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!

Holiday

Things I have thought I should write about while I was away:

The second workshop

The logistics of dealing with ‘independent’ children

How glad I am I’m not a princess – giving birth is hard enough without the world watching

Where to visit on a trip to the Chinon area

How to walk a dog in Hampstead

Supporting your children’s productions

Birthday celebrations

The Ashes

I may come back to some of them, but I can knock off a couple now. The second workshop was much like the first, with three people coming again and two new customers. All seven said they would come again but none want to commit to weekly classes. Need to think about that!

Eldest came home just in time for our trip to France, even managing to wash some clothes needed for the holiday and/or the Edinburgh Fringe. We travelled via the Channel Tunnel staying in Le Mans en route to a little village near Chinon (above). We stayed on a property with three self catering cottages and a shared pool. We would recommend: 



a potter around Tours

Bastille night in Chinon




the gardens of Villandry

Wherever you of course, it is vital that you take Test Match Special with you at all times – we wouldn’t let Husband listen to any of the CDs we’d brought along for our holiday as we needed to know the score…

France here we come

 
The frogs are sunbathing in our pond: it must be time to go in search of summer weather abroad!

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.

Roman Holiday

We are just back from five nights in Rome – Youngest’s idea, and no one came up with a better suggestion. We visited all the things you’re supposed to see.


I am staggered by just how much Roman ruin there is and how big their buildings were. Vatican City was another enormous set of buildings with much ornamentation on show – and opportunities for money making in every direction.
It is true that Italian drivers, at least of cars, shouldn’t be allowed on the road: our taxi driver from the airport first tried to rip us off by demanding a larger fee than the price advertised and then drove at 100km/hr while talking on his mobile phone, changing gear and hand such that he regularly had no hand on the steering wheel. We agreed we’d not get in another taxi and returned to the airport by train – even more expensive but it felt safe!

It is also true that Italian food tastes even better in Italy: we ate bruschetta, pizza, pasta, and tiramisu (including tiramisu ice-cream) washed down with Italian beer or wine most nights. Our evening meals were relaxed and fun, if on the pricey side, but buying drinks was extortionate! Iced water in bottles was readily available and much needed in the heat, and we were able to top up bottles at the many drinking fountains around the city, but if you wanted to buy a coffee or a Coke we’re talking 5Euro each at best.

We stayed in a hotel near the Trevi Fountain so we have many photos of it at different times of the day and night. We went early on our departure day in hopes of finding fewer people: there were, but the fountain wasn’t on because it was being cleaned and all the tourists’ money being collected from the pool!

Having viewed the Coliseum, the Palatine Hill, the Forum, the Vatican, four museums, the Spanish Steps, lots of fountains, ridden on the metro and the buses, marched all over Rome and braved the high temperatures, we took a ride up into the hills to visit the Villa D’Este and its garden in Tivoli on our last day. It was delightfully cool and we loved the place. Very few flowers this late in the season, but it was lush and green and had every imaginable water feature. My high point!

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!

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!

Catching up

The birthdays were both deemed successful; the camping, fun.

Eurostar and the TGV to Lyon were brilliant. We had a busy trip, eating too well and all managing to speak a little French: it’s amazing what you can manage if everyone has to order their own food or go without.

Eldest got nine A* and an A.
My trainee teacher has started work.
My girls have gone back to school.


I AM ALONE IN THE HOUSE.


I may take the day off; eat chocolate with a good book; think in the sewing room; play in the garden… or perhaps just take delivery from Sainsbury, do the washing, tidy the sitting-room and catch up on what’s been going on on the blogosphere, all while listening to Radio 4 with no chance of anyone turning it off.