R&R

I thought the best way to get back into this is to blog if not every day, then every couple of days, until it feels second nature again!

Today has been pretty lazy so far, I should explain. I gave up my job and the number one priority was and is to rest. Basically since we lost mum, we haven't stopped. Even rare time off has been filled with guests and activities, which has been great but we both basically got quite ill where we've been so exhausted. So, I left my job last week, and this week and next are rest weeks. I can do a bit of housework, run some errands, but not too much. And when I get bored and frustrated, I remember that the goal is to be strong and healthy again, not exhausted and ill!

This morning, I've been updating my diary with all our upcoming travel arrangements. We have a lot! And partly that's because we're trying to protect ourselves...

After you lose someone, you face a year of firsts; their birthday, Christmas, mother/father's day, your birthday etc., etc. so for mum's birthday which would have been November 5, we're off to Bath for three days. I chose Bath deliberately. I went a lot with mum and it's a city we both loved. And for Christmas, I didn't want to be with other family and I didn't want to be at home, so we're off to Wales for 8 days. Just to do something different. And then there's visits back to London and we're off to Venice early next year as well. I figured I needed to update the diary seeing as it's getting pretty busy again. We also need to fit in remodelling our bathroom sometime in Oct or Nov.

Even though I am taking time off - probably 2 or 3 months - I won't be completely idle. I plan to learn BSL and Italian, finish the book, do all the jobs that need doing around the house and possibly even get some sheep in partnership with a friend. So I'll be keeping fairly busy! Oh, and hopefully blogging too!

This weekend, we're off to the Cornwall Food & Drink Festival in Truro and hopefully, we're both finally well enough to take the kayaks out!

Back to blogging...

Well, I'm back...

It has been over a year since I last posted. And in that time it's fair to say a lot has happened. The most devastating is that I lost my beloved mum to cancer on June 1st, 2010. I'm not sure I'll talk much about that on here. We are still struggling to come to terms with her loss. We miss her everyday and I suspect people think we've doing OK, which on some levels, we are. But the agony of her loss - so unexpected, so unfair has ripped a huge hole in our lives which my wife and I are inexpertly trying to pull back together. She was a truly remarkable woman, that personified dignity, grace and bravery. And to be honest, there's nothing I wouldn't give to hold her hand again.

We are still in Cornwall. So settled it's hard to remember living anywhere else really. We are getting a new bathroom and woodburner soon and re-decorating. We are very lucky to get lots of visitors! And friends have been quick to show their love and support since losing mum, which has meant the world to us. We celebrated our 2nd wedding anniversary with 26 friends in a local pub and over the course of just under two weeks, had 18 people visiting and staying - it was mad but fun!

The dogs are happy and healthy. Currently curled up at my side and on my feet.

My wife works locally now. She was working in London for 11 months after we moved down. She now works for a south west organisation that does cover the entire south west (flipping large region that!). But it is better than commuting into London.

I have just given up my job! Not many people I guess would do that without another job to go to, but it was the right decision for me. I plan to write, rest, work around the house, and when the time is right, get another job.

I'm just under half way through a children's book, one of the reasons giving up work. I just didn't have the energy to work and write. I plan to finish that by the end of October... no pressure then ;)

So, that's if for now. Until the next time....

Featherdown Farms

We’ve just had a Featherdown Farm experience! We stayed at Knaveswell Farm in Corfe Castle, Dorset (an area I am very familiar with after having spent a lot of time there in my younger days).

I saw Featherdown Farms in Country Living – it’s basically, very posh camping. It started in Holland, spread to France and there are now over a dozen farms in the UK. The farms that want to become a Featherdown holiday have to fulfill strict criteria (including being a working farm), and all the tents are identical: 3 bedrooms (although the 3rd ‘bedroom’ is like a cubby hole that fits either one adult or two children), toilet, running water, wood burning stove, proper beds and an Honesty Shop where you can buy bread, eggs, milk, meat, candles, etc., etc. All of which has to be as local as possible. So as I said, we chose Knaveswell because I really wanted to take my wife there and show her what a beautiful part of the world it is. I’m also a massive Famous Five fan and Corfe and the Purbecks are known as Blyton country with the castle allegedly providing inspiration for Kirrin Castle.

