Turns out that the rabbit show-jumping we saw at the
London Pet Show last May was not a one-off, as Ruth has sent me
this link reporting on a rabbit ‘grand national’ held in Yorkshire a week or so ago. The report originally included a video clip, but that appears to have been removed. Those Swedes are evidently crack jumpers though, as it was a team of Swedish bunnies who thrashed the Brits at the London event too.
Ray came up for the evening on Thursday and made me listen to an episode of
Clare in the Community on Radio 4, which he has been suggesting that I would like. Indeed I did, and will seek out more of it. I cooked a really quite thrifty pork casserole with paprika, using (sshh) Sainsburys Basics pork. A two-hour cooking time, but I’d started it the previous evening. Am officially domestic goddess. Well, until it comes to dusting and hoovering things, as Ruth will testify. That stuff's just boring.
Spent several hours on Saturday in Hungerford and environs: started with a trip to Inklings to purchase a birthday card, as I have apparently hidden the stack of cards Ruth keeps in reserve for family birthdays, then eschewed the usual antiques arcade in favour of
Great Grooms, opposite The Bear, as Ruth fancied a nose inside. We had a brief mooch and warmed our hands on the radiators (v. cold day) before bumping into Gail and Rob, apparently on the hunt for pieces of stained glass, though I didn’t quite gather what for. The four of us then decamped over the road to
The Bear, where we met Ruth and Gail’s mother and aunt for a pleasant though pricey lunch. As a postscript: quite what the subtitle on Great Grooms’ website actually means is something of a mystery: ‘the finest antiques for period & contemporary lifestyles’ – what’s a ‘period lifestyle’? And who leads one?
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| Granny and Ruth |
After lunch we drove up to
Aldbourne Nursing Home for Ruth’s grandmother’s 104th birthday tea, where we met up with Mrs Millard’s cousin Mary, an excellently down-to-earth woman who kept everyone amused and took leave of me with a wink and instructions to “look after Bones” (excellent, a new nickname). We spent quite a pleasant hour or so before the conservatory, where we were, started getting cold and Mrs Box was wheeled off back to the lounge.
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| Wintry canal |
Drove home in snow which had progressed to about two inches’ worth by Sunday morning. Returned to Milton Keynes that morning, partly in case conditions got worse over Sunday night as I wouldn’t have fancied untreated roads at 5.30am. The main roads were fine; the only slippery bits were the unmade road at the back of the house, and the little estate here in MK. Learned afterwards that there were
major delays on ‘my’ section of the M40 on Saturday night – it is quite hilly in parts which can’t have helped. Spent Sunday grocery shopping, going for a brief walk in the snow to try out my new stretch-on shoe spikes (v.g.) and baking a batch of apple cupcakes to use up a slightly woolly apple and some past-the-date eggs. What thrift. Actually baked a second batch on Monday evening and took them into work, where I was Most Popular Girl in the Class for that morning. The canal here looked really quite frozen on Monday morning, though I don't think I'd have tried my weight on it.
At work I continue to be sucked into the world of writing data definitions and coding fields, which is new and no doubt valuable experience but a bit of a learning curve. Our HESA analyst is on leave this week but the spec he has left me to work from includes a number of notes in red saying ‘IGNORE (WELSH)’. An important message for all of us, no doubt.
Ruth and I went round to Ray’s on Friday evening for a pleasant dinner, if not strictly home-cooked – I had volunteered to bring the food and had done something resembling a supermarket trolley dash around Waitrose on the way. The evening started badly when I unaccountably drifted while driving along the private road leading to the marina and had to swerve sharply off the road to avoid an oncoming car, unfortunately into a deep pothole, flattening one of my tyres and bending the wheel rim. Drove more cautiously than usual back to MK on the spare on Monday morning, but car seemed to handle fine so hopefully there’s no damage to the suspension. It’s booked in at the garage next Monday so will find out the damage then.
On Saturday morning Ray drove us over to Riverside Nurseries in Bisham, a wholesale nursery from which he and Darren obtain a lot of their plants for work, to choose the new bamboo for the garden that he had offered us as a Christmas present out of some of his credit there (some unique footage here). Picked out a fine tall specimen with thick green stems, which we managed with a bit of manipulation to get into Ray’s van, though it looked initially as though we’d made a bit of an error of judgement. We got it back to the house and Ruth planted it up that afternoon, fairly nobly as a) it was raining by then and b) I asked her to replant it further forward as I didn’t like the position of the first hole she’d dug. It looks splendid. Hoping it will now grow like the blazes. 
