Virtual favourites
April 12, 2011
I visited a friend this morning. She’s a little incapacitated at the moment after a contretemps with her horse and some hard ground.
She told me that she has been enjoying reading our blog, particularly our travel tales over at La Vie En Route and has, with extra time (enforced) on her hands, been digging a little deeper into the world of blogging, even going so far as to have entered into correspondence with a lady way across the Big Pond.
It’s amazing what this little tool does, this internet thing. You can read the daily goings on of people far away, follow people’s travels, even keep up with what your neighbours are doing. I have made friends through writing this blog too and with my latest layout (it’s a little like rearranging the furniture in the lounge, it needs doing occasionally so that you can clear out the dust from the back of the piano!), I have deleted my blog roll so I thought I’d share with you just a few of my favourite sites.
Firstly food passions. Ruth Clemens on The Pink Whisk was runner up last year in BBC2′s The Great British Bake Off. Ruth’s baking recipes, mostly sweet but sometimes savoury have reignited my inner baker and inspired me to make cakes once again – something I used to do all the time when the children were small and before work got in the way. Veronica on La Recette Du Jour is one of the few bloggers I have actually met and keeps a usefully searchable blog full of all sorts of delicious recipes – from there you can link to many other foodie bloggers, and Kath at The Ordinary Cook a recent discovery. I do admire anyone who can cook lovely food AND take the time to photograph it and write about it!
My French favourites include Susie Kelly at No Damn Blog – Susie calls her blog a ‘pot pourri of observations and opinions’ which are often highly amusing and more often than not involve her faithful followers in follow up chats and comments. Susie has recently published her fourth book ‘The Valley of Heaven and Hell – cycling in the shadow of Marie Antoinette’. Sorry I’ve not yet read it, Susie, but if it’s as good as the others it won’t be long before I do. Jon at The Vendee Blog is a witty observer of French life over there by the seaside amongst other things, and of course the diary of our good friends and neighbours at Les Poissons En France is one we visit regularly.
Jon is an avid follower of Police Inspector Blog so that he can remind himself on a daily basis why he is glad to have left the service himself and hit the quiet life in rural SW France.
There are beautiful photographs on The London Nature Photo Blog and if you like music – especially jazz, you might like to try the newest blog All Jazz Cafe and be sure to click the link to download Steve’s podcast on iTunes – it’s free!
My thanks to Chris, on her crutches, for reminding me to go and have a look at some of my own favourite blogs past and present!
