Tales From Pixie Wood

The River Cottage

The house you can see in the distance is the River Cottage. This is the new location on the West Dorset/Devon border and LBH and I had yet to visit since it moved from just outside of Bridport. LBH surprised me with a day spent at the new headquarters, a tour of the gardens and livestock followed by lunch cooked by the River Cottage kitchen staff way back on Valentines Day this year and we'd been waiting about two and half months for the day to roll around. Eeeek!! Any longtime readers to this blog will know how I feel about the River Cottage, its ethos and just how much good they do in making folk aware of the food they eat and where it comes from. Hugh's Chicken Out campaign was a huge success and sales of free range chickens were so high, and continue to be so, that many of the big supermarkets struggled, and possibly still do, to meet the demand. Ahhhhhhh, the power of television!

We did so much in our day at River Cottage and learnt so much about what they are doing and their plans for the foreseeable future but I wanted to tell you about the gardens. The magical, Beatrix Potter'esque gardens.

These rotating beds are at the front of the house and head gardener Simon Hansford told LBH and I that he had planned the next eighteen years for these beds - loosely of course. But it was as I was staring around at the gardens and the surroundings that I had this odd sense of having been to a place like this before. I couldn't place it AT ALL but I kept staring and staring and then it came to me. This was Mr McGregor's garden! It was, it had that feeling and that sense that Peter in his little blue jacket could pop out at any time and be cheeky.

I saw him plopping along this wall to the garden leaving his sisters behind and not really giving any thought to what dangers may lay ahead in human form. 

He would pay little attention to these makeshift propagators deciding that the goodies to be had were elsewhere and in more abundance. He would have been right, as the abundance of food was growing its heart out in the polytunnels.

This is one of the River Cottage polytunnels. Fantastically organised and the air around the produce growing here reeks of organic, seasonal goodness.

LBH and I gazed longingly upon the rows of lettuce variety and both noticed one that was not quite recognisable at the end. Can you see it? I'll give you a close up.

I hope this picture shows you, in all its glory and detail, that these particular types of lettuce are not, repeat not, supposed to look like this. At this time our guide Simon was speaking to us all about slugs and how they deal with the problem at River Cottage HQ and while he was on the subject of pests and garden enemies he turned to the decimated lettuces and forlornly but very good naturedly said " As you can see we also have a rabbit problem"

It was all I could do not to jump up with my hand in the air and yell "I know who it is, I know who it is. Have you seen flashes of a blue jacket?......."

   

The First One

As an English person I wait for this type of weekend, the first of its kind this year, with an anticipation that I can only liken to a dog eager to go out for a walk. Lots of tail wagging, tongue dripping, panting and whining. This weekend was the first real weekend where it was warm enough to be out in the garden without my long sleeved thermal vest. It was bright enough not to have to worry about hours of rain and there was a smell in the air. The smell of a sunny weekend day in England. If you've ever smelt it you'll know what I'm talking about.

I'm having my bachelorette party here at my house and in my garden so LBH and I are working hard to get it looking pretty for the day in July.

Say hello to a new addition to our garden family, Jasmine. LBH and I both have fond memories of the scent of Jasmine which filled our noses on a daily basis while we were in Italy last spring, so when we saw this beautiful version we picked her up and brought her home with us.

If you stand back and look at the front of our house we have a climbing rose dealing with the left hand side of the bench which sits out the front and we both felt that the right hand side of the bench needed something to chat with on a hot summers evening. This area gets lots of sun and I'm so excited about training it up and over the front window.

I have to admit to testing the mettle of our new addition already. I was in the front room early on Saturday evening about an hour after we had manoeuvred the plant in to place and I secretly opened the window adjacent to the area of the Jasmine most heavily populated with flowers. I pottered about the room, plumping cushions and what not and waited. Within a few minutes the syrupy smell hit me.

