What Your Underwear Says About You

You tend to buy new underwear instead of doing laundry. You’re sexy, in that pinup girl, tease sort of way.

No, I’m too old and too married.
Unless my husband is a very lucky man of course 😉

Update next day – I tried again with the knickers du jour –
“You like to think of yourself as innocent, even though you’re not!
You’re a closet exhibitionist who gets a thrill from being secretly naughty.”
Sad to say, this is nearer the truth. All part of my cheerful mid-life crisis.

At the village festival* my daughter El won, on the tombola, a jar of frankfurters, a jar of pickled sliced cucumbers and a tin of spaghetti hoops. She was not impressed and they did not travel back to London with her on the train.
Ro spotted them tonight and enquired. I explained that there was no danger that any of them would be on the family menu any time soon. “But what are you going to do with them?” “Put them on the next bring & buy stall.” “What, and be seen?”
He’s right, I’ll have to sneak them on anonymously. Call me a food snob, but the first on a depressing list of ingredients on the frankfurter label is mechanically recovered chicken.
Call Ro a food snob too – he said that El had won another tin of spaghetti and had given it to the raffle. “Mind you, at least it was edible. Well, barely – wasn’t even Heinz.”

*She asked me what was the difference between a village fête and a festival. I explained, it was the presence of the beer tent.

And the winner is…………

The scare-crow!

Al and the Sage sold nearly 400 punnets of strawberries in a couple of hours this morning at Bungay’s Street Market, which meant they were able to come home early and have the afternoon off. I went in for an hour, but that was enough for me (noon was the most convenient time, but the hottest, of course, too).

I have the prospect of counting the votes for the scarecrow competition. We have gone for a complicated method of counting, to make it fair for the entrants, so it may take me some time. Unless I bung it all on a spreadsheet and let my good friend Mac do all the hard work. Which, of course, I will. But maybe not tonight. I am, I’m sorry to say, completely drunk on only two glasses of wine. I have been next door, chatting to Al and Dilly and Dilly’s parents – D’s dad managed to cut the tip of his finger off this morning, which has left him with a large throbbing bandage. He is being manfully brave about it though.

A frog has taken up residence in a plant tub in their garden, by a clump of moss. He is very beautiful and posed nicely for a photo…………….

And my favourite entries from the village scarecrow competition
Ho, shadow of Z visible.

And the bit of the river Waveney as you cross from Norfolk to Suffolk. Please excuse my presumption, owner of bridge and willow tree, if you read this and object, of course it will be deleted. But you have a lovely garden.

The Sage has fallen for another piece of china. He is consulting me before buying it though, we’ll look at it tomorrow afternoon. Well, I’m a complete sucker for early Lowestoft, he’s on pretty safe ground. I appreciate the delicacy though – my choice, woo-hoo.

I’m making quiches. Oh dear, not my strong point. For one thing, I can’t make shortcrust pastry. Every other form of pastry is fine, including trickier and more pretentious ones, but regular shortcrust and I just don’t gell. So I bought it, no problem there. Then of course there’s the business of blind baking. Oh, there’s a tedious extra step – a pastry case, so good they cooked it twice? Huh.

I was asked to make them in foil cases. Beastly little shallow things they are, although I’ve left extra pastry sticking up at the sides and all that sort of tedious gubbins they are still only about half an inch deep when they come out of the oven and there will be hardly any room for the delicious filling.

I think that I’ll leave them at home, saying they are too hot to bring and I need to let them cool down, and hope that they aren’t actually needed. Then I can foist them on my unfortunate family tonight, who will be too busy comforting my lamentations that I can’t cook, to realise they are giving themselves indigestion. If the lunch turns out to be unexpectedly busy, the latecomers will have to make do with my sad efforts after all.

Maybe I’ll just pop down to the supermarket and see if they have any ready-made pastry cases.

ps – actually, quiches tasted fine. In the end, one went to the lunch and one was cooked later for us. Ro praised it, which has mollified me entirely. Maybe my quiche-making days are not altogether over.

I love the honeysuckle on the fence by the door for its wonderful scent, particularly on a summer evening.

