More Boring Bricks

Fancy a quick wander?

Come on, then. Now that we've finished poking around The Great Hospital we shall venture just across the road to see some of the yummy old houses between the hospital and the Cathedral.

There are many more (and sunnier) photos of beautiful old Norwich buildings to be seen in this post and in this one but these are from last week when I was on my way to meet Mikey.

Contrasting styles.
Two fifteenth century houses and an early nineteenth century one.
The pink house has had a bizarre, seventeenth century front wall added and the middle one has had the original windows replaced with sashes on the upper floors.

Most houses of this period or earlier have been bashed about so much over the centuries that little of them is left.
Check this one out, however, for the real deal!
Dragon Hall Post 1
Dragon Hall Post 2

This is much earlier. The back end of The Deanery by the west door of the Cathedral. I am always torn between thinking this would be a fantastic place to live (especially as when I used to walk past it on my way in to my old office I could hear the Cathedral Choir rehearsing in the Choir School just across the way) or a total nightmare, as every quarter of an hour the bells from the Cathedral go apeshit, so perhaps I'll move here when I go deaf.

The Deanery from the garden side. Again with windows added in just about every century to make a charming mess.

Most of the houses around the Cathedral and The Great Hospital look like this. To say I want them all is an understatement.

Here is one of my favourites.
People actually live in these places. I want to kill them and steal their homes. Is that so wrong?
Don't answer that.

Some early Georgian houses from another part of Cathedral Close.
This one would make an ideal setting for Katie, Lynn, Petrea and Lucio to indulge in their Austenesqueries (yay! Another neologism for the Small Glass Planet)!
Kindly pass that sheep's-gut condom, Mister Darcy; I feel somewhat frisky!

I have always lusted after this house. The front of this one dates from the year before the pilgrim fathers set sail for the colonies (there's a date plaque) though it would have originally had leaded casement windows; these are late seventeenth century replacements.
The bulk of the house, however, is fourteenth century.

All of these houses are owned by the Cathedral and when I was working in Norwich my mate Gerry was surveyor for the Close and I managed to sneak inside several of these places with him and had a good rummage around in roofs and basements, dating the timbers and construction methods. I love stuff like that.

A trio of Elizabethan cottages belonging to The Great Hospital with later brick walls set in front of the original timber framing and sixteenth century Dutch gables added.
Quaint and beautiful in a vernacular fashion.
Again, this would have originally been timber framed with oak mullioned windows, then when the brick was added the windows would have been leaded casements. These are early Victorian windows, from the start of plate glass production when windows were no longer hand-blown glass and larger panes became possible.

This was originally the monks' brewhouse from the Cathedral monastery and the lower parts of it date back to the 1080s. Now one of my favourite houses in The Close.
It is the first house on Hook's Walk, leading down to The Great Hospital. The cream house beyond it is a fourteenth century timber framed house with fifteenth century additions and the original great hall inside.

We shall finish today's picturesque perambulation with another part of Hook's Walk.
The path turns left at the pink house (a nunnery) and if you follow it round you see those lovely Dutch gabled cottages and The Great Hospital in front of you.

In the spring, when the weather is warmer and sunnier I shall do more posts of Old Norwich.
If you find them boring, tough titty. I love old buildings, so there.

What's Cooking With Dive? Sesame Seaweed Snacks

A quick snack before we get back to the Norwich photopost.

Mike and I were talking food (as we so often do) the other day and he is feeling the health benefits of having stopped eating crisps (that's "potato chips" if you can't speak English) last summer and having replaced them with those yummy crispy seaweed snacks you get in Japanese stores.

I am a sucker for those things too but these days I find it much easier and cheaper to make them myself.
So here - if any of you are remotely interested in replacing some of the salt and fat in your diets with something healthy - is Old Dive's Sesame Seaweed Snacks recipe.

First up:
Ingredients: (all organic) …
Sesame seeds. Easy peasy.
Toasted sesame oil.
Soy sauce.
Mirin.
Wakame (fresh or dried; whatever).
I usually use big strands of wakame in my miso soup. I cut them to fit the bowl while I'm making it. But for this it is a lot less hassle to buy a bag of the dried wakame that's already cut up small (which is how you usually find it in the supermarkets … I have to go to Japanese shops to find the big stuff). This recipe is all about spending the minimum amount of time prepping and cooking and the maximum time enjoying.

If you don't have wakame or mirin (c'mon! Even bloody Sainsbury's sells it now), you can use spinach and sugar. The result is pleasant enough (it's how they make that alleged "crispy seaweed" you find in Chinese restaurants) but nowhere near as yummy and healthy as this!

