Odd

I haven't done an architecture blip for a while, but this newly restored house in St Laurent stopped me in my tracks. Somehow I find it hard to believe that the turret is original. It's all been immaculately restored/remodelled. Even to the point of creating a neat ventilated box to hide the aircon units. The garden is very nice too.

I haven't been to St Laurent for a while, and since my last visit it seems to have gentrified rapidly. This is not the only recently tarted-up house, and the council has spent  over 2 million euros redeveloping the site of the former distillery. There are two new restaurants -- one of them, in the former school, is kebabs and pizza, but the other one looks very nice and we've already had positive reports, so that's on our list.

I wimped out of swimming this morning; after last night's rain the temperature had dropped considerably and it was overcast and windy. I did return to the fig trees though, and with little difficulty picked over 1.5 kg of ripe figs. I happened to be Zooming with sister N yesterday evening, and she told me she'd made some fig chutney with the glut of figs from her tree. So I looked up the BBC recipe she'd used and made a double batch ... that still leaves me with over a kilo to use, and the trees are still laden. I can't vouch for it yet, but she said it was delicious and she was sorry she'd only made one jar as a birthday present. 

In other news, the Guardian had an article on what to do with a glut of figs which featured a single recipe that used six figs ...