Category: Family

It seems that living in cities is now the most popular place to live.  It used to be once you had hit midlife, you left the cities for the fair villages on England and lived a more peaceful life.

The problem now with village life is that they are either failing due to high prices, ageing population and poor transport or growing into vast commuter villages of modern estates where people seem to just sleep there and drive off in the morning to the city and come back at night, never partaking in village life or contributing.

Our new village seems to have really picked up in the last couple of years.  It helped when the pub was saved, we now have a good place to drink with a good restaurant and a community atmosphere.  The village school is also successful and we still have a post office.  Rarer still, is that we have a small artisan village bakery and now a newly opened tea room also bringing in visitors.  It still has the problem many villages have though, poor transport links both public transport and bad roads, but this at least has saved the village from becoming a commuter village and stops people building housing estates here.  We seem to be managing, possibly helped by the poor transport links stopping the prices from getting too outrageous.

Now with the lighter nights its not just weekends we have now to catch up on the gardening.  Monday night saw us planting seeds, grass cutting etc. The garden is now once again starting to look like someone looks after it and cares.  When you both work full time and have busy lives, the little things like house work and the gardening can suffer.

We had a lovely quiet weekend.  Saturday we just did little bits and bobs round the house, then walked to the new village tea room. We indulged with soup, hot chocolate , and then followed this up with chocolate cake. Then we walked back collected Timmy the Greyhound and popped over to the pub for a drink while Timmy enjoyed a treat.

Sunday we finally got to do some more major work in the veg plot.  I dug over a couple of plots and then got the potatoes finally planted and watered in.  The onions also needed a water, and Timmy then decided it would be fun to play long jump using the veg plot as his landing zone.  Fun for Timmy but not to be encouraged.

Last week was Cruft’s the international dog show.  I like to see how the hound group goes, I am sure that one year a Greyhound will win.

This year it was ‘Frosty’, a Grand Basset Griffon Vendeen, from the Netherlands, who won in the Hound Group.

I have been on the lookout for a new fountain pen.  My current pen is a little too valuable for everyday use in the office so I wanted something else.

It was announced on the news this week that Ruddock’s of Lincoln is to close.  A small family stationary business its been finding it difficult to cope recently with the cheaper on line stores.  I bought my last fountain pen from them so as I needed another one I wanted to give the small family company some final business.

I bought myself a basic steel nib Waterman which will be fine for use everyday.

Its sad to see so many small shops closing, but they have taxes to pay as well as rates and its difficult to compete against a large warehouse especially when the company puts its profits through other countries to make a technical lose and not pay any profit in the country they are based.

With spring now about to start we have bought the seeds for our first crops of the year, hopefully we will get some dry days soon so we can start planting.

It seems to have been quite a while since we had a weekend to ourselves with nothing to do.

After the last couple of hectic months we spent this weekend catching up on the shopping, house chores etc.  The car and bikes got washed, and we spent some time in the kitchen, cooking and baking.

It was a chance to recharge our batteries ready for the week ahead.

 

It was a quiet weekend in the Brown household this weekend.  No visitors for a change so we had a fairly restful time.

I had a few hundred images to edit, or at least to sort out my picks and selects from the three models I have been shooting with in the studio of the last few weeks.

We also had to use up the last of the marrows out of the veg plot.  We decided to make a marrow pickle, its a bit like a piccalilli so spicy with ginger, turmeric and chilly, as well as the usual, salt, sugar and vinegar.  

We also made up another batch of marmale.

The cupboard of preserves is starting to look a little depleted in the marmalade department.  Last year was the second year of making marmalade, and that time we made double the amount to the previous year.

This year we will be making the same amount as it has just lasted the year, including being able to give a few jars away to friends and family.

I was hoping to get into the garden this weekend, and finish digging over the veg plot and pruning the trees in the front.

It was wet and miserable so we stayed in.  In the planning for the summer veg its potatoes that we need to get sorted next. Obviously its too cold to planting them yet, but we can lay them out in the garden utility room to get them to start chitting