Food thoughts

Expensive coffee beans bought online, or from a Special Coffee shop, seem to be sort of dry, sometimes almost a bit dusty-looking, sometimes even a little shrivelled.  But supermarket coffee beans are fat, round and near-black and rather beautifully shiny.  Do they wax or oil them to improve their appearance or storage abilities?  Are fat coffee beans cheaper than little wizened ones?

Why are wheat and oats and barley eaten only when ground or squashed, when other seeds are eaten whole?  Is ground seed less allergenic than whole seed, or is it that 'nut' is shorthand for 'a kind of seed that contains some particular allergenic Thing'?

Fire-dancers in a cavern

We went to the 'Best of Bodmin Moor' organisation AGM this evening.  I  have attended a few AGMs now and again, but this was the first one that was held in the vast cool candle-lit cavern of an old slate mine.

It turns out that ten degrees centigrade is the perfect temperature for such a meeting, and candle light is the perfect lighting.  Nobody can read documents, there's no internet and no powerpoint, and the chill encourages an admirable brevity to the proceedings.  Also, if you get bored with the speakers, there are bats to watch.

After the AGM bit there were fire-dancers juggling, shadow-fighting with swords of flame and a girl twirling inside a burning hula-hoop to the sound of a live band, which included a skinny lad with enormous hair who played the washboard.

After that, we all put on hard hats and descended into the UnderCavern to see illuminated pools, coloured a delicate clear green from the reflective mica in the slate.

Really, the only minor disappointment to the meeting was that we arrived late (due to fog coating the roads like the ghost of cotton-wool), and thereby missed the mulled wine and our pasties had gone cool.