"YAY!!!!! the smell comes into the house!!!!", I yelped to LBH as he immediately came in to see if he could smell it too. I think the smell hit him while he was still in the kitchen. Joy, joy, joy!

My geraniums are doing well too. We have three large planters going up the steps to the terraced area and when these girls are ready I'll pop them in there. Mixed colours of course. We have what is essentially a cottage garden and I really don't think you can be too precious about something with as many nooks and crannies as we have. I take the wise words of my garden heroine Vita Sackville - West to heart and cover, cover, cover!

My potted Lavender is doing well, prevailing through the past winter and has delighted us with blooming again for the second year. I was given two lavenders as housewarming gifts and they've done so well it would appear that I need to re-plant them in super pots!

Aubretia is something that can be seen all over the county we live in at the moment. Huge bunches of greenery punctuated by a violent purple flower and they have a wonderful habit of growing very well in walls. Driving out about in the surrounding countryside I love to see a random purple cloud of foliage seemingly floating in the middle of a cottage wall. Hopefully ours will do just as well and by next spring I'm trusting that it will be cascading down the steps of our garden.

This weekend also welcomed back another tradition that I love about warmer days in England - the pub garden. Some pub gardens allow you to watch the cricket on the green, some allow you three course meals. Some allow you to watch the day go by at the side of a lake or a river and others allow you stay out until well after the sun has gone down.

We enjoyed white wine spritzers and cold beer for the first time since last summer and I know it seems like I'm going on about it but anybody who has experienced the inclement weather that England has in late spring will know that when you can you LEAVE THE HOUSE! 

We trundled back as the sky began to turn indigo. By then LBH had goose bumples on his arms, but it was OK. He may have been chilly but his jacket was in the wardrobe at home. I'm hoping it stays there.

Madonna Or A Bubble Bath Bubble

I'm sitting here cutting out teeny weeny felt tree trunks for a project and thinking about Madonna, as she's just been inducted in to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. I like Madonna. Not because she burns crosses in her videos or has a penchant for simulating masturbation on stage, or even because she has a much better body than me at nearly fifty years old when I'm only thirty two. I like her because she is still here.

Lets be honest, we all have days when we feel like Madonna - or a Madonna type figure - powerful, brave, ballsy, carefree and then we have others when we feel like a bubble made by the bubble bath we use. Fragile, ready to be popped and never seen again with the most fragile of touches.

We can look around us and it can appear as if everything is perfect - so why do we want to cry?

The room shown in this post is our guest room.

This room has the advantage of almost never being untidy, simply because its used less than the other rooms. I come in to this room and lay on the bed when I'm feeling small. I stare up at the ceiling or look out on to the garden that LBH and I are finally making sense of. I ask myself whether I have too much and perhaps that is why I am feeling like this?   I ask myself if its me, what have I done wrong to have these invasive feelings? Perhaps I get up too early and work until too late and get so tired I sleep standing up? If thats the case then why do I feel as if I am never getting enough done? Perhaps I'm not cut out for this? Blogging, exposing, teaching, publicly crafting, publicising, dreaming, creating, hoping, wanting, writing, searching. Perhaps things need to be quieter, gentler, simpler, less 'big'? There is no time to fit it all in. I can't drink any more coffee and I can't set my alarm any earlier. I just feel small and my bottom lip keeps trembling.

I saw my doctor the other day with regards to my pesky hip, it keeps having spasms, spasms of pain. I like my doctor, she's......hmmmmm, what is she?......level, my doctor is level. I was feeling very discouraged that day because I knew that she was going to suggest physio and my first thought was "I don't have time!!!" We chatted and got on to a conversation about somebody in the press recently. I commented on how if we all were to realise that in fact each one of us were the same we'd be ever such a lot happier. She looked at me and said that she thought that was a truism if ever there was one.

So in effect if I believe what I said then I would be able to take great comfort in knowing that we all have bubble bath bubble days. You may lie on the couch or stare out of the car window. You may lay in the bath or sit at your sewing machine. I lay in our guest room, not for very long mind you, just long enough to .....well, to think.

