A Different Cheese To Try

 I came home from a visit to YD and EGD via the Co-op in Debenham for the locally made  Lane Farm  sausages and while I was there looked at their range of 'artisan' (that just means expensive!) cheeses, to try something different.

Choose this smoked cheese from a producer I'd not heard of .

After googling I found they'd been around for 25 years...

I love cheese, any cheese, and there hasn't been a cheese I've tried in the 19 cheese tasting posts that I've not liked at all, but I'm afraid this one really wasn't good. Has to be eaten rather than thrown out but it's hard with an odd after taste.

Aldi don't have their multi grain crackers/biscuits that I used to get so I got these Salt and Pepper ones and goodness they really are peppery which is good as it overpowers the cheese!

Books Coming in 2027

 I was excited to find Jacqueline Winspear - author of the Maisie Dobbs stories - has a new book being published next year, three years after writing the final Maisie Dobb story. I added it to my list to reserve at the library next year. It's titled ' Charlie Bright' and should be published in March. Hopefully the start of a new series.

Already on my list are several other books by favourite authors due.................

Sally Smith's third book in the Trials of Gabriel Ward series - A Case of Fear or Favour is due in January

Chris Nickson has a new series starting in February

Tim Sullivan has 'The Baker' due in April, another George Cross book

Anthony Horowitz has 'The Vanishing Jury' also due April this is in his Horowitz/Hawthorne series

A New-to-me author, Sarah Hilary, has the second in a series due to be published in April

Jane Thynne's new book 'The Woman with No Shadow' is out in May

Alan Parks has the third in the Joseph Gunner series due in July

Rachel Hore has a new book due in June 2027 'Song for a Suffragette'

The third book by William Shaw in the DS Eden Driscoll series is being published in July 2027

Tracy Chevalier's new book 'My Name is Agnes' is due in September

and in October next year Ann Cleeves is publishing ' The Final Vera'

St. Luke's Day

Tomorrow, October the 18th, is St Luke's Day (unless you are reading this on Sunday in which case it's today and if you are reading any later than Sunday - it's gone already!) and in the books of weather sayings they always mention St. Luke's Little Summer. This is a spell of warmer, dry days that often occur around this time. As October 2026  has, so far, been warm and mainly dry anyway this won't be much of a change this year.

 Below is the illustration from the  St Luke page of the Calendar Of Saints book. The description says mosaic in S.Vitale, Ravenna.

St Luke is the patron saint of physicians and artists and wrote his own gospel and the Acts of the Apostles. He is thought to have been a doctor and went with St Paul on one of his missionary journeys. He might have been a Greek Doctor from Antioch or an Hellenic Jew (combining Judaism with Greek Culture).

Luke's gospel has some stories from the life of Jesus that don't appear in the other gospels even though it's known that he didn't witness the work of Jesus himself. It's thought he lived until aged 80+ before dying in Greece.

Luke was often in religious pictures accompanied by an ox with horns and this led to fairs being held on his feast day called 'Horn Fairs'. A notorious one was in  Charlton in Kent, where the parish church is dedicated to St Luke. Horns were the theme, there would be horns for sale and merchandise made of horn and people would wear horns on their heads. People found the wearing of horns very amusing because of their sexual link. The crowds flocked to this fair until it was condemned for it's rudeness and indecency and eventually in 1872 it was banned.