Yeti Snow Beast spotted in North Bucks

TV News crews from all over the world have descended in a frenzy on the tiny village of Brill and this most rural part of North Bucks has become a hive of activity.

The reason?  These mysterious, gigantic footprints were found in the heavy snow, followed by numerous reports of villagers being molested by a 7ft, hairy, black, inconsolable monster.

The North Bucks Chronicle have also done a front-page story on it.  Have a read, it's the most astonishing bit of journalism I've ever read, quite simply the bees' knees. 

You may recall the incident that occurred on Sunday chez moi with Gladys Grove.  Accidentally on purpose, Gladys was sent blindly - and as drunk as a skunk - into my 2nd floor airing cupboard where I'm currently keeping several bee-hives, mistaking the room for the lavatory.  You might think it a very odd occurrence to be keeping bees in a 2nd floor airing cupboard, but my only defence is that it's very cold outside and the bees like it in there.

Gladys, a confirmed apiphobic, was last seen making a bee-line across fields in the general direction of the town of Haddenham, some 7 miles distant, covered from head to toe in bees.  She must have lost her sling-backs in a ditch somewhere, which explains her footprints in the snow (first picture, above).

I've got to commend the work of the artist who drew the impression of this Yeti Snow Beast, envisaged from the many sightings around the county.   It does seem like Gladys Grove has once again made the headlines, for all the wrong reasons.  Maybe it's time to come out of retirement, Gladys?  The world clearly craves you.

I must dash now, as I've got to go and get my photo done as it's time to re-new my passport, in readiness for my embarkation on my 180-days Around the World tour.  

Toodle-pip!

Recipes with Yellow Snow

The weather is as bitter as gall here in rural England.  It's so cold you could freeze a rice pudding on your head!  A man with the whitest face and beetrooty marks on his bulbous forehead - looking disturbingly like Mikhail Gorbachev - is presenting the BBC Weather Forecast every five minutes pontificating that this is "the Beast from the East": a savage cold front raging in from Russia, taking no prisoners.  We've just had six inches of snow; with day-time temperatures peaking at minus 1c.  

My house, Raffles, is surrounded by 12-inch deep snow and the villagers of Brill are walking on the tops of hedges, like Elizabethan paupers heading to church for their dry bread roll and cheap mutton soup. As a punishment for my staff's insubordination, I've ordered the hand-servants to dig out the grand drive using only silver teaspoons so I can get my Rolls Royce out for a leisurely slut-crawl down to Soho, London, as I want to buy a set of sexy Chantilly under-garments.  If it's too snowy for the drive, I might take the helicopter!

Having grown up in arid Texas (where the annual average temperature is enough to flash-cook a chicken wing in the shade in just 5 minutes), snow is a gross novelty to Fanny: when it does snow, I feel I need to go out into the grounds, strip naked and roll around in the cold, wet stuff, just to see if it's real.  I'm amazed by the brightness of it.

However, on this occasion, I felt incredibly adventurous and decided to turn my hand to culinary creations involving another phenomena which I know jack-shit about, that is, yellow snow.  I'd never heard of naturally-occurring yellow snow, but apparently yellow snow can be found in many public parks and commons, especially around lamp-posts.

 
It is said that Eskimos have over 50 words for snow; conversely, us Texans, given our native, desert-like surroundings, only have one phrase for anything closely resembling snow: "ice cubes".

I don't know how yellow snow occurs or why, but it's out there if you look!

Now, Fanny has an exceptionally creative hand in the kitchen and when Mother Nature has turned the Great Outdoors into a vast refrigerator, there's no time better to go out and collect up indiscriminate amounts of snow, armed with an ice-cream scoop and a scrubbed-out old margarine container, and lovingly fashion the icey mush into extraordinarily-beautiful yellow ice lollies.  As it's yellow snow I'm lucky enough to scoop up, I really don't need to bother with food colourants like beta-carotene:

 
As you will see, my Press Office came up with the idea of printing on the ice lolly stick the words "Aunt Fanny's Yellow Surprise".  I do think that's a fitting description for what surely is a wonderful icey surprise.  Snow never lasts in England but it got me thinking about business entrepreneurialism.  Maybe I'll sell my lovely yellow ice lollies to Waitrose.  Goodness, they could do with a lift in their frozen foods section!   In the meantime, I've taken the four dozen yellow lollies I've made down to the Brill Womens' Institute. By the looks of them, they need something nice to suck on.

In true Blue Peter style, here's another one I made earlier.   I think, unfortunately, there's some sort of garden worm or bug caught in the ice, a careless but very minor oversight; other than that, it's a great-tasting ice lolly, made by the fair hands of Fanny Love and now for sale in the village shop for a mere snip at £22.99 (all proceeds to the registered charity, The Fanny Love Barbados Charity Fund):

Castle Combe - one of my favourite villages

This is a photo I took about a month ago, during the unexpected snowfall.  It is the village of Castle Combe, in North Wiltshire.  Dr Doolittle, the film, was shot here and it is often cited as the most beautiful village in England. 

Set in a deep wooded valley, with the Bybrook flowing through, the village consists of 15th-century Cotswold stone cottages, a turreted church, a stone-canopied market cross and a medieval manor house.  Although it is a good 1 hour drive from my home in East Wiltshire, I visit the village often, but for more debaucherous reasons:

He's one of my favourite toy-boys.   I always have a good time with him, coming back utterly exhausted.  He has just had another tattoo done, immortalising his favourite girlfriend - moi! 

Caviar in the Snow

(My home, Fanny Towers, hidden in the depths of the East Wiltshire countryside, England)

Snow fell heavily yesterday over the tiny East Wiltshire hamlet where I live; so much that my walled garden and servant's quarters were inaccessible under 6 feet of the cold, white stuff.  This meant my staff had to dig their way out, just to make my breakfast.  I cannot begin to describe the mayhem: at one point, Polly the scullery maid - she's 86, deaf, bent over double, with a face liked a whiskered walrus, black eyes and halitosis that could halt radio broadcasts - slid on ice and my breakfast, a boiled egg with Iranian Beluga caviar ($2,000 per pot), went crashing to the ground. 

Can you imagine her, on her knobbly knees, trying to collect tiny black balls of caviar from the snowy recesses of my garden using a teaspoon?  Needless to say, her P45 is currently being typed up.