And then I get up and get on, sometimes feeling a little better and sometimes not at all. I guess that's what I like about Madonna, she gets up and gets on, not always partaking in something I would do personally (although I do love her in a pink leotard) but she gets up and she gets on. Whereas the bubble bath bubble, well thats gone and its not coming back.

Cx

He Seemed To Know What Was Needed & That Was To Follow The Sun

Good lord, what a week last week was. It was FANBLOODYTASTIC on many levels but I ended it by eating a bowl of pasta on the sofa and falling asleep at about 8.15pm on Friday night without ever really feeling the benefit of the fire that LBH had made in the hearth. Although I did wake up SUPER HOT and rather red of face before taking myself off to bed at around 10pm so I suppose I got something from it.

Last week was a week of meetings and tests. I'm very lucky to be building relationships with people in the television industry and find that they are as passionate and as practical as I am. I think that sometimes the industry can be given bad press as a place of insincerity but as long as you're not unrealistic I think that its possible to  forge working relationships with folk from every (within reason) industry and there is a lot to be excited about no matter what happens.

I also took my driving test - and passed.

I had been driving around for AGES, years in fact, but I always had to have someone in the car with me. This was never really a problem when I lived in London and had public transport of all types on my doorstep but now we're out in the sticks its a touch more problematic. I also want and NEED to see those babies whenever I can so it suddenly became important to pass my test.

I gave up fear in 2007 and taking this blasted test was one of the last bastions of fear that still intruded upon my life. No longer. It's over, passed. My first solo flight was over to Jo-Jo's to see the girls and now I'm free as a bird. Of course this DOES NOT mean that I shall be throwing carbon into the air willy nilly and will continue my love of WALKING into town but it does help, it really does.

So, getting back to the point of this post, after a week that was pretty taxing on my mind if not my body LBH did what he does best. He knew what was needed, when it was needed and made sure that it happened. On Saturday morning this happened to be a walk in the countryside near to our town and in temperatures of approximately zero.

As we walked we watched the sun rise higher and higher until it met us, head on as we turned down a path which lead back to the car.......

....and in passing took us by a field that implored me to yell "Oh England, my England"!!!!!

Although I didn't as LBH spotted some bunnies just in time and my mind was distracted by the site of their little white fluffy bottoms hopping across the landscape.

I'm not sure whether it was the freezing temperatures or the surroundings but this early walk worked. It jolted my brain back into gear from meetings and projects and dreams of the future to what was needed from me right now. This was companionship for LBH, dedication to my business and my home and to the other work that I do.

I don't want to sound glib when I say that I gave up fear in 2007 as I know, deep in my soul, how debilitating fear of all sorts of things can be. But the fear of what may or may not happen was taking up more time than dealing with the things that actually were happening. Its not that I don't care about the future its just that I know that no matter what does happen, eventually, it will all be OK. Those truffles in my pockets appear to be doing a good job!

Cx

Dusters At Dawn

It was all set to be a pretty good end to the day. I had been running around for most of it and now, late in the afternoon, I was settled and began to bake some pink fairy cakes as I'll be having a visit from Jo-Jo and the monkey doodles tomorrow. All I had to do was make sure I was in the house for when the man from the damp company arrived. I was in when the man from the damp company arrived and so was he .......IN A BAD MOOD!!!!!

I wasn't quite sure what was happening at first as he seemed fine. I told him briefly about our damp situation and how we were told that we had damp on one wall before we moved in and that now we had decided to pull up the hideous dark orange tile that currently resides on our kitchen floor we thought we really should get it dealt with. So far so good. He said that needed to do a quick sketch of the "downstairs living area", I asked him if I could let him get on with it and it all seemed OK. I switched the Kitchen Aid on to continue with my cake mixture and thought nothing of it.

