Pancakes & Valentines

Hi there everyone

Last week brought both Shrove Tuesday, or Pancake Day, and Valentine's Day.

A week or so ago, as Martin was going to be off work, I asked if he fancied nipping out for lunch on Pancake Day ... to one of our favourite places to eat, The Pear Tree Creperie, or if not, then did he fancy it for Valentine’s Day.

He started grinning and, him not being one for much in the romantic gestures stakes, surprised the life out of me by telling me he’d already booked it ... for Valentine's Day.

We both just love pancakes, sweet or savoury, we are not too fussy. We’ve eaten regularly at The Creperie ever since we met and we’ve never been disappointed so I was looking forward to a sneaky mid week treat.

It wasn’t the only romantic gesture he made. As well as a card, he bought me a gift. Not roses, jewellery or chocolates, but a six pack of hot cross buns from Asda.

You may laugh, but for the past three or four weeks I’ve been saying “let’s get some” whilst we’ve been doing the weekly shop but, we’re trying to be good, so we didn’t succomb.

So, it was hot cross buns for breakfast ... with real butter left over from Saturday night's dinner party. They were a real treat, I can tell you.

We decided we'd head out early and do a bit of mooching about before we had lunch so made our way to a local garden centre for a wander, though it was freezing cold and throwing it down with rain so it was definitely more of an indoor wander than an outdoor. I can’t wait till it’s plant buying time, but we have a while yet.

Then there was time for a quick stop off at at Blackbrook Interiors, a local place we discovered last year ...
On their website they describe themselves as ...

"An emporium of antiques, furnishings and furniture for your home and water features, statuary, animalier, architectural pieces for your garden and so much more."

It is an absolute gem of a place, and from the minute you arrive there is plenty to grab your attention ...

Inside there is room after room, stuffed full with antiques and all manner of other strange and wonderful things ...

There is also lots to be seen outside, out the back. It was far too wet and cold for outside today ...

... but we’ve managed to find a few bits here before. Our garden ‘spinny thing’ came from here last year ...

As time was getting on we headed off to The Creperie, which is situated within the Heart of the Country  shopping village. There was just time for a quick look in our favourite oak furniture shop and the French kitchen shop ...

... before heading into the warm 

We were glad to get out of the cold and the wet. The ambiance in The Creperie is always really lovely. It's toasty warm, welcoming and there is always a buzz, with traditional French accordion music playing in the background. Probably not everyone's cup of tea, but we love it.

We completely over indulged ... with seafood for Martin and smoked salmon with cream for me to get us started ...

... followed by the daily special of BBQ meat feast for Martin and my favourite ... mushroom strogonoff with cheese for mains ....

... accompanied with a bowl of mixed salad, just dripping in their own home made vinaigrette. Not that healthy, but a real favourite with us ...
We finished off with Nutella and strawberries, topped with Caramalito ice cream for me and profiterole, topped with Maple and Walnut ice cream for Martin ...

Washed down with a couple of ciders, we didn’t have much joy with the crossword but it was a really scrumptious midweek treat.

Fortunately by the time we were ready to leave it had stopped raining ... but it was still absolutely freezing.

It was lovely to get back home to the warm for an afternoon snuggled up on the sofa with a good film.

Safe to say, I’m still not missing working, retirement and this life of pottering is suiting me very nicely thank you 😉

Making me Smile ...

Hi there everyone

It's grey, wet and miserable here this morning and Martin is at work.

Whilst the renewed vigour that I seemed to find from nowhere last week, following starting to write down things that make me smile or I am grateful for each day, seemed to be hanging around, it's not quite so apparent this morning. Perhaps it's a weather thing.

Anyway, this morning's feeling of lethargy aside, I thought a post sharing the things that made my list over the last week might be worthy of inclusion in my new, more personal style of post writing so here goes ...

Food
If you know me well, you will not be surprised to find that food figured pretty frequently.

There have been home made soups, a Chinese banquet cooked for friends, new recipes added to our ever increasing list of favourites, hot cross buns and a meal at one of our favourite restaurants, which I will tell you more about later in the week.

Blogging
Having been inspired and re-energised by the discovery of a new favourite blog, Tales of a Happy House, I have spent many an hour reading through all of Gillian’s back posts. I was a bit sad to have finally caught up, a bit like that feeling when you finish a very good book.

Gillian’s blog inspired me to change things up a bit on my own Life of Pottering, which resulted in me posting three times last week, is it too much? I don’t know.

Anyway, not only did I post three times, I actually received comments, and not just one!! No, three different people commented on my Changing it Up post and two on my subsequent post about The Morning After. I even had a comment on my latest Will Sidney's War update. Thank you so much to those of you who commented.

Talk about chuffed to bits, I was over the moon.

My blogging mojo definitely seems to be back with all sorts of things inspiring me to write. Lots of, what I will call, 'everyday ordinary', but they are just piling up on my iPad, waiting for the right moment to publish.