The farm is a dairy farm and you’re welcome to go and watch the cows being milked which further adds to the experience, and on one of the days we were there, you could hand feed young calves. There were also pigs and chickens and you could help yourselves to eggs.

Our stay was Monday to Friday and by chance, we had lovely weather. A little rain but lots of hot sunshine as well! The tent was fantastic, but we were particularly taken with the wood stove as we plan to buy one before next winter. The beds were really comfy and having a toilet in the tent is fantastic! (There are showers available but these are shared, just like a traditional campsite). To get to our tent we had to walk through a small woodland of bluebells. We were surrounded by trees and hills and the birdsong, including owls at night, was amazing. After milking, the cows would amble up to the top field next to our tent and would low to each other until they all settled down for the night. At night we would light the oil lamps and candles and read or play gin rummy (I wasn’t very good!). And because there were no artificial distractions like TV we ended up going to bed early, sleeping really, really well and then getting up early, too.

By day two we already felt like we’d been there for a week which was glorious because we relaxed so quickly; the dogs, too. They loved being out and about with us all day and curled up by the fire all night.

We visited Studland beach, the Monkey Sanctuary, the Tank museum, the Swanage Steam Railway, Lulworth Cove and Kimmeridge. We found the best place to have breakfast in the whole of the Purbecks and ate cream teas and lots of icecream. The farmer lit the bread oven on the Wednesday and we bought pizzas which literally cooked in 2-3 minutes because of the heat of the oven. And they were so delicious that I ate mine too fast and got hiccups!

It really was a lovely holiday and because you pay in advance for the whole thing, you didn’t get a nasty bill at the end of the holiday! (Although you do have to settle up your Honesty Shop bill). We would thoroughly recommend choosing a Featherdown holiday. And as much as we would love to return to Knaveswell, we will probably choose another farm next time and go to a part of the country we’ve never been to before.

We’re still really relaxed and have even got a bit of a tan! I’m not back till work until Thursday and my partner is off all week. It was lovely to come home again, and the weather is fantastic here, too. Today we’re off to the beach and having lunch out.

The next two weekends we have friends and family staying!

Good guests, good times

It’s lovely having guests. And good guests bring out the best in you. I think our hospitality is very good. We cook good meals, offer good wine, and hopefully good company, too! We have three very dear friends staying this weekend and so we cleaned the house top to bottom, and put fresh flowers in both of their rooms and my wife, in particularly, has excelled herself with her cooking! Homemade chilli and flour tortillas on Friday, pancakes with fresh fruit salad for breakfast (we went out for dinner), and this morning I am doing one of my special breakfasts. I like to do a full English but with homemade bread, grilled organic bacon, homemade potato scones, and of course our own eggs (preferably home grown tomatoes, too, but it’s a little early and we still only have seedlings!). Later on we’ll be having freshly baked scones with clotted cream and fresh berries. We’ll be sending them home about five pounds heavier! But it really is fun. Getting out the good towels, making up the beds, laying the table and lighting the candles... I think guests help you appreciate your own home sometimes. And I like the ritual of airing the rooms and putting in flowers, it’s a bit 1950s maybe but our friends seem to like it...

Yesterday we went to Polperro and Looe, and walked the dogs at our usual place, Golitha Falls. Today we’re off to the Hurlers, an ancient stone circle up on the moor. And then sadly, the guys will be heading home. I hope they’ve had as good a weekend as we have!

Where to start...?

Well, I’m back. There’s too many exciting things happening not to blog! I may not be back to my daily digest, but I will try and do a couple of entries a week and see how it develops...

So it’s March and it feels like summer. The weather is gorgeous; not just bright and sunny but warm, too. A taste of what we have in store this summer? I certainly hope so because we have lots of exploring and walking we want to do, and doing it in glorious weather is always so much more fun. The nice thing about the unexpectedly nice weather is we get to do stuff when Cornwall is still quiet and not crawling with tourists (some places are literally transformed in the summer with the amount of people that arrive). So we can wake up and if it’s a beautiful day rather than have to drive miles to get somewhere, we’re pretty much already there!

