England’s Bumpy Bits & Marmite

Hearing on the news a few days ago that Oxford researchers have suggested that high doses of vitamin B may help prevent memory loss, I immediately reached for the Marmite, which is certainly high in B12 and folic acid, though no one seems quite able to remember whether it has much B6. Perhaps a downside is the presence in it of glutamic acid, an excitotoxin, possibly implicated in various neuro-degenerative diseases, and you would also have to eat a jar or two a day to reach the B12 dosage levels of the Oxford trials.

But it reminded me of our week in Cumbria last month. Not that Marmite actually appears in the pictures on the web but Bob, who at 80 still very much has all his marbles was there and eating it every day on his breakfast toast.

Personally I don’t go for toast, certainly not at home where we eat good bread. Toasting is really a way to make cheap and stale bread palatable, and to inflict it on Linda’s fresh home-made wholemeal seems sacrilege. But Marmite has its place in my photography, or at least in my camera bag, in the sandwiches that I always like to take if I’m going out from home and would otherwise miss a meal. Being on a strictish diet (low fat, low sugar etc) makes buying food out a problem, and I need regular meals to keep blood sugar at reasonable levels.

So I can recommend curd cheese, Marmite and raw onion (thinly sliced) as a cheap and tasty filling for wholemeal bread sandwiches, although it’s a shame that Marmite – even in jars – seems to be runnier than it used to be. If you want to be sure about the B6, perhaps you should eat it with peanut butter, though I don’t fancy the mix and peanuts are too full of fat for me.

River Derwent at Keswick

The last set of pictures from Cumbria I’ve put on the web were taken on a walk to Keswick from a few miles north where we’d gone with the others on the holiday – including Bob – who as keen bird watchers they were going to spend a few hours not seeing the ospreys. We did stop for a minute at one of the viewing points but certainly weren’t going to wait for birds who couldn’t be bothered to turn up on time.

Most of the walk was pretty level, roughly following the River Derwent upstream, but the hills were all around us. I took a few pictures and they are on My London Diary (along with other sets under the label ‘Cumbrian Interlude’ covering the  Cumbrian Coast, around Wigton, and  Caldbeck and Hesket Newmarket, the home of Doris’s 90th Birthday Ale.)

Talking to a woman at the Horse Hospital on Friday we found we had a common view of the country. Her former partner had liked going for country walks and she hadn’t, clear grounds for separation. The real problem, as I said, is that “it’s all green.” Never my favourite colour.

Hills to the north-west of Keswick

It’s not really a good idea to walk to Keswick. Because you end up in Keswick. A tourist trap, though the churchyard was empty and pleasant enough and the Luchinis ice cream can be recommended, the only really good thing about the town seemed to be the view away from it. It’s a town you could walk away from with a happier heart.

Novelist Hugh Walpole’s monument in Keswick Churchyard.

All pictures with the D300 and Nikon 18-105 VR (27-157 eq), a decent single lens to take on holiday that covers almost everything. Incredibly cheap for a Nikon lens at around £200, it’s considerably better built (though not pro standard), optically superior, lighter and shorter than the 18-200mm which costs almost 3 times as much. There is a detailed review of it at Photozone (avoid the opinionated muppet elsewhere) which comments on it’s very high resolution figures and also the rather pronounced distortion and chromatic aberration.

This is presumably a deliberate design decision, as both distortion and CA (along with the inevitable vignetting) are readily removed by software – automatically when I import the files into Lightroom 3, though I haven’t yet got a profile for this specific lens and am using one that isn’t quite a perfect match. Overall I think this is probably the best value for money ever from a Nikon lens.