The first signs of Spring
It has been so wet, cold and miserable for, what seems like ages and it was lovely last week to wake up to the occasional blue sky and sunshine. This kind of day really does seem to ‘lift’ me and I always seem to want to get up earlier and manage to get loads done.

After a bit of a slack spell on the housework front, over the course of a couple of days last week Martin and I managed to fully Spring clean the lounge, dining room, bathroom and one of the bedrooms and I even cleaned the upstairs windows, boy did that feel good. I think I’d forgotten how much I love being at home when it is at its best.

Having a mooch round the garden revealed the first signs of life too. Lots of green shoots and buds on show and the Hellebores and the Snowdrops are really putting on a show.

I love flowers and, whilst Martin isn’t one to turn up with a bunch, even on Valentines Day, having flowers in the house always feels lovely too. These were a gift from our friends Jackie and Phil last weekend.

Music
When Martin and I met we used to listen to a lot of music. Nothing new, I am a bit ashamed to say, we are both definitely stuck in the 90s and even further back when it comes to our taste in music.

Whilst we often will have the radio on, it’s been ages since we’ve listened to any albums and, no longer having a CD player, we’ve been trying to come up with the best way of making it easy to listen to our music more often.

We are not that au fait with the modern way of listening to music, by streaming or through Spottify or Amazon, and I definitely don’t want to be paying a subscription to be able to listen to my own music or for it to be interrupted with adverts.

Well, I think we’ve now solved our problem. We’ve uploaded loads of CDs onto iTunes and have downloaded them onto an old, old iPad. This, coupled with a bluetooth speaker that I bought Martin for his birthday a few years ago, seems to be working a treat.

So this week we’ve had M People, Tbe Beautiful South, Fleetwood Mac and Katie Melua on a bit of a loop.

Perhaps we do need to think about trying something a bit more modern, but hey, if it ain’t broke, why fix it.

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I don’t know whether it’s a coincidence or not but since I started jotting down the things that make me happy or I am grateful for I do seem to have achieved a lot more and feel a lot more like my ‘normal’ self. 

Not to say that I want to be running everywhere at 100 miles an hour, but I don’t want to be stationary either, so I think I’m going to carry on jotting things down for a while and just see what happens.

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How about you, if you are having a really lazy and lethargic period and it’s starting to get you down, how do you pull yourself out of it? I’d love to hear any ticks you have up your sleeve.

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Will Sidney's War - December 1918 - Re-engagement

Hi there everyone

I have been so remiss 😞It has been an absolute age since I've let you have an update on Will Sidney's WW1 story.

I last posted in June of last year. It was November 1918, the Armistice had been signed and Will was on a month's re-engagement leave, following a long hospitalisation in Italy with a problem with his neck.

Whilst on leave Will and Ethel finally tied the knot.

It's now time to find out what happened to Will at the end of his re-engagement leave.

You would be forgiven for thinking, with the Armistice having been signed, that there may have been little point in Will taking back up his posting.

Sadly, things were not quite that simple.

There were no entries to be found for December in Will's 1918 diary, but we have found this entry at the beginning of his 1919 diary.

Having read it through it just seems absolutely crazy to me that Will didn't get to see the 'MO' before he left England. Hopefully things are a little more efficient these days!

Will tells us ...

"Arrived Southampton 20/12/18"

"Left Southampton 20/12/18"

"Arrived Cherbourg 21st"

 "Left Cherbourg 22nd"

"Rough journey across wondering whether all is well with Darling Ethel. God bless her. Sent her 6 or 7 letters."

"Landed @ Arquata @ 11pm 26.12.18. Sent a card to Ethel."

"Writ to Ethel a letter with cards. Saw the MO the next morning, marked a medical B. Got put to. Sent a letter to Ethel telling her the good news. Writ to Ma let know. Very cold. No hot water bottle (God Bless her, Ha ha). Can't help but smile."

"Went into hospital 51 Section 28.12.18"

"Went from there to Genoa 29.12.18. Writ to Ethel from Genoa."

"Went from Genoa 51 Stn to France. Started @ 7.30 30.12.18."

"Landed @ Marseille @ 7.30. Stayed on the train until 1.30pm. Whilst on the train I ..."

 "... writ to darling Ethel. How pleased she will be to think I am so near home."

"Left Marseille @ 11.30 for Le Havre. Landed @ 4pm."

"New Year's Eve in the 57 General Station @ Marseilles and New Year's Day." 

You can see that Will writes of landing in Arquata on 26 December 1918. In his things we have found this card and I think we can safely assume it is the one that he is referring to ...

This set of cards was also with Will's things. We have no way of telling when they were sent but they seem to infer that the war is over, so it could have been about this time ...

So, it is 1 January 1919 and Will is, yet again, in hospital in France, waiting to come back home. Surely it won't be long now before Will's war is over and he and Ethel are re-united.