It is giving me such pleasure, having the chickens where I see them every time I go to the kitchen garden. Usually they are in an area that needs a special visit as it’s not on the way anywhere else, and that’s where the Sage is usually to be found. Chickens have the same soothing effect on him that seedlings have on me. But they love the new site as it is full of plant and insect life and happily cluck all day – it’s a soft and happy sound like a cat’s purr, used to keep in contact and to assure each other that all is well. We shut the bedroom window on that side of the house last night, so I slept through cockcrow.
Of course, the downside is that a hen run is the first thing that visitors see, but hey, this is Norfolk and we hold our heads high – as Maudie Littlehampton* said “If it’s me, it’s U.”**

I’ve had a busy and tiring day and it may be a measure of both these things that I have not glanced at one blog today. I might, this evening, but actually I quite want to go to bed. I probably won’t, as early to bed, early to wake up is one thing, but 3 a.m. is another, and only too likely if I sleep before midnight. I couldn’t be arsed to do the watering tonight, which I will regret tomorrow but, after all, life is full of regrets and it is character-building to learn to cope with them manfully.
You’ll be awfully pleased to know that I have recovered from my strop of yesterday, although it lasted well into this afternoon and I am being civil and pleasant this evening.

*She is a character from the cartoons of Osbert Lancaster. And do click on the link, a most entertaining potted biography by Chris Stamatakis.
**The Mitfords – quite a family

I’m afraid I had a bit of a strop this evening. There’s a village festival this weekend on the village green, which is all good and lovely and the weather forecast is fine, so it should go well. There will also be displays of various crafts and things like that in the church, and I’ll help quite a bit with one thing and another. On Sunday there will be a service at 5 o’clock. This evening I had a cheerful email saying that there will be a music group rather than the organ (which I’d arranged for someone else to play as I’ll have too many other things to think about), so will I play the clarinet.

I’ve written back to say no. And had a cheerfully sarcastic reply saying, never mind, you do have such a busy social life, have a relaxing weekend.
My son has chuckled at my rantings to the extent that I’ve almost regained my good humour.

I went out to dinner this evening; it’s a monthly occasion with a group of friends. It takes me about 45 minutes to get there, but we eat quite early as most of us have quite a long way to go. There was an accident on the Norwich ring road (a lorry hit a tree, shot across the road and hit another, so there were bits of lorry and tree all over the road and a bridge had to be checked for structural damage. Driver not badly hurt though.) so a section of it was closed and long queues were diverted, so my journey time was doubled. As I approached the ring road junction from another direction, I glanced at the Honda CR-V in the next lane. The driver was reading a newspaper spread out over the steering wheel. We were approaching traffic lights, so were slow-moving and sometimes stationary, but if you see this Honda, HD55EVP, do give him a wide berth as he may not be looking out for you.

That waked the z all sleepy at dawn. The new hen-pen is nearer the house than the old one and he certainly sounded cheerful first thing this morning. I did doze off again, but then woke up when a fly landed on my mouth which was, fortunately, closed. Extremely unpleasant though.

The mother has her head down and tail up as she is scratching vigorously at the grass. The baby has seen something that looks promisingly edible, so she has her head down too.

She just looks handsome and posed so proudly.
The dirty white object behind her is one of the feet of the LPG tank. It might seem a little odd to have a large gas tank in the kitchen garden, but I’ll get used to it.

The bantams are moving house. There’s a bit of land which we mean to incorporate into the vegetable garden, and which should have been dug over and planted with potatoes this spring*. Not surprisingly, we didn’t get around to it, so the chooks are going to do the job for us**.
We’ve moved the youngsters first and, after some anxiety at being moved from their coops, they settled quickly. Their mothers and a few other adults have been shifted this evening. I offered my help, but the Sage can just pick them up and they don’t mind.

Not good photos, especially the second and if I can get something better I’ll replace them tomorrow. The black mother is moulting badly; that pedigree breed of bantams loses whole clumps of feathers at a time.

*Potatoes are very good for clearing the ground. They are vigorous enough to outgrow most weeds and having to dig the ground two or three times both clears and aerates it. It’s an excellent way of clearing the ground of wireworms, though if there’s a bad infestation you need to leave the potatoes until the autumn and then put up with the creatures or destroy the spuds to kill the pests.

**Planting potatoes might be a bit beyond them, although I’m willing to teach them.