Crabby rooks, Steve Martin, Chilean guava and the best baked potatoes

Abundance: Tuesday 1 October

South east Cornwall in autumn. The sky is dotted with screeching buzzards and scratchy rooks, while below, a seascape of alternately calm wide blue and simmering grey-green claws at the land. It’s been a week where the weather gave a little of everything: it rained heavily, sunned intensely, blew impressively. We took the best for walking; the worst for reading, drinking excellent coffee¹, visiting a subtropical garden² (grateful for its natural overhead protection), and eating the best of pasties³.

Much of it was spent with my wife like Father Ted and me like Dougal, with her trying to bang into my thick head the difference between a crow, a rook and a jackdaw. We didn’t even get to ravens.

In much the same way I still have to imagine a compass to remember which is west and east, I turn to the old rhyme - a crow in a crowd is a rook, a rook on its own is a crow - and I know jackdaws are the smallest, but by the time I’ve remembered the rhyme⁴, whatever the feathered thing was has moved on.

Below, for paid subscribers, more words and an excellent recipe for Twice baked potatoes with rosemary creamed leeks and smoked paprika