The Morning After

💜Happy Valentine's Day💜

Hi there everyone

I know, it's not a Monday ... I did warn you in my last post that you might start hearing a bit more from me, I hope you don't mind.

This Saturday night just gone we had very good friends round for dinner.

I've been good friends with the very lovely Jackie and Phil for over 35 years. I first met Jackie when I was working as a Saturday girl in Bambers, a ladies fashion shop in Tamworth. 

I remember one Saturday lunchtime, I was 17, going on 18, and there was a 'boy' at college that I fancied like crazy and Phil was away at university, and we nipped into Woolworths, yes we are going back a bit I know, and Jackie rang this boy and did the 'my friend fancies you' kind of thing and I rang Phil to do something very similar. 

Well, it was a pretty successful exercise as we did all end up getting married, though Jackie and Phil have lasted far longer than my first marriage did.

Our friendship has also lasted far longer than the Bambers chain of stores ever did. Just out of interest I googled 'Bambers' and they definitely must have been pre-Internet as I could only find the name of the company on a list of defunct retailers on Wikipedia, there was absolutely no other trace that I could find anywhere.

Anyway, I digress ... back to this weekend. 

Martin was working last week and I spent a leisurely Thursday afternoon trawling through cook books and recipes planning our feast.

I had decided we were going Chinese and ended up settling on a menu of Yuk Sung with ice berg lettuce to start, followed by gunpowder pork, honey and lemon chicken with asparagus and mango and Szechwan prawns, finished off with a Millionaires shortbread cheesecake, something I have been wanting to have a go at for ages.

Shopping was done on Friday ... and Saturday was spent, with Martin and I both in our tiny kitchen, chopping and preparing and bemoaning the fact that Chinese can’t really be cooked ahead, trying to work out a timeline of what to cook, and when ... and wondering why I hadn’t opted for a slow cooker dinner.

Fortunately it was freezing outside and we were able to avail ourselves of the ‘outdoor’ fridge as there was no way all of the prep would fit back in our indoor fridge as that was full of cheesecake and beers and wine chilling ... you know, the important stuff.

Anyway, all went to plan and we had a lovely evening, the food was good, the company even better and we even managed to drag ourselves from the dining table at the end of the evening to enjoy a comfy seat in our recently decorated lounge on our new sofas ... the first real time they’ve experienced company.

It was a fairly late night for us and we can never face a big tidy up at the end of an evening of entertaining. So, whilst we did manage to load and run the dish washer I knew Sunday morning would bring a necessary tidy up session.

As much as I am not the greatest fan of housework there is something I quite like about these Sunday mornings. It reminds me of an advert I saw for a furniture polish on the TV once, where a lady was cleaning her home and as she was doing it she was dreamily visualising what had happened to create the mess, so you got to see a bit of a rerun of a romantic evening in, with lots of sticky fingerprints on the banisters, which were being polished in the advert, as the evening ended.

There wasn't much to do in the lounge ... just straighten the sofas, cushions and throws, which came in handy for snuggling under as the heating went off and the house started to cool down and get rid of the evidence of a very non-Slimming World end to a fairly non Slimming World meal, though the starter and the mains were pretty much on plan ...

In the dining room there was the table to clear and candles to put away for next time ...

And in the kitchen there was a dishwaher to empty and definitely enough for another load ... 

Condiments to put away and just a few bits for the recycling bin ...

Oh ... and flowers to arrange. Jackie often will turn up for dinner bringing me flowers and these were just lovely ...

And not to mention the fridge full of leftovers ... Chinese mash up for Martin for Sunday lunch. Not for me though, I couldn’t imagine anything worse.

I’m not so fussy when it comes to cheese cake though. That was shared with mum and dad and went down very nicely indeed and it was definitely just as nice second time around.

I don’t think we will ever be the kind of people that clear up before we go to bed. Our friends are the opposite, they much prefer to have everything ship-shape to come down to in the morning.

Having been friends for over 35 years and entertained each other regularly for all of that time they know us well ... they were surprised to hear me say I was even going to load the dish washer before I went to bed, normally I am straight up the stairs and into bed before they’ve managed to walk to the end of the street (Yes, we live in very easy walking distance - how fabulous is that?) ... mind you, it could be because I hadn’t really had anything to drink so didn’t feel quite as sleepy as the rest of them.

What about you? Do you have to clear up before yo go to bed? Or do you also like that reliving of a lovely evening as you clear away the morning after?

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Clearly, there was just a little bit too much Chinese made for Saturday night as this managed to stretch out for Martin's Monday lunch too ...

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And my flowers look just lovely ...

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Thank you to those of you who took time to comment on my last post. It really made my day. After having no comments for such a long time, it was lovely to know that you are out there reading my ramblings. It makes it all feel a lot more worthwhile 😀