The sky in silver lace

Overall it's been a quiet and restful weekend by my standards. Saturday was spent mainly at the gym in the morning for my two hours of classes, then at the market (the stalls on the Saturday open air market rotate on a fortnightly basis, and the iteration this particular weekend is better than what we'll get in a week) picking up vegetables, Greek deli items, bread, etc. I started today off with my usual early morning swim, and then Matthias and I bought some pastries from my favourite bakery, and hung around in the house for a few hours. I did a yoga class, finished my book, stewed apples for next week's breakfasts, washed laundry — all the usual Sunday morning stuff.

Then we hopped on a train for about half an hour, and got off in one of the villages along the train line between Cambridge and London. After a half-hour walk (not particularly exciting, and half of it was alongside a motorway, but at least the whole thing was on a footpath, which is not always a given in this part of the world), we ended up at our destination: provenancekitchen, a restaurant I've been meaning to try out for years. Back in the day, they had a food truck that used to pop up at various outdoor events in Cambridge, and I remembered enjoying the food then, but since they bought the permanent location the food trucks have only come out for private hire at things like weddings or corporate events. And somehow I'd got it into my head that their restaurant was inaccessible except by car.

In any case, I managed to figure out that it was perfectly possible to walk there, we booked a table, and we had a great lunch. On Sundays they only do roasts — the quality of which can always be quite variable (I've had some awful pub roasts comprised of dry meat, soggy, overboiled frozen vegetables, and a tiny suggestion of gravy insufficient to flavour the whole meal) — which were excellent examples of the type! They came with a platter of roast potatoes, fresh roast vegetables (parsnip, carrot, fennel, beetroot, kale and beans), all with rich earthy flavours and perfect textures — plus a huge gravy boat filled to the brim, and fresh, handmade Yorkshire pudding. It was delicious food, in a lovely atmsophere, the trains were all on time, it didn't rain, and we returned home with a smug sense of an outing well-planned, in which everything had gone perfectly. On the return walk, I was better able to appreciate the scenery, which was the usual sweeping fenland panorama of flat, water-drenched soggy fields, hedgerows, clusters of snowdrops and daffodils, little villages with church steeples piercing the sky, wind turbines, and the first hints of sunset starting to bleed into the silvery-blue air.

It was possibly just slightly too much food, though, and I can't imagine needing to eat any dinner at all! That suits me just fine, though, as I have zero desire to cook, and would rather spend the next few hours slowly winding down, as the weekend draws to a close.

I hope everyone's been having equally enjoyable weekends.