Step one: Grab a handful of wakame out of the bag and soak it in cool water. Give it around fifteen minutes but it matters not one jot if you forget about it and come back and find it hours later.
This is a dish I like to make when I am working around the house, doing chores. There is such a miniscule amount of time actually spent in the kitchen that you can make this stuff almost without noticing you're doing it.

Step two: Dry fry your sesame seeds.
The amounts I am using here will give a couple of bowls worth (like the photo at the bottom of the post only twice as much) which is enough for party dips for half a dozen people or snacks for me for a week.
The total cost of ingredients used for a whole week's worth of yummy snack Heaven is around twenty pence.
Add to that the gas used in having the hob on for a couple of minutes and the oven on the very lowest plate-warming setting for twenty minutes or so and we're talking cheap food for the recession.

Toast your sesame seeds until they are beginning to turn nut brown like in the picture. It doesn't take many seconds.

Next up: take the wakame out of the water and strain it. Then what I usually do is pick up a fistful and squeeze as much of the water out of it as I can, just to cut down on drying time in the oven. We want this stuff crispy and we want it now!

Right! On to the minute or so you shall actually spend cooking this dish.
Heat up the wok and add no more than a teeny teaspoon of toasted sesame oil and woosh it about so it coats the bottom of the wok.

Add the toasted sesame seeds and the wakame and toss 'em about to mix things up a bit. When they're good and hot add a few drops of soy sauce and some good shakes of mirin (the mirin adds sweetness so Joy would want to add about a gallon while I use around a teaspoonful).

Shake things around until any liquid is soaked up (probably three seconds) and we're on to the next step.

With your oven on its very lowest setting, arrange the stuff on a baking tray (I use non-stick foil as I can just shake 'em straight off into bags for lunch).

Now go away and do whatever else you want. The wok will just need a wipe around as all the liquid has been absorbed by the wakame and it's just about clean anyway.

Come back and poke the stuff from time to time.
When it's good and crispy it's done.

This photo is crap.
The snacks are actually a lovely shade of dark green and are dry and crisp, not black and glistening and sinister like the flash makes 'em out to be. Hey ho.
It might look kinda icky but it is totally delicious, intensely flavoured, crispy, more-ish and mind-buggeringly healthy.
It also costs around £2.40 a portion in the shops (called "Izumiya Seika") and in addition to the ingredients I use they add "starch syrup, sugar, salt, MSG and trehalose", whatever the fuck that is, so with my home-made version you're not sucking down all that shit.

My version looks, feels and tastes exactly the same but is much healthier and costs a tiny fraction of the shop price. We're in a recession, people.

Next time you're doing the housework, make a week's worth of healthy snacks for a few pence while you're at it. They're also ideal for making while you're blogging. I made another batch while I was writing this and I am about to bag 'em up for snacks to eat at work this week.

WARNING: These are totally addictive!

Guitars And Drums

Who needs girls when you've got guitars and drums?
Hokay, so maybe I do, but I've been so long without a girl that I wouldn't know what do do with one if I woke up to find one nekkid under my duvet.
So guitars and drums it is …
Besides, they make a much better noise than girls.

Good folk of Blogville, kindly permit me a brief interlude from all those photos of beautiful buildings and instead come and join Phil and Dive down at Woody's rehearsal rooms for a good, therapeutic thrash about.

"What the fuck do I do with all this stuff?"
Because I am retired from gigging, my careful set-up routine has long gone from my woolly old mind.
Hence the look of stupefaction on my face whenever I open my box of leads.

While I'm figuring that out, let's help Phil set his kit up, shall we?
First up … The good old bass drum.
Easy, that one.

These stands are a bit of a pig to set up correctly though, so we'll leave Phil to get on with it himself and stand around drinking coffee.

That's the tom-toms done. Now where are those pesky cymbals?

Ah! That's better.
Phil has a acquired a new snare drum and a new china cymbal since we were last down here.
More boys' toys for the boys to play with.

It sounds awesome, but then it's a Pearl Reference kit and it cost about as much as the US budget deficit so if it didn't sound totally fucking brilliant he'd be doing something very wrong indeed.

Plus, Phil's a bloody good drummer, which helps.
A lot.
Here are his new snare and china cymbal.

And again from a slightly different angle.
Musicians (and drummers) can never have enough photos of their instruments.

Which is why I can't resist taking photos of my guitars.
Especially this little beauty.