The cottage is coming along really well. (The new Elfin Cottage sign arrived and has been put up inside, so as not to confuse the postman!) Yesterday the Plymouth lovelies gave up a day to help us paint the dining room and bathroom and it looks great. (I was actually excited to come downstairs this morning to see it!) We choose Willow Tree for the dining room (a light, creamy green) and corn silk for the bathroom (a soft, but still bright, yellow). The girls and my partner were great; working hard and taking lots of care. I was floating support! I can’t stand for too long, which does make me a bit useless for painting! Although I did manage to clean some walls, do the understairs wood and finish off cutting in on part of the wall so I did feel I was some help. I was also chief cook and bottle washer and did hotdogs for lunch (with chocolate pudding for afters) and roast chicken and salad for dinner with my partner making some homemade rolls as well. And I got people drinks when they needed top-ups. And in between all this I even managed to watch the rugby!

We will paint the rest of the house, but probably stick with the pale cream we have now because it really shows off just how sunny the house is. But for now, we wanted to just do a couple of rooms to really make the place our own. Anji put together our new chimenea which we lit (not very successfully!) last night so we could eat our dinner on the patio. It turned out to be a little ambitious as although the days are warm, the nights are still very cold.

Next weekend, we need to install some fencing as Pluto keeps jumping into our neighbour’s garden! So it’s off to Mole Valley Farmers Saturday morning to get the panels to make the garden a little more secure. Which means I can leave them in the garden unattended so that Bess can sunbathe which she absolutely loves to do!

Our next big job is the attic as that’s where we’ve put all the as yet unpacked boxes. We’re going to plan a day up there soon, with a bottle of wine and a radio and will unpack EVERYTHING! We need to; we’ve already had lots of visitors, but in a couple of weeks, we’re having three visitors at once and will need both spare rooms.

Otherwise, the chickens are doing well, the dogs are happy, as are we. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever been happier or healthier.

Big breakfasts, narky dogs and unpacking boxes!

I went to my first Coastwatch training session last Wednesday; charts and plotting! Of course I didn’t understand a bloody word but it was still cool and I definitely learnt a thing or two. I have much more to learn, but that will come ‘on the job’. This was just an introduction. I also have a Tides course, Weather course and Radio course coming up…

Getting to Polruan was a little, shall we say, exciting? Torrential rain, freezing fog and a lot of unmarked, track-type roads that were as black as the inside of a witch’s hat… I was hunched over the wheel and actually praying out loud to whichever deity might take pity on me, to deliver me in one piece…

The people were lovely. I think it’s fair to say that I’m not a typical NCI volunteer! Only about 10% of watchkeepers are female, for example, and I was the youngest by a few years, but I was made to feel welcome and not out of place at all, which was really nice.

Our carpet has now been fitted! I’m now not tripping over a large roll of carpet in our front room and dining room (I’m tripping over dog toys or my wife’s shoes instead but that’s another story). We also managed a lot of sorting this weekend and felt quite pleased with ourselves – the bathroom looks great now and we’ve cleared the dining room table of all sorts of crap! But it wasn’t all hard work. We met our friends for breakfast again on Saturday, which was a lot of fun – and nice also to meet our friend’s niece and brother who are also very lovely so it must be in the genes. And on Sunday we took the dogs to Seaton beach and ran them (and us) ragged, before stopping off in Looe and buying a gorgeous hurricane lamp for the bathroom and a picture of St. Michael’s Mount (where my partner’s great, great grandmother lived), from a small gallery on the harbour. It really is a stunning picture and is going up in the dining room.

We did, however, have a bit of trouble with the dogs this weekend. As was to be expected perhaps, once they both settled down in the new house, hierarchies and boundaries would have to re-established. Consequently Bess gave Pluto a pretty hard time and we had to find a balance between not interfering in what is a necessary and natural process when two or more dogs live together and not letting Pluto be bullied. Of course, we also had to rule out that Bess wasn’t ill either. When dogs act out of character, two reasons might be either because they are frightened, or because they are ill. So this morning, without an appointment, we turned up at the vet practice that we were planning to register the dogs with anyway, and asked whether they could check Bess over. They were amazing and we got to see a vet within 10 minutes of walking in! We knew the vet was highly qualified and very experienced when she told us she thought Bess was absolutely lovely! She established that she wasn’t unwell and that the weekend’s hostilities were almost certainly all about the thorny issue of who wears the dog pants in our family...

Of course after all that fuss and nonsense things are practically back to normal anyway!

