Buns & Roses WI

Once the business part of the meeting was done with it was on with the cheesy xmas songs, sampling the delights of the buffet, chatting and the making of suffolk puffs with festive fabric. There was enough buffet for us to take a plate of treaty goodness to the staff on duty at the Cosmopolitan to say thank you too.

A big thank you to all our members, guests, speakers, workshop leaders who have helped make 2013 such a success - and here's to 2014.

Details of all our meetings and workshops can be found at www.bunsandroses.co.uk and looking forward to seeing you at a meeting or workshop soon.

It seemed fitting somehow to be discussing Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen amongst the victorian splendour of the Tiled Hall Cafe. It's a good spot for people watching as it's between the Art Gallery and the Library. Northanger Abbey has a lot of people watching in it as well as being a pastiche of gothic novels - though alas none of us had read the novels mentioned in the book - most notably The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian by Ann Radcliffe so we can't tell you first hand how good a pastiche it is, but we can tell you it is wonderful novel full of people watching - each page packed with delicious detail of tea taking,dancing, gossiping, flirtation, misunderstandings, fashion, and of course romance.

We tried 6 different wines from around the world over the course of the evening. A couple of whites and three reds and he explained a bit about each wine before we tried it, where it was made, what latitude it was grown at and how long it took to ferment. Then he invited us to try each one and asked us what it tasted like - responses varied from 'a honeyed aftertaste' 'smells a bit like gooseberries' to 'tastes of sour wood'.

He also gave us some top tips winewise:

The sweeter the wine, the worse the hangover so if you are planning a big night out and want to avoid a headache then the dryer the wine the better

Cheap french wine is worse than any other kind of cheap wine

Roughly £4.50 of the cost of any bottle of wine is taxes so a £5 bottle of wine contains just 50p's worth of wine so an £8 bottle contains £4 pounds worth and that is something to bear in mind when buying wine.

Using bits of leftover wine to cook with isn't worth it as if it's not good enough to drink then it's not good enough to cook with.

There were lots of other bits of winely wisdom he imparted but I'm afraid by then I was so enthusiastically trying the wine I forgot to write them down.

You see we weren't doing anything as vulgar as spitting the wine out but drinking it down properly in a civilised manner so I'm afraid the evening is a bit of a blur but it did involve cheese and biscuits and of course WI loveliness.

5 of us met on Sunday to discuss Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg. As the wind picked up outside we sat cosily inside the Tiled Hall discussing how much we had enjoyed reading it - the scores ranged from 7 to 9 out of 10. Scores like that are high praise indeed.

We each agreed how vivid the voice of each character was, the delight of the excerpts from The Weems Weekly, Whistle Stop Alabama's Weekly Bulletin by Dot Weems, the delightful love story of Ruth and Idgie, the differences between the book and the film adapatation, our favourite bits - we all loved the trial scene and the part in which Evelyn takes her revenge upon parking spot stealers and which of the recipes at the end of the book we would try. We all wanted to be able to go the the Whistle Stop Cafe and to try their  Fried Green Tomatoes.

The Washington Post describes it as a 'funny and macabre novel' and we all agreed it was exactly that but it isn't just that - it is also a heartwarming tale of love, loss, friendship, cooking, understandable murder, outwitting of the Ku Klux Klan and the judicial system. It's an easy friendly read that doesn't insult your intelligence and it has made us want to read her other books.

We also talked about how to develop book club in the future - one thing we might do is instead of picking individual books is pick a genre, each read a book from that genre and then discuss the genre as a whole but for the meantime we decided we would again write names of books on pieces of paper and then pick one out of the bag. The book chosen this time was Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen and honestly I did not fix the choice - even though this is the second time on the trot it's been my suggestion that was picked.

We'll be meeting to discuss it at 2.30pm (a slight later start as that should give us time to recover from the Buns and Roses Party the night before) on Sunday November 10th at the Tiled Hall Cafe. They do lovely cake. It's the most  comic of Jane Austen's novels and is a parody of gothic fiction. Come along and tell us what you think about it - even if you haven't read it and just seen the film or the Wikipedia entry about it.