at least in terms of what they chose to share with the rest of the Internet. The babies, the divorce, the marriage, the food, the marathons and the gear.

So I've never really set my own one up. Why? I have plenty of things to talk about, but they are all so disjointed. I want to talk about:

• running
• clothes (regular and workout) 
• the fact that I've been trying to get pregnant for nearly 3 years
• my work (up to a point, because I'm not ready to be that honest)
• cooking and food
• shopping and my generalised window shopping envy (living in London on a civil servant's salary = torture)
• random stuff

But most blogs seem to have a theme. 

Then today I thought: Why do I have to have a theme? Why not just go for it? Don't overthink this. I overthink everything. 

So here we go. First post, and already it's about nothing much.