I hopefully have another Coastwatch training session this week and my brother in law is down for the weekend. It will be great to see him and he will be our first overnight visitor.

I wonder if he knows that when we said he’ll have to make up the spare bed, we weren’t talking about sheets and pillowcases, he will actually have to put the bed together!?

A weekend at home

We had a lovely weekend. It was exciting to come back from work on Friday and know that my partner was home. I’d gone to M&S and bought one of those ‘eat in for a tenner’ deals they do and I have to say it was delightful. Butternut squash and goats cheese lasagne, roasted veg, fruit dessert and a bottle of plonk. Of course, whilst it appears to be fantastic deal (the wine alone was £4.99 before the discount was applied), you never just go into M&S for one thing. And they know that, they know they are dealing with the weak, the over-enthusiastic and the greedy. Sadly I was all three and ended up spending not £10 as planned, but nearly £30. This is not just marketing; this is M&S marketing…

We ended up at Route 38 (an American style dinner on the A38) with some friends on Saturday morning, where we had a good old catch up (even though we’d seen them the week before!) and large and rather lovely breakfasts. Then we went our separate ways; us to see a clock maker. My partner inherited her grandfather’s long-case clock (circa 1830) but it had stopped working. The clock means a great deal to all of us and so we wanted it fixed by the best and in a tiny village in Cornwall we think we found exactly that.

He’s slightly eccentric, an impression not helped by the magnifying lens that protrudes from one of the lenses of his glasses, but also by his love of clocks – all clocks. Absolutely all of them – his ability to talk hind legs off of unsuspecting donkeys and his general world-weariness. He is a craftsman in a society that no longer values its crafts people. It saddens him that there are “so-called” clock repairers and restorers out there who do a lousy job and charge people the earth for the privilege. So he toils away, building on his reputation of excellence and often having to clean up other people’s messes. Anyway, we were completely enchanted and trust him to be able to sort out our grandfather clock – mind you, it’s costing us £300 to have it done!

I sorted books in the afternoon despite really suffering from this cold and ended up having a fairly early night. Sunday we did a big shop because I was getting fed up going out for lunch and paying a lot of money for manky sandwiches when I can make some lovely sarnies myself, and then we sorted the bedroom and most of our clothes. I was in bed by 8pm reading and keeping everything crossed that the cold would be gone by morning. It wasn’t… oh well…

Men are worse drivers than women

Yes you can disagree but I don’t really care...

I tend to do 80 in the fast lane; I try not to do over that. There is a reason our motorways are the safest in Europe. Yes, Europe. The whole of Europe. And that’s because our speed limit is 70. You may disagree and think it’s too slow and that somehow your man or womanhood is called into question by this outrage but again, I don’t really care. That’s the speed limit and even then, if the conditions are right, I'm going over that.

So today, I was zipping along at 80. I was doing 80 because visibility was good, as was (surprisingly!) the weather and traffic. As I came up quite a steep hill passed Plymouth. Maddy (my car) start to slow to 70 before she changed gear (she's an automatic), and I made the decision to swap to the inside lane because I could see that there was traffic behind me that hadn’t slowed – or hadn’t really appeared to. Before that happened however – some fuckwad decide to overtake on the inside and then the most extraordinary thing happened. He slowed right down, flashed his hazards and was gesticulating toward the middle lane. Now I thought he’d overtaken and suddenly lost power. Confirmed, I thought, when he virtually stopped in the fast lane. I indicated and then went to go round him. As soon as I was in the middle lane (and that had now snarled up as we all changed lanes to get out of his way), he suddenly sped up. Ah! He was trying to make the point that 70 was too slow and so had almost stopped his vehicle in the fast lane of one the busiest roads in Devon to demonstrate my own fallibility as a driver…

A woman would simply not have done that. A woman may have shouted, driven too close to make a point, she may even have gesticulated and shaken her fists. But she would not have pulled one of stupidest and potentially one of the most dangerous things I’ve ever seen on a motorway. The irony is, he then pulled in front of me and was going too slow and down the road I had to overtake him. As I did so we looked at each other and I indicated that he was a self-abuser and drove on without further incident.

There’s a reason car insurance for women is so much cheaper. Of course, as he probably couldn’t read or string a sentence together, that fact would have been lost on him.

On a brighter note, I’ve made some lovely sandwiches for work today!