At Burtonwood Services charging my car. Before that I went to Earlestown Post Office to post a form to the UK pension service. Parked in the market square at about 10:00.
Wandered about the town and took a few pictures. Judging by the town hall it must once have been quite a prosperous place.
Found a couple of charity shops, BHD and local one. The local one had a rail of clothes marked down to 1 GBP so of course I had to have a close look. And I bought a top.
Then I went to the Crumpet Café, Earlestown. Had a mug of tea and a sausage on toast.
I like the way it is furnished, lots of small booths. But my tea is only just hot enough.
The sausage on toast is reasonable and the whole thing is good value for money at 4 GBP. Cash only though which is a nuisance but better than the huge number of places in the UK that are card only.
The place could do with staff that are a bit friendlier and less slapdash though.
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In the Station, a café in the old station building at Irlam Railway Station. After the waitress had taken my order she introduced herself, Susan, and asked my name. I told her and she said 'Pleased to meet you Nina .' I can't make out whether this is something she does with everyone, or if there was something about me that prompted it.
Having a pot of tea with a scone, butter, and jam. Almost everywhere I have had scones with cream and jam on this holiday the plate has included pats of butter. Is this something specific to the north of England or a new national trend? It's certainly not how it is traditionally done in my family in Cornwall
@ninalanyon Delighted to see you prefer jam then cream. I've never understood the preference for cream then jam and, more importantly, how to put cream then jam without it enfing up as a mess.
@22Michelle I'm half Cornish. I wouldn't be able to show my face in Cornwall if I started putting the cream on first!
But I feel that it must really have started as a practical solution to the fact that English jam (don't know about Scottish) is typically set harder than it is in Norway, for instance. So as the jam is firmer than the cream the jam has to go on first or you can't spread it without pushing all the cream off. But if I could get clotted cream back home in Norway I might have go over to the dark side and do it the heathen Devon way because typical Norwegian jam is not set so hard, hardly at all in fact so spreading it requires less force than spreading the cream.
Even cheap Norwegian jam is typically on par with or better than luxury brands here in the UK; more fruit, less sugar.
On the subject of spreading jam and cream: the thing that bothers me most is in fact not the order of application but what it is applied to. Scones are an English import, the proper base for jam and clotted cream is a Cornish split not a scone. But they are almost unheard of even in many parts of Cornwall now. I once asked in a cafe, in Cornwall, why they didn't serve splits and the waitress looked at me completely blank, she'd never heard of them yet was not much younger than me.
