Interlude We’ve been incredibly busy here recently, hence the reduction in my blogging output but I’ll be taking some time to bring you up to date very soon. In the meantime, a tale of an accident involving two of our holidaymakers and probably the World’s best ever thing to do with a bowl of strawberries.
The Accident: Just out the back of the private garden of our holiday gite, suspended from a sturdy horizontal branch of a venerable oak, is a swing, a large plank of sweet chestnut tied on with hemp rope, a choice we thought more environmentally-friendly than the man-made alternative. 
Swings are seductive, many are drawn to its pendulous charms and recent holidaymakers, Geraldine and Philip, were no exception. Unluckily for them, the natural hemp rope has not weathered well and suddenly lost its battle against gravity, plunging them earthwards at 32.2 feet per second per second: by my calculations, they hit the ground a third of a second later at just under eight miles an hour. Philip had pressed the shutter on his camera at the precise moment they fell, capturing the moment for posterity (see photo at top).
The first I knew of it was answering the door to a sheepish Geraldine apologising for “breaking” our swing. I gave her a tube of Arnica cream for a bruise on her leg and have reinstated the swing with some more durable polypropylene rope.
The World’s Best Ever Strawberry Recipe (probably): Maybe it’s a bit late in the summer to be telling you this but we’re still picking strawberries here so, hoping you have similar good fortune, here goes:
You’ll need some ripe strawberries (over-ripe are fine too) some sugar, Cointreau (an orange-flavoured liqueur) and vanilla ice cream. 
Wash, de-stalk and quarter the strawberries into a bowl; sprinkle over some granulated sugar and drizzle over some Cointreau. 
Leave for several hours, turning the strawberries in their liquor a few times and then serve with the ice cream. The Cointreau really lifts out every scrap of flavour from the strawbs. The picture of Homer Simpson serves as a visual metaphor of how good this tastes … Bon Appétit!
