“It’s glacial…get my fur, will you?” may have been a line delivered by Maggie Smith in Gosford Park (recently re-watched, can you tell?) but it also sums up how I’m feeling, having landed in the UK just under a week ago to, among other things, enjoy British ‘summertime’.

We are staying in Gloucestershire in a house we’ve rented for a few weeks in the middle of a honey-coloured village called Blockley. When the sun shines, it’s beautiful:

But the most exciting thing for me are the local farms that sell bundles of freshly picked asparagus. I am sure there’s a more effective way of finding them (local paper, internet etc) but that’s against the rules; we just jump in the car and within a few miles spot something along the lines of this:

(usually only when we’re practically on top of the sign), followed by a less than ideal swerve in the general direction of the arrow and hey presto…

There’s an honesty box in the middle of the table (£3.20 a bunch) and you just help yourself.

Throw into boiling salted water for a minute or two and serve as a starter with lashings of butter and flakes of coarse sea salt, no cutlery required (my mother is a walking Debrett’s: sans knife and fork is officially the way to go when eating asparagus…but who cares, they are so good you can’t get them in your mouth fast enough – a knife and fork would just slow you down – which is reason enough for me).