Ta Dah!

The owner has collected and paid for her chair - result!
We are off to Dorset for the weekend and the forecast is rain.
I am still not getting proper typing etc. from this page so blogging has become somewhat of a chore: sorry!

Holiday highlights

Home is beginning to look loved: the house is vacuumed where it shows and the garden is deadheaded and mowed; there is still room for improvement.

There are spiders’ webs everywhere, in every corner of the house and across every path in the garden. I must be upsetting them, constantly walking through as they attempt to repair my previous work. I am followed as I work cutting down our long grass by a young robin who clearly thinks I’m doing it for him. He’s quite happy just a couple of feet from me grabbing insects and seeds, but he doesn’t like me to speak so I have given up trying to engage him in conversation.



Corfe Castle



Dorset was lovely as ever, a few new things to do and lots of revisiting.
A different view of Corfe walking 'home'.

the Red Arrows - really!

View from the pub



Pythouse Kitchen Garden for a coffee

The Red Arrows performing in Bournemouth but flying over the cottage and our Corfe walk – they’re the spec if you blow up the photo!

Corfe from the garden of the Scott Arms in Kingston

Supper with friends at The Grannary





Mapperton



Mapperton, a beautiful private garden and setting for Far From the Madding Crowd which started production work there the day we visited – Youngest very disappointed to discover they were looking for not tall girls with long hair, no modern cuts or dye, no tattoos and natural eyebrows (just like her), but you had to be local…

(If anyone has a suggestion as to why I'm unable to make my posting page type/compose easily I'd be most grateful - this has taken me hours and still doesn't look as I planned, but I've lost the will to persist!) 



Results

We’re on holiday in Dorset visiting our usual haunts and delighting in the absence of TV, internet, landline and dodgy mobile signal: life is slowing down. But we have popped home for a couple of nights to collect Youngest’s GCSE results. She may not be her sister but we are all delighted with a total (including two taken last year) of 6 As and 5 Bs - even if the As were in the subjects she’s not planning to take to A level! As she remarked, “I got what I deserved, and what I needed to do the subjects I want to do, and I can have higher level qualification in those subjects, but I need the As in the ones I’m not taking forward.”


Not perfect, but perfectly grounded!

Soul time

Counting down to the Church Fete but still finding time for essential soul feeding:

a walk through a bluebell wood with friends

an amble in Dorset that found wild orchids

a march to Corfe Castle for a cream tea

Back home for essential revision (we hope she's doing some). Chair’s done, card and a couple of outfits next.

Recipe for success

We've been in Dorset.
It was a bit damp but a welcome break despite the lack of Eldest. We walked, pub lunched, ate fish and chips, entertained friends for the day, went to the seaside, did a spot of gardening, looked at Daniel Craig, let Husband win at Scrabble, fought over the puzzles in The Times, and enjoyed the view from the top of the ridge.
Meanwhile I've been asked to post the recipe for Prize Pumpkin. So, in the hope that it's not too late (and pumpkins might be on offer now of course), here it is:

7cm fresh ginger, thinly sliced
Seeds extracted from 8 cardamom pods, ground
1-2 fresh green chillies finely chopped
8 skinless chicken breasts cut into 1cm slices
125g butter
625-750g onions, thinly sliced
6-8 cloves of garlic, thinly sliced
125g button mushrooms
50g plain flour
450ml milk
1 large pumpkin (3.25- 3.50kg)
Sunflower oil
Melt ¾ of the butter in a large pan, add onions and cook over a low heat until soft. Add the ginger, cardamom, chillies and garlic then stir. Add the remaining butter and then the chicken and mushrooms once it’s melted and stir to coat. Stir in the flour then gradually add the milk and season with salt. Bring to the boil, stirring all the time until very thick. Remove from the heat.
Cut a circular hole in the top of the pumpkin and scoop out the seeds and all the stringy interior leaving only the firm flesh.
Spoon the chicken mixture into the pumpkin and replace the ‘lid’. Smear the outside with sunflower oil and place in a roasting tin. Place in oven at 240°C for 25-30 minutes. Now turn it down to 180°C for about 1 ¼ hours.
To serve, scoop out the flesh of the pumpkin with the chicken mixture. Serves 8.

Josceline Dimbleby tells you to move the cooked pumpkin onto a serving dish. In my experience you need to be able to serve it in whatever you cooked it in! Also, it tends to ‘leak’ pumpkin juices so don’t use anything too shallow! Any leftovers make really flavoursome soup.

Escape to the country

In contrast to last week’s pictures of The Smoke here is Dorset countryside in all its spring glory!

We visited a couple of lovely gardens, walked at an RSPB reserve, went to the pictures to see the latest Aardman animation, ate supper out, ate fish and chips in, ate tea and cake out, pottered round the local town’s shops, read and listened to Radio 4 even more than usual (no telly), did a jigsaw, walked up the hill, went to bed early and got up late. Bliss!

Relief not panic

Youngest will go to Madrid, Spain this afternoon. It’s an exchange through school: we will have a Spanish girl to stay in March. There ought to be worry and perhaps panic; instead there is only relief!


