Disaster strikes.....but redemption taps in the rebound

March was a good month for eating pies, according to my records I had 19 of them. Good work eh? Well, yes and no.
I’ve probably alluded to this in the past but the way I operate when I go pie hunting is that I take a camera along with me to get a photo of the goods and I narrate my general observations onto the voice recorder on my phone.
The trouble is I’ve had no mobile phone for a week. My mobile phone is no more. It’s been away for repair.
Above - Stanforths of Skipton: where the pork pies are hot, greasy and AMAZING
 

Not only that my last back up was on Saturday 2nd March, a day where ironically I thought it best to do a back up as I was going out on the lash to a beer festival to celebrate/commiserate the passing of my 40th birthday and was liable to break or lose my phone. I managed to avoid both these outcomes but unfortunately last weekend my phone went kaput, corrupted memory card and corrupted data, it’s been at the 02 workshop all week and I’ve been walking around with the modern equivalent of a Motorola Flip. I keep pulling it out of my pocket, looking at it, thinking "oh I can't do nothing with this" and putting it back in my pocket.
Not only that, as I parked up last Saturday following a productive morning buying pies in Skipton my car conked out too. However, I’ve just about salvaged the tasting notes from that sunny afternoon, if not the photo of the pheasant stuck in a car radiator grill or the Otley Street “pie mile” shot only marred by the sight of a Greggs ominously placed across the road at one end. Gah!
All my own fault and I expect no sympathy. You see, I failed to do another back up in the subsequent period from 2nd March meaning that although I have most of the photos of all the pies I have eaten taken on the camera although some were also taken on my phone, I have none of the recordings: the ratings, the pie lists, the anecdotes. The last bit is the most important – with the best will in the world banging on about pies for 18 months and reviewing nearly 300 is going to get a bit repetitive for all but the keenest pie aficionados without some amusing anecdotes to lighten up proceedings. And I can’t remember them as my memory’s not what is used to be. I wrote a book in 2003 purely off memory and primarily the day after having 15 pints but that probably goes some way to explain why my memory is so feeble nowadays.
I had just eight pie excursions left to conquer when disaster struck, just 40 or so pies to complete this pastry based tome and this goes and happens.
So it seems like the only course of action is to re-trace my steps of the past seven weeks and eat those pies again adding another 5 or 6 repeat pie hunts to sample the pies which turned my head. Whereas the memories come flooding back to a certain extent, a photo alone doesn’t quite tell you the full story. Character, ambience, smells and most importantly of all the taste and that leap into the unknown when you step into virgin territory and attempt to capture the aura and aroma of the time honoured tradition of baking.
Of course, you can often get a very different pie from the same vendor – were the ones I felt to be too salty merely due to uneven distribution of the mix? Do they burn all the crusts or did they just give me a bad one because the pie girl serving had a hangover and wasn’t in the mood for some chirpy tosser demanding an explanation of every pie on the menu?
So I’ve some catching up to do to complete my quest but complete it I will do. Thankfully the furthest I had travelled in the past six or seven weeks was to the depths of beautiful Cumbria.
So watch out....Conwy, Barrow, Cumbria, St Helens and Cheshire. I’m coming to get you (again!)