Behind my beautiful PRS sits my yummy, hand-built Mesa 25th. Anniversary special; the most totally fucking glorious amp the planet has ever seen.
Oh, and my Converse hi-tops, which Phil wanted to try with his kit as he's after a more sensitive drumming shoe than his current pair of squash shoes.

Hot valves! Yay! Now we're cooking!
Round the back of the Mesa when things get warmed up.
This amp responds like a living thing. It has so much sensitivity and expressiveness it takes my breath away.
Being a Godless Heathen I know I don't have an immortal soul but I am certain that this amplifier does.

Yet more drum porn. You'll notice I was a good boy this week and carefully cropped out Phil's bald spot.

Mine - on the other hand - is there for all to see.

I make the dumbest faces when I play.
Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel would look frighteningly intellectual stood next to me on stage.

I think I must be squeezing out a fart on this one.

So … That's what flabby old folk do to relax.
Maybe I'll get back to proper posting tomorrow but I did enjoy that.

The Great Hospital, Pt.4

Continuing our tour of Norwich's Great Hospital we come to one of many buildings in front of which Mike and I groaned and said things along the lines of "Oh, crap! Do you remember all the trouble we had with THIS one?"

This is Suffield Court, between St.Helen's and the river.
Originally built in 1937 around three sides of a glorious bowling green.
Inevitably, when they were originally built, each resident had but a single room (one window for each, with another row of rooms along the back) and there were no kitchens or inside toilets.
Residents ate in the Refectory (where a lot of them still do from choice and who can blame them? It's beautiful) and used the communal outside privies near the river.
Back in those days bathrooms were totally unheard of!

Still, it was a major step up from the cubicles still in use in Eagle Ward.

In the late 1960s things were improved a little in that each resident was allotted two rooms (one of which was split in half to give a small inside privy) and the remainder of the old folk were relocated to a new building our old boss designed (which is so execrably 1960s that I will never photograph it for danger of smearing his reputation).

Since Mike and I got hold of it, however, every second front door behind these porches has been blanked off and each resident has a big and beautiful living space (I'll show you where we rehoused the displaced folk in a minute).

Here's Mikey, reminiscing with me about all the hassle we had renovating these places.

On to the back of each bungalow we built a matching extension with a lovely big kitchen and bathroom in it, with fully accessible features for wheelchair and ambulant disabled use so a lot of the residents can cope without a nurse now.

That little square outshot is one of them, behind the somewhat scummy pool in the foreground which is not a swimming pool gone to seed but something far more fun.
From the late 1240s until quite recently The Great Hospital was granted rights from the king to herd swans.
Every spring a "swan-upping" was held where all the swans and cygnets from the river would be rounded up and the cygnets allocated to the different people in Norwich (72 in all) who had the royal right to eat them.

The Great Hospital's cygnets were then held in the Swan Pit - which is fed via two small creeks from the river - and were fattened on grain for the Master and the clergy to feast upon (remember the old folk in Eagle Ward subsisted on bread and gruel).
This practice only ceased in the 1950s.
The pit here has been partially drained for maintenance but usually it is a lot prettier.

Round the back of Suffield Court you can just about see where we are going next.

This is the rear courtyard of Suffield Court that we built to house the residents squeezed out of the front half. We tried to make it look as close as possible like the original with of course fewer porches as each bungalow is much bigger and quite luxurious.
We built much larger, two storey version a couple of hundred yards away in the direction Mike is looking (Young's Green) where folk from the Eagle Ward's cubicles and Holme Cottages (a similar set of bungalows to this) were rehoused.

Here's the view of the Cathedral from the corner of the bowling green.
That's the back of the Chaplain's House from yesterday's post in front of us.

Just around the corner are these cute little cottages on two sides of a green. The ones on the other side are residents' cottages but these ones hold the reception and some of the offices for running the hospital.
The third door up with the little plaque beside it is the "door of doom" where Mike or I would trudge to hear the Master moan about the builders or lack of money or just moan for the hell of it.

We've seen a little less than half of the hospital but as most of the rest of it was not accessible on this particular open day you'll have to wait until another year to see more.

In the meantime let's walk through one of the many little walled gardens and take a gander inside St.Helen's church, around which the hospital is clustered.

Being the church for the residents of The Great Hospital it probably has a bigger congregation than any other in the city due to its captive audience.

The vaulting and bosses of the Chantry Chapel are particularly lovely. They depict scenes from the lives of Jesus and Mary with the apostles around the outside and were carved by John Everard who was one of the masons working on the bosses in the Cathedral (take a looky here).

