Sometimes, we leave Karanja in her home port of Moissac and go off for a while. From what we got up to in August, here’s a trio of sister-centric outings, in the UK and in France.

While visiting my sister Dale and her family in Kent, England, she and I did a couple of day trips – first to Shoreham village and The Mount Vineyard, and then to Herne Bay. Then Roy and I went back to the Dordogne to meet up with his younger sisters Lyndsay and Cheryll.

#1 Shoreham (Kent) 

You have to specify Shoreham (Kent) because there’s another one – Shoreham-by-Sea in West Sussex.

Conveniently, the cute village of Shoreham (Kent) is just 20 minutes by train from Bickley station, which is just up the road from my sister Dale’s house.

It was just Dale and me. My brother-in-law Colin said he couldn’t think of a worse way to spend a day. Far, far away, on a boat somewhere in France, Roy was similarly unimpressed by the idea of a vineyard in Kent. “That’s hops country,” said he dismissively.

For sports buffs, a 1668 court case mentioned that cricket was played in Shoreham – one of the first references to the game. The place was also famous for smuggling, and paper-making was a local industry until the mill finally closed in 1925.

The Village

A short walk from the station took us to Church Street, and past the 15th-century pub Ye Olde George Inne where Dale had decided we would have lunch later. A pretty bridge takes you over the River Darent (above); the village also boasts Shoreham Aircraft Museum.

The village has an impressive four pubs, and here they are to prove it:

Ye Olde George Inne dates from the 15th century and has the low-slung ceilings to prove it. You could lunch alfresco, but we chose a corner table indoors. Lunch was pretty good: for me, beer-battered cod, green peas and chips; for Dale, a chicken Caesar salad. (Being sisters, we of course shared – more or less fairly.)

We walked up an ridiculously narrow lane in the direction of The Hop Shop at Castle Farm (Home of Kentish Lavender) – to our right, the lush Darent Valley – but turned back when I started whining. Later, Dale checked the map and said it had been “just over the hill”. (Oh yeah.)

The Church of St Peter and St Paul – described as a largely medieval church with an outstanding late medieval timber-framed porch and a very lively polychromatic 18th-century tower – has suffered various vicissitudes since the foundations of its chancel were laid in Norman times.

These tribulations include bombing damage in WWII – Shoreham was the UK’s most-bombed village, because the Army had taken over several manor houses in the area.

The Mount Vineyard

The vineyard is open only from Thursday to Sunday, and Thursday is perhaps its quietest day. We’d popped in earlier to book for the 3pm tour and wine tasting. (There was also a 12.30pm tasting, no tour.)

The menu is limited to charcuterie boards and pizzas. As for the tour, it was pleasant enought to stroll through the vines and check on the progress of the grapes, only just turning from green to red.

This is just a vineyard, not a winery. The harvest is taken directly to a wine-maker in Denby and comes back in bottles.

It is a lovely destination for a summer’s day, and the afternoon brought some warm and welcome sunshine.

Jessie delivered a generally entertaining patter, and with only ten of us in the group there weren’t too many annoying questions. (Unlike my sister, I’m not a team player.)

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Of the five wines we tasted (four from this vineyard, the other a rosé introduced for purposes of comparison), only the first was interesting: the sparkling red that we started with. But it’s £45 (!) for a bottle of the stuff if you want to drink it on site, and only five quid less to take away, so we didn’t bother. (What’s more, we’d got through several bottles of red at home with Colin the night before.)

That said, a visit to The Mount Vineyard is a nice day out from London, and vouchers for the experience (at £35 a head) make popular gifts.

Festive family interlude: half-Christmas in August

One Monday night in August, at the request of  my nephew Chris (he didn’t want to wait for December), we had a half-Christmas dinner.  (We coined the term with due recognisance to the episode of Friends where Phoebe’s Happy Days-mad gynae discloses that it’s the Fonz’s half-birthday.)

Colin did superb stuffed chicken and turkey on the Weber along with all the trimmings. We pulled the crackers that had been urgently ordered from Amazon, played charades at Chris’s insistence, and opened half-Christmas presents.

