34 degrees

Set off for beach after early morn meeting and heavy dim sum lunch to ease out of jetlag with sunbathing and swim. Too hot for anything else!

Great eating and drinking in Hull...

Pub
Sabrini's... for great Margaritas and more tapas than you can eat
Ye Olde White Harte... for ghost stories and good real ale

Sub
The Last Word Cafe... for the best porridge and filling ciabattas, and as many books as you can read
Planet Coffee... hot chocolate with flake. Say no more.


Grub
The Boar's Nest... for a special night out, organic food from the local area served with class, and with Moet.
McCoys... for brunch in front of a roaring fire, overlooking Hull city centre
Hull Truck Theatre Cafe... for drinks and a cultured and enormous pile of delicious grub
Fudge... brunch in hot pink, on a peaceful post-Saturday night Prince's Ave. Perfect.
Marrakesh... moroccan grub, served with belly dancing (occasionally). Yum (the food, not the dancing).

We only do fresh chips here, love. Monday, 10.30am.

There's still snow here. Great big yellowed, week-old, once-was-snow, solid mounds of the stuff. Back your car into this, and it's your car that will come off worse (no, I didn't really, I'm just guessing). And it's COOOOOOLD. Thank God I live in Hull and not in Leeds - it might be a bit breezy down the Humber estuary, but its a fresh sea wind, not that icy shivering Pennines wind that makes you think of wartime austerity and foot-and-mouth. So I pulled into a little coffee shop for a warmup cuppa coffee before the 70 mile trip back to Hull. It's a cute little town, not far from the airport, and this is not generic all-looks-the-same England, oh no. This is real England, The North. Which explains perfectly why, as I await my breakfast, I hear the waitress explain to a young couple that they'll have to wait for their bowl of chips, because they only fry them fresh for every customer. Only the best, indeed. You can imply anything you want about obesity levels, but frankly, this is Leeds, not California, and up here you need the central heating. At least that's my excuse for a big sausage bap with my latte this morning. COME ON, who else hasn't been craving a big plate of bangers after all that chat about pork at the weekend? God, it seemed like everyone we talked to was reminiscing about how good Superquinn smelled last week when they were giving out rasher samples, or how tasty the Christmas ham always is, and we just know there's going to be a massive rush for the next lot that gets produced. So forgive me, but I bought British.

A brave new world...

So week One went well... the uni is great and my new colleagues are friendly and welcoming, and enjoy going down the pub - I couldnt ask for more, could I?
Well somewhere to live would be nice, and thanks to some early work on that front, I have found myself a fabulous house with a spare room for all my eager visitors!
The house is a mile south of the University, so a nice 15 minute walk along Newland avenue, with all of its greengrocers, butchers and bakers (sorry, no candlestick makers). It's a great little neighbourhood, just north of the city centre, and dominated by old Victorian and postwar redbrick terraces. And I've managed to satisfy my rather expensive habit of a fresh air cuppa in the a.m., with a lovely long garden lined with fir trees. Still, with my crack habit and casino visits receding, a girl has to have some vices.