Burns & Kindle

We were prompted by a promotional email to attend a Burn's Night Eve supper at the Shy Horse last night, an establishment which is part of the Vintage Inns family and which is said to be  'a country pub & restaurant oozing rural charm and rustic character'. I must say that the décor people from Vintage have done quite well and for a place which probably makes most of its money out of food, have contrived to maintain quite a pubby flavour, including warm beer (which I failed to sample on this occasion). Maybe it is the smell of the burning logs in the fireplaces which do it. Do they add the smell or does it come naturally?

Supper consisted of cullen skink (served with cheese on toast), a new version of haggis & mash and a pudding consisting mainly of cream and cherry jam, but with some toasted rolled oats stirred into it to give it the necessary Scottish flavour. Mistakenly served in a rather large green glass globe on a stem; it would have looked better in a simple bowl. All in all, not bad. Nor was the Châteauneuf-du-Pape with which we washed it down. Decided against Tallisker and settled for Jameson for a winderupper. We shall continue to visit the place from time to time, the only catch being that it is slightly too far away to walk, at least in the winter, so BH had to limit herself to one glass of wine.

Back home to watch another episode of the ancient BBC adaptation of 'War and Peace', which has replaced 'The Pallisers' as our standby for when ITV3 fails us. An adaptation which I quite like, despite not quite liking Natasha. Sometimes it works for me and sometimes it doesn't. Hélène a bit wooden - and not very attractive - one can't see the point - but most of the rest of the cast good.

Now once upon a time I used to pride myself on knowing the book quite well, but this is no longer true. I need to be reminded of lots of episodes, for example of the existence of Natasha's aunt. Worse still I was quite sure that it was Dolokhov who tried to elope with Natasha, and who subsequently took a lot of money off Rostov at cards in revenge for the failure. But the adaptation plumped for Anatole, with Dolokhov present but in a supporting role. Clearly need to check. Started to wail about if I still had hard copy I could turn the pages and soon find the scene in question. Not possible on the Kindle, now the home of my only copy of the book. And being a freebie from Gutenburg it did not have the sort of extended table of contents which would have told me where this particular episode was.

But I learn. On the off chance I try the Kindle search facility (which involves the not very good and rarely used Kindle keyboard) and ask it for the word 'elope'. Of the not very many hits the episode I wanted was second. I had found what I wanted rather faster than I would have with hard copy, the only complaint being that the BBC was right and I was wrong. At least I move on in the Kindle department; I'll make geek first class yet.