#2 Herne Bay, Kent, UK

One morning, it being an uncharacteristically  sunny English day, Dale and I took the train to Herne Bay on the Kentish coast, just over an hour from her home in Bickley. It was at least two months since I’d seen the sea – and it was lovely!

Roy loves an English seaside town in the cold and rain. (Or maybe he just loves the idea of it?) I don’t – I enjoy coastal villages, I adore the sea, but the weather must be reasonable.

Herne Bay ticks all the boxes for a proper English seaside town. It has:

• A long pier complete with funfair rides, a café and those silly seaside cut-out boards. When the original pier, the first of three, was built in the 1830s, it was the longest pier in the country before it succumbed to shipworm. (Google shipworm, like I did – they’re fairly revolting.)

• Tacky amusement arcades on St George’s Terrace, built on the site of 19th-century baths that were at the time the largest covered saltwater baths in the county! Also, tacky entertainment on the pier itself:

• An elegant Victorian clock tower, surrounded by more recent floor mosaics commemorating Herne Bay’s history.

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• A Seaside Museum whose highlights include a Victorian “What the Butler Saw” contraption, marine and other fossils found in the area, glamorous period posters extolling the delights of Healthy Herne Bay, and an exhibition of Giles and other cartoons to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the 1969 moon landing.

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• An old bandstand, today housing a couple of sun-drenched restaurants.

• Fish and chips at The Ship Inn, with a view of the pebbly beach.

#3 Saint-Geniès village, France

It was Roy’s sister Lyndsay’s idea to get her siblings together at her and John’s house in the Dordogne – Roy and me, plus Cheryll and her husband Bob. The focus was to be the last marché nocturne of the summer in Saint-Geniès – the night market that takes place every Wednesday evening during July and August. (Roy and I had had a great time there with them last year – click  here for that story.)

It’s a couple of hours’ drive from our base in Moissac to Saint-Geniès. As usual, Roy took the back roads. Somehow, the Garmin manages to take us by a different route each time, each more picturesque than the last. Our own Tarn-et-Garonne countryside is beautiful, but Périgord/Dordogne is arguably even more so. (For my 2017 post on that area, click here).

To market, to market

That first night, John and Lynt regaled us with snails, pasta carbonara and ridiculous amounts of wine. Next morning, the six of us dragged our sorry arses out of bed in time to get to Sarlat market to linger over coffee and pastries at a sidewalk café. While Roy sat and reconstituted his cells with yet another cup, I went shopping.

Here’s a sample of what you might find in Sarlat on market day:

Duck!

How wonderful it is that saturated fats like butter, lard, dripping and duck fat are the new margarine lite; and that grass-fed red meat, especially offal, is now so good for us!

Our meals at the St Geniés night market could have been improved by the addition of something green (at least for aesthetic appeal), but the pommes de terre Salardaise (potatoes fried in garlic and duck fat) with three big pieces of foie gras, or with duck leg confit or duck breast, tasted amazing just as they were.  The cost? €10 a plateful.

Lunch

For a traditional four- or five-course lunch in France, you don’t have to go far or pay a lot. And there’d certainly be no point in trying to cook it yourself – just find a restaurant that advertises un menu ouvrier, or worker’s menu.

This time, we visited Auberge le Roustigou, just a few minutes’ drive from Saint-Geniès village. (It was also not far from Auberge d’Imbés, where we had a repas ouvrier this time last year. Similar, though in a more rustic setting, I thought the meal at le Roustigou was even better.)

Again it comprised five courses (€15 a head, including wine):

1. Bean and vegetable soup topped with freshly soggy bread;

   

2. Salad of tomatoes and chopped onion with hard-boiled eggs and slices of tête de veau;

   

3. Roast rolled pork chilled, cut into thick slabs and served with hot fried potatoes;

   

4. A cheese board – Brie, St Nectaire fermier, chévre (goat), and another soft one rolled in chilli;
5. Dessert – crème caramel or tarte tatin (apple tart).

After a final night of drinking and reminiscing into the wee hours, the way only family can do, we waved goodbye to Roy’ sisters and their husbands and headed back to Moissac and the boat. Not before time, either – the liver can’t take much more than three days of these family get-togethers!