Above the altar hangs a copy of Raphael's "Transfiguration" from the Vatican, endowed by the owner of Geldeston Hall, a large country house I had the pleasure of totally restoring (one day I'll dig out the photos and scan them in … it's nice).

Mike calls this painting "Jesus on the Trampoline".
Hee hee hee hee hee!

Tomorrow - if you behave yourselves - I might take a wander with you around the scene in this last photo. That's the Cathedral on the left and St.Helen's and The Great Hospital on the right.
I'm standing on the riverbank here. The river swings in a big loop to my right around The Great Hospital and ends up the other side of the Cathedral. It's a great place to walk.

The Great Hospital, Pt.3

First up, I'd like to wish all my yummy, sexy, smart, funny and/or just plain odd blogpals an intercoursingly Happy New Year.
Here's to 2009 being less sucky than the shitbag of a year we got stuck with last time.

Now that's out of the way I shall continue boring the pants off you with my tour of The Great Hospital in Norwich.
Today we come down the twisty old rickety oak stairs from Eagle Ward and emerge in the delightful and romantic cloisters.

Although the hospital was originally a monastic institution (hence the cloisters) both it and the neighbouring Cathedral managed to survive the dissolution of the monasteries.
The Cathedral achieved this by becoming a secular college, a function it still carries out today with the Norwich School occupying the old monastic buildings but the hospital came under threat from speculators.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
The state to this day loves to privatise previously public institutions and leave them at the mercy of asset strippers and crapitalist profiteers and it was much the same in the Reformation.
Only the city's noble history of riot and righteous rebellion against royal greed prevented the hospital - together with the Cathedral, Blackfriars and St.Andrews - from the destruction that befell most of the country's other monasteries.

The city formed a Corporation (still going strong) and began a strenuous action to save these institutions.
Being at that time England's second city Norwich fortunately had the balls and the bluster to kick out the king and his crapitalist cronies and as a result all four of our beautiful monasteries are - as this one - still beautiful and unsullied.

In contrast to the pitiful accommodation in Eagle Ward, married elderly couples were given much grander retirement homes.
You'll notice a couple of doormats to the left of this photo. They are the front doors to two of the houses opening onto the cloisters.

In the dark on the right of this photo you can just make out the front door of my favourite house in the whole hospital.
The door with the light shining through it on the left leads to the Refectory, which we shall peer into in a minute or two.

This is the back half of the two houses on that side of the cloisters. What a wonderful place to live out your last years.
About a hundred yards behind me here is the river and just the other side of St.Helens' church is the Cathedral with the city beyond.
Thank goodness this place hasn't fallen into the hands of developers and is still going strong.

This is the east side of the cloisters with offices behind the wall on the right.

And here is the north side with those two fabulous houses opening into the cloisters. I can only imagine the sheer joy of stepping out of your door every morning to take a stroll around this beautiful secluded little paradise.

This is the view looking left from where I was standing in the last photo. It is a tiny place and far less grand than the Cathedral cloisters but much, much nicer to spend time in.

The west arch leads from the cloisters to the Chaplain's House courtyard and St.Helen's House beyond.

Before we leave the cloisters let us peek in through the door of the Refectory.
One of my old jobs was the restoration of the minstrels' gallery you can see at the top right. For my sins I also put in the fire escape door underneath it.
The place is still used for meals so safety regulations state it needed yet another door. Sigh …

Here's some more of it. What a great place to have dinner, eh?
To put it into perspective for my Colonial friends: this room had already been the Refectory for almost two-hundred and fifty years by the time Columbus set sail (and three-hundred and twenty-one years before those pesky puritan "pilgrims" took their fundamentalist bigotry and intolerance and smeared its poison over the New World) and it is still in daily use.

Leaving the cloisters via the west arch we reach the courtyard and the lovely Chaplain's House. The house on the left is divided into more fabulous retirement homes.
Much as I like the Eagle Ward I would far rather live in one of these.

And this cute little house tucked away in the corner is The Master's House.
The Master of the hospital (there have been sixty-five Masters since 1249) runs the entire show and has one heck of a tough job as the whole shebang is funded by voluntary donations.
Good old Ray Kennedy (Hi, Ray) was Master for most of my time there, being replaced on his retirement by the splendidly clichéd batty barking madwoman "jolly hockey sticks" Dorothy North.

So we've seen the worst and the best of the accommodation offered by The Great Hospital; tomorrow we shall head off through this little alleyway to look at where most of the residents live these days and see some more of what Mikey and Dive used to get up to.