A couple of weeks ago, I spent the weekend in the company of some old school friends (not to mention various chickens, ferrets and cats) at one of our number’s rather gorgeous and very spacious Georgian/Victorian house. Well, with 3 acres, it’s more of an estate really and all of the vegetables we ate for dinner we’d picked fresh from the kitchen garden. If that weren’t enough to elicit envy admiration, her kitchen is bigger than my living room. I wanted to move in! (My DH kindly offered to parcel up and send the dog and Ebay the children).

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On the 6th of July our family grew by one member. He’s affectionate, playful, a bit smelly and surprisingly hairy. No, I haven’t had DS cloned, we’ve adopted a dawgie 🙂

He’s called Dexter*, he’s between 8-10 months old, so still a pup, a Pointer cross with probably some Doberman in him judging by the colouring and he’s completely and utterly lovely 🙂

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Sometimes, you get a day from hell. Sometimes, it’s a week and, if you’re really unfortunate, longer than that. Days when everything seems to go wrong, all your efforts are thwarted and frustrated, and every bit of good news is swamped by a relentless stream of guano until you think your head is going to explode.

My week from hell began last week a couple of weeks* ago on Monday when, whilst clearing space for DD’s new bed in her room, I was almost swept away by a massive (and I do mean massive) pile of sweet wrappers hidden in the corner. She had clearly been “posting” them there over a lengthy period (or at least I sincerely hope it was a lengthy period) in order to hide the evidence of her contraband. I’ll spare you a photo. Exhausted from lugging her new bed back and into the house, dismantling and carting out the old bed and tidying up (I must have easily done a hundred trips up and down the stairs. Hot, sticky and utterly dismayed by the wrapper spectacle, it was all I could do to stop my head exploding. The vacuum cleaner was less resilient and gave up in the face of it all by turning itself off and refusing to have anything to do with the business for an hour. Not a great start to the week, particularly in light of DD’s scant appreciation of my efforts, not to mention the persistent getting underfoot to “help” put the bed together. No work done.

*It’s been a hectic couple of weeks with one thing and another so this post took rather longer to get out than anticipated

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Waddya mean those aren’t horses?

I used to be quite good at picking the winners in horse racing. My links to horses and racing go waaaay back to when I used to ride along with them, they being on the TV and me being on my rocking horse. I rode real horses from the age of 7 until teenager-dom made it a bit uncool. Then later, at my first job, I would watch the racing while waiting for the backups to finish on Saturday afternoon, deftly (and almost always correctly) marking the winners in whatever tabloid I found had been left behind in the office. I never put money on the races (betting shops were very much the preserve of grubby, tobacco stained giffers in dirty macs as far as I was concerned), the uncomfortable exception being when I braved the seediness to put a small bet on the Grand National…oh, and a trip to the racecourse. Of course, I never won if there was money at stake. Perhaps the money aspect clouded matters so that I just didn’t trust my instincts or perhaps I’m just not lucky that way. That said, I am pleased to report that I have definitely backed one winner: today is the 21st anniversary of DH and I getting together and it’s out 19th wedding anniversary next week 🙂

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I have just returned from a weekend trading at the St George’s event at Wrest Park and I couldn’t have wished for a better start to the season. Wellies were left at home and there was this wonderful, shiny, golden ball thingy glowing hotly in the sky all weekend. I’m not sure what it was, (I certainly didn’t see such a thing last season), but I liked it a lot! It was mostly particularly welcome to thaw out from the overnight temperatures, which were minus lots. See the silver grass? That’s frost –>

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It was with a mixture of excitement and trepidation that we set off to spend the coldest, snowiest Easter week for years in the Alps North Wales.

You can see my confusion…

Llanberis pass

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As another Costume day at school dawns, you find me frantically putting finishing touches to the outfit and dressing the Tudor girl. Costume day has sometimes been a royal pain in the proverbial (particularly back in the days when you were only given about a week’s notice to frantically knock out a suitable period outfit), but on this occasion (and despite being very busy) I’ve loved it. Tudor is one of my favourite clothing periods (along with Medieval and Victorian) as it has such a variety of sumptuous loveliness and lots of interesting underpinnings and accessories. DD and I had lots of fun making and stuffing the bum roll and selecting pearls, trims and fabrics for the outfit. Sadly, I didn’t have time to make her a penner for her quill and ink, but we managed the rest of the outfit just about in time.

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I don’t make New Year’s resolutions. It seems rather bizarre to me to suppose that my will and determination would be significantly stronger on any given date over any other. Neither do I see the point in waiting until the New Year to begin something – if one has already decided to do it, why wait?

The closest I came to a New Year resolution was to have a dry January, for economic and detox reasons to recover slightly from the excesses of the Christmas holidays. I admit I have fallen off the wagon to the tune of two pints thus far, (I made it six days, including New Year’s Day) I will not go in to the reasons, but I’m fine with them and still broadly sticking to the alcohol-free plan, despite continuing to be sorely tried by ongoing and, as yet, unresolved plumbing issues.

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I was at my school reunion at the weekend. It was…well, hard to describe unless you were there, in which case, you won’t need my inadequate attempts to explain the gamut of emotions. If, as is more likely, you weren’t there, I hope this may give you an inkling: it was amazing and comfortable, funny and sad, euphoric and exhausting, novel and familiar…I could go on with the contrasts, but I’m sure you get the idea.

Meh! you might think, it was just a bunch of people you probably lost touch with for a reason and won’t want to see again, but you’d be wrong. When we were there, it was a convent and private boarding school*. (Yes, that’s right, I’m a convent girl and I’m not a nun, make of that what you will).

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The weather this summer has, for the most part, been beyond a joke, even by this country’s motley standard. Three of my events this season have been cancelled due to heavy rain making the site a bog/river/lake.  Night time rain has traumatised myself and other survivors of Kelmarsh into lying fretfully awake in our tents, fearful of waking up to similar scenes of flooding.

We made it to Herstmonceux on the Bank Holiday Friday in good time and had the tent up and the trailer emptied before the rain started (to fill it up). We watched with growing trepidation as the ground assumed sponge-like qualities: water visibly squelching up as you trod down, and this was inside the tent. As it turned out, the rain did not linger and although it was most definitely welly weather on Saturday, the ground dried out nicely and Sunday was glorious, ending with a breathtaking view of the very starry, starry sky.*  Of course, just as we were packing up on Monday evening, it started to rain again, against all probability and just to be annoying. Naturally, now that I am not camping out and have started to write about the rain, we have wall-to-wall sunshine. It’s enough to make an atheist wonder if there is a god, who not only plays dice but loses heavily.

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