Day 33 Rest Day 5 Oxford

It was good to be at home. Annoyingly I awoke at 4.30 and only managed another half hour of sleep. Sue, on the other hand, having reached Plymouth where she is staying with another friend, clearly a more relaxing friend than me, slept until 9.30.

I was a bit dopey today. Couldn’t quite get my act together. Probably not helped by champagne mid-afternoon together with a cream tea. Not our regular Saturday afternoon pastime but some friends were taking us out for Matthew’s birthday -and mine when they discovered it was next week.

Observant readers of the blog will have realised that the lunch bought at Winford Community Shop (and post office) was left uneaten in favour of the sourdough toast. And by now, even the most inattentive of you, the ones that just skim the title and the pictures, will have noticed that I bought a pasty. In Somerset? Yes, this one was cleverly marketed as a West Country Pasty. So, let’s go. Pastry, poor. Too flaky, certainly wouldn’t hold up to being thrown down a tin mine, but to give it it’s due, it did hold up to quite a few hours in the backpack. Crimping, definitely Devon. In the middle and again, not very robust. Filling-I didn’t have a choice of filling so this one was mince and potato. Not bad, nicely spiced, but not as good as a steak filling. Overall-ok, but I’m not a fan of the flaky pastry and really nowhere near the top three.

And that, I think, is the last pasty review.