Big Apple

"... life in the big apple moves very fast and so must you'  or so we were led to believe by the Classic 80's band, Kajagoogoo, late in 1983. Of course they were waxing lyrical about New York City, a city so good "they" named it twice. Quite why the the greatness of a city warrants random renaming by invisible forces is clearly a deeply kept secret known only to a few Mafia related crooners. 

If that were the case then the world has a long wait for the concept of Auckland Auckland, with our appalling infrastructure...

However if the suburbs were to be accorded the same honour then Manly Manly would be a certainty.

Our suburb is a real gem, and at the heart of that gem lies the local school. Schools of course being the epicentre of most suburbs, dictating everything from traffic flow and  house prices, to retail planning and bus stops.

So It was then with a fair sense of anticipation that we went to the school gala yesterday, rain lashing our faces as our cheap Chinese umbrellas imploded with just a soupcon of  wind.  How typically British! At least it wasn't going to rain on someone's parade, there being no parade.  It was like being back in my nostalgia train on the way to my childhood and the many school fetes that I enjoyed as a kid.

The playing fields were filled with various stalls and attractions  including a pony ride, facepainting, tombola, bouncy wet castle , quoits and the usual plethora of fund raising activities.

The book and cake stalls were heaving as citizens of Manly collectively ambled and buzzed from  stall to stall with varying levels of interest and participation  We bought several books and lingered over the plant stall before attacking the cake stall in earnest, strategically hovering near the hidden treasure of an unmarked carrot cake, which of course out trumps all the other lemon cakes, fruit loaves, chocolate sponges and the massed ranks of the ubiquitous cup cake.  Luckily no-one had let the cake out in the rain, for I would hate to have to bake it, it clearly took a while to make, and besides that I was not aware of the recipe. It was then I remembered that I was in Manly Park, not Macarthur....

.We departed with our treasures, not before stopping at the toffee apple vendor, apples all a glistening, wooden sticks upright, like a Parisian nightclub revue chorus.

I have never really eaten a toffee apple (well not a whole one), only ever having toffee strawberries last year.

So it was a revelation to start to eat one, the crisp toffee cracking and splintering to my bite as I crunched into the apple.

Would the apple count as one of the 5-a-day we are supposed to eat to keep healthy, as I guiltily slurped on the toffee.

I don't think I could eat 5 toffee apples anyway, it took me 2 days to finish it off. It was so big that I decided to saveit until later, and deposited it on a saucer in the pantry. Rather amusingly the toffee had melted in the high humidity and I had to resort to a knife and fork to finish it off!  It was a very big apple, after all.