We had an active half-term and did nothing you could call useful: a blustery walk to Old Harry’s Rocks, a trip to see a ridiculous film (The Three Musketeers, at which Youngest cheered and the rest of us laughed derisively), trawled the charity shops for items to be turned into three costumes for the school play, read the newspaper, fought over the puzzles, tidied the garden after the builders and before the greenhouse turns up…
And this week has been busy: school, tidying for Swedish visitors, altering aforementioned garments to make a day dress, beachwear and an evening gown that look vaguely 1920s, a coffee morning spent filling Operation Christmas Child shoeboxes, upholstery (still taking out staples!), and finding suitably British presents to send to Spain. Not to mention that ballet is back of course and Youngest has been out babysitting two nights, had two after school rehearsals for said school play (The Boyfriend) and been to Rangers – a bonfire party last night.


Let’s face it: the family has been through two French Exchanges, went to Madrid earlier this year and Youngest went to Switzerland in the summer. Sending Youngest to Spain to an unknown family in somewhat of a rush is just a relief all round that she’s off! Except that this is Youngest: when we got in the car to go to school this morning she burst into tears, and again when I left her there. She managed some watery laughter in between, and she will be fine, she will love the experience and get on with the Spanish family regardless. She is good at making friends.


When she went to France Husband had to actually go to put her on the bus (as opposed to them leaving from school). Stood waiting to wave her off the mummies around him were discussing the poor girl in bits on the coach and how they wouldn’t be sending her, they’d be whisking her home at once, it was just too cruel… I told her this story on the way this morning, it made her laugh because she’d had a wonderful time. She’ll be fine, and she’s back in a week, hardly worth tidying her room!

Mud, mud, glorious mud

Who knew? I have a Geography O Level, and did poorly at an A Level. I remember drawing lots of pictures of geographical features, but no one ever showed me pictures or, better still, took me to see any of them. I will admit to a complete failure to understand scale!

We’ve just come back from Dorset where the coastline is brimming with examples of exciting rock formations – yes, I know, I didn’t expect to write that phrase either. We had a wonderful clamber over the pavements at Kimmeridge where you can look at the folded layers of oil shale and limestone, eyes peeled for fossils when you’re not looking in the rock pools. It’s fascinating! (And I vividly remember going to Lulworth for the first time and being completely blown away by the reality of my teenage diagrams.) It may be that I just wasn’t very interested in Geography, but I think it more likely that it didn’t seem real, it didn’t grip me. (I recently saw a baobab tree on TV and it looked exactly like the drawing I’d done as a fourth former; I’d never seen a real one - not even a photograph – so, as with the rock, didn’t really understand what they were.)

On another trek, on a very drizzly morning, we walked out to the coast from Kingston, around the headland and down to Chapman’s Pool. The last part was off our usual route but Husband and Youngest decided we needed to get to the sea. There are steps cut into the Houns Tout cliff, but the next bit was just cliff. Eldest decided, about half way down, to wait for our return. Foolishly, I followed the other two. This was not the family’s usual ‘bear hunt’: this was hippo country! I have never seen so much clay outside of a pottery! It was extremely slippery underfoot and this Hausfrau got very grumpy indeed! I’m afraid I didn’t make it to the beach either, despite mocking from Husband: I couldn’t see how I was going to get back up without getting filthy and I’d been promised a pub lunch! There were people swimming. I can’t even begin to explain why they were in the sea…

Half way there

The kid done good. Four AS levels (sort of half an A level) and a thing called Science in Society: As the lot. Clever girl! Made us proud and all that.
She was expecting to do well apparently: it was made clear that we should have a bottle of champagne to hand ready to put in the fridge as soon as we got back from Dorset and checked the post. This from the girl who, along with her two 17 year old friends, whom we had taken to stay at the cottage for a few days before the family, said “No thank-you” when asked if they’d like to keep the half bottle of wine and the cans of lager not yet cleared out of the fridge by our friends who had been visiting. (Gosh that sounds complicated! Our friends borrowed the cottage for a few days; we took Eldest down to take over from them and joined them for lunch; they took their stuff, but offered to leave food if the girls wanted it.)

I don’t suppose a taste for champagne will do her any harm: she only had a glass so sadly we had to have the rest.
You may be amused to hear the girls had eaten well, watched lots of DVDs on a laptop, played cards and Monopoly, walked all of a hundred yards to the farm to feed the ducks and buy ice-creams and had had one decent walk over the hill to the pub for supper. One of the three, we were informed, “doesn’t do walks”.

Note: the background is Wiltshire not Dorset, but the girl is mine.

