campervanliving

I have noticed twitching activity on twitter in the last couple of days. A few people have posted pictures of swarms of starlings making beautiful shapes in the winter sky. Twitchers call it a murmuration. It's one of those most lovely of winter spectacles and is truly mesmerising.

If you are one of those kind of campers who say that camping isn't camping without a camp fire then you'll love what I've been testing recently. It's a Roadii Grill and I was sent it by Simon Benton, the man who developed it with the help of his family over the last few years. Simon, like me, loves to cook and camp and loves a camp fire but found, time and time again, that camp fires were banned from many of his favourite campsites because of the damage they cause to the earth. It's understandable. He also found that portable barbecues tended to fall apart pretty quickly and often weren't up to the job. So he set out to create a portable hearth that wouldn't rust out easily, would keep the fire away from the ground, would provide a good heat for cooking and could also double as a camp fire. The result is the Roadii Grill. It makes perfect sense to me as old wheels are great for cooking on and also make good hearths (I used to make fires in them on the...

Dan Garnett is a celebrity in north Devon. Having graced the telly a few times, contributed to a number of food books and made himself available to food festivals and events over the last few years he’s become a face of all that’s great about the region. He’s a local treasure. He’s also a fishmonger. So, if I said than Dan is ‘Dan the fish Man’ would that ring any more bells? Perhaps.

This is a silly song. It's a cautionary tale about the perils of processed meat that I wrote it when I was at art college in the nineteen eighty somethings (not a great time for the processed meat industry). Over time the lyrics have been refined (?) but the message is essenitally the same: if you can, make them yourself (like the example shown above that I made)! My kids love it because they get to scream in the appropriate places. If anyone fancies singing it for themselves it goes to the same chord sequence as the Stray Cat Strut (remember that?) which is C, B#, A#, G (in the bar chord of E). The chorus goes C, G, C, G, C, G, F, G. Which is a lot of the same thing and not that difficult. At the very least you have to admire the rhyming of creuztfeldt-jacob disease with knees, Es and trees, even if the accusation might be on very shaky ground (lawyers take note). VERSE 1: I wish I was a hamburger all covered in cheese. To be a Big Mac would be such a wheeze. An...

Last weekend I went over to Ireland to do a couple of demos at Waterford Harvest, one of the country's biggest street and food fairs. I even had time to make a quick appearance on Irish breakfast telly to talk about the festival on the Friday morning before my Friday night demo. All was good. The demo was fun - as it was outside the beer tent. Once the washing up was done I was escorted to Waterford's best bar, Geoff's, for a few pints. I spent the day on Saturday with Sally McKenna, who writes and publishes the Bridgestone Guide to Ireland. She took me kayaking to look for seaweed on a gorgeous loch not far from Skibereen. It was a wonderful day and I felt like a young apprentice in the presence of such great experience and knowledge. However things started to worry me when I woke up on Sunday morning.

La Bergerie. Small, friendly, level pitches, great location and very clean. Do you ever dream of owning your own campsite? What would you do with it? After our trip this summer I have been having fantasies about owning and running a campsite (before you say it isn’t easy, I don’t think for a minute it would be). This has resulted in a game we call “fantasy campsite”. It’s a very simple game whereby we go through and list all the places we have stayed and add their best qualities to our list of wants and needs from a truly brilliant place to pitch up. It changes all the time and can sometimes depend upon the place we have been staying, whether good or bad. Sometimes “fantasy campsite” sounds like whinging. But it isn’t. It’s about casting an eye over what we’ve seen, taking the best ideas, cutting out the worst elements and putting them all together to remake a campsite that’s just perfect. From that we can then work out where, of all the many places we’ve stayed over the year...

Contis Plage: free showers, washing up facilities, toilets and just 11 Euros per night. I can’t help but think, having just returned from 64 nights in Europe in our van, that we are missing a trick here in the UK. Or, more specifically, local councils are missing out on an opportunity that would improve our lives (as campervanners and motorhomers) and bring them much needed revenue at the same time.