Prized

So, all sorts of news:

Both the doll and the devil won first prize, and the doll’s outfit won best in show and, thus, a cup!
Do not get excited! Each entry cost 30p, that’s an outlay of £1.20. There were lots of liqueurs and mine got nowt. Two first prizes netted 60p each… So I broke even… Except that I am requested to get the cup engraved with my name… Cost unknown…

It rained rather in Dorset, but there was more fine weather than wet, and just the change of scene, and reduction in the scale of the housewife’s chores made for a welcome holiday. We walked quite a bit, ate well, played Scrabble and Cluedo, fought over who got to do the puzzles in The Times and stayed in bed ‘til the end of the Today programme. Lovely! (The photo is a view taken in Arne.)


I have thought of several things to tell you about: AS levels, Geography, Lionel Shriver’s So Much For That, Glorious Mud, Church Fetes, and, probably more, but I think smaller helpings would help the digestion - and I need to catch up on what everyone else has to say!

Show time

It is holiday time and we’re off to Dorset in stages (Eldest goes with friends tomorrow, Youngest returns to the UK on Friday and we go Sunday), but before that I wanted to show you Eldest’s cake for her father’s birthday:

3, not 53, clearly

And my entries for the village show:

A dressed doll or bear: (the poor girl is over 40 but seemed pleased with her new outfit) dressed for a British summer!
Possibly a little over the top?



A crocheted item: a little devil who's a little underwhelming?



And two entries for the liqueur class: Sloe Gin and Apple Vodka…

Happy holidays!

Half-term treats

Deepest Dorset

Flowery garden, Dorset

 Flowery garden, by my pond

Avebury

And it’s still not finished!

But the classes have, so I'm on my own until September...

Half-term

Half-term is over and normal life resumes. It felt quite long, my week.

We spent a few days in Dorset and had one beautiful day on which we walked along the ridge to Corfe Castle for lunch in The Greyhound (only OK) and home with a smackerel stop fuelled by the bakers with a cake of choice. Time slows on the Isle of Purbeck regardless of the weather - which is very much its own.
We returned for a special day on Wednesday: Husband graduated as a Master of Research in Statistics watched by his proud wife and father. I hadn’t been to a graduation before so, in case you too have yet to take part in such a ceremony, may I say it is much like a prize-giving? Our graduand’s name was read out, he walked onto the stage for no more than a few seconds, had a brief private exchange with the Chancellor and left the stage to collect his certificate a graduate. I clapped everyone, listened to the two speeches and sang the National Anthem. I was brought up with a sense of duty which I cannot abandon. You will not be surprised to hear therefore that I was not impressed by the number of people who took pictures and clapped only their own student and failed to sing. Gosh I’m stuffy!
We met the girls and esteemed step-m-in-law at the Bath Priory for a very smart celebratory lunch afterwards. Both girls were fascinated by the fine dining experience having watched endless Masterchef, but Eldest thought it pretentious! An indulgence, but it seemed like the right thing to do.
Visitors-from-abroad over Friday night, and not-seen-for-a-while godparents to lunch yesterday, and then it was all over.
Time to tidy the house, catch up with the washing and think about meals – except that I realise I’ve now spent the morning catching up with everybody else in the blogosphere…

holidays

We’ve had a good time in Dorset and staggeringly fair weather, but it’s nice to be home. We walked every day, read lots of books, ate out several times and went to the pictures twice. Alice in Wonderland was wonderful – even Husband enjoyed it – and How to Train Your Dragon was OK. Youngest had a friend to visit and has come home exhausted from too much chat and too little sleep... she’ll learn one day that beauty sleep is essential.

Poor Husband is busy taking exams, two last week and five more this. He’s been swatting hard and I’m crossing my fingers as he’s anything but confident – most unusual for him. If nothing else he’s setting a very good example to our GCSE student!
I’ve had a lovely weekend catching up with all the laundry and pottering in the garden. There’s something very satisfying about piles of freshly laundered clothing – not ironed of course, just smoothed when folded - and it's amazing what a week of warm weather has done to the plants. All the excitement of the dentist and shoe shopping this week to look forward to. I wonder if the girls will get up today?

Half-term break

That's half-term over for another term then. The girls and I have been to our favorite other place: the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset. We've had glorious weather, enjoyed a number of fine walks, eaten a scrumptious cream tea (well, strictly speaking only I ate a scrumptious cream tea. For some unknown reason Eldest doesn't like clotted cream, and Youngest prefers a toasted teacake. Foolishly they dared me to eat both portions of clotted cream, something that I'm able to report I had no difficulty in achieving.), read several novels, did lots of Times puzzles and generally chilled out. The cottage is petite and there is no TV so it is a great place for quality family time.

But the best laid plans can go awry! Husband came down after uni on Tuesday night and joined us for a walk and pub lunch the next day. I put him back on the train on Thursday at 6.20am and he stayed in a hotel overnight. Got a call on Friday saying he was on his way. The train broke down: it took him 2 1/2 hours to get from Bristol to Bath where he gave up and cadged a bed off the in-laws. On reflection it didn't seem worth his while to come south on Saturday since we needed to get back early on Sunday for Eldest's inevitable ballet. So we came home on Saturday afternoon so he wouldn't be alone and we wouldn't be under pressure on Sunday morning.

The girls are convinced I kiboshed British Rail so we could be home for Strictly......