It wasn't until he came back into MY KITCHEN and I very innocently and in a 'simply trying to make conversation  because you are in MY KITCHEN' way that I asked him if it was very damp, as opposed to just a little bit, that he said "If you don't mind not asking me questions like that until I have finished doing my checks"

Err........O.K.
I looked at him slightly incredulously but he was already far too busy trying to get out of MY BACK DOOR, which was locked. It was at this point that Mr Damp Man asked me just how the people who had told us that our back wall was damp knew that it was damp when it had kitchen cupboards all along it. To which I replied that they must have done the test from the outside. You'd have thought that I'd suggested that his mother come round for supper and I cook her boiled eyeball and scrotum stew because the DISDAIN with which he said "If it had happened to have been raining when they did the test an outside wall is going to show up as damp, ISN'T IT?????"

At this point my entire face dropped and I put my 'dead eyes' in. LBH has been known to mutter "Oh God" when I have put my dead eyes in and I was fast approaching a point when this angry, young damp man was going to be seen FLYING across my town with butter-cream filling all over his red head.

His entire attitude was one of utter rudeness. His company may not need the business, who knows, but unless they come back and say they'll do the work for a tenner then they're not getting it from us.

The best bit happened when he was about to go. He had finished asking all of his questions and the visit had come to it's natural end. So I stuck my hand out, as all polite people do, to shake his. In return he hugged his "folder" to his chest and left me standing there with my arm extended while he proceeded to tell me that they could email me the report if I'd like to tell him the best address. Well, when I told him my email address cherry (at) cherry menlove dot com, WHICH IS MY NAME, he seemed to get the 'Cherry' bit easily..........and then the punk started on my surname!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Let me tell you something, I grew up with kids teasing me over my surname every day of my life. I love it now as it's mine and it's part of me, it represents my family and I'm proud of it. So when Mr Damp Man convulses into FITS OF GIGGLES when I have to SPELL OUT my surname to him before he can manage to write it down I almost had a fit.

You see that big pink blob of butter-cream filling, sitting atop my palette knife?

I'll leave the rest up to your imagination...............................................

Thoroughly Modern Weekend

This past weekend LBH and I went to stay in Shropshire with LBH's mum, Precious Sue. It was a good thing to be able to sit in a house and not look around and stare at the things you wanted change or needed to be fixed, do you know what I mean?

It was also nice as we were able to fit in a short visit to Much Wenlock.  It was lovely to walk around
on a fresh Saturday morning and see the whole village going about its business the way villages know how.

I have a romanticised view of all things nostalgic and anything thats drenched in community. I'm whole heartedly unabashed by this quality and therefore take great delight when I see people in line waiting to be served at the local butchers.

The iconic red letter box. So many of the darling red phone boxes have been sold off to private collectors and I understand why when we all have phones in our pockets but if it had been up to me I would have turned them all in to honesty boxes and sold local produce from them. I told you I was a romantic!

Now this is something I love. We have the opportunity to have our milk delivered in our town and I think I may speak to LBH about using the service. There is nothing like hearing the milkman arrive, especially when you've used the last drop the night before.

We buy our milk from locally sourced cows and milk is something we always make sure is organic, but that old romantic streak is rearing its head again.

We also paid a visit to one of my favourite bookstores in the land. I bought a book that I have devoured since buying it and as I handed over my card to complete the purchase the owner of the store handed me a card of her own. She asked me to drop her an email when I had finished the book, telling her what I thought. I shall and I shall also post my thoughts on this tale here on the blog.

That segue brings me nicely to a decision I have made about my little fledging book club. I came to realise that if I was under pressure to read a book by a certain date I didn't enjoy it nearly half as much. The last book we chose, Pride & Prejudice, was glanced at over the Christmas period with the thought "Oh, I HAVE to get around to reading that!" instead of "Where's my book??"

In short, I have decided to blog about the books I have read, here at Pixie Wood, and if you have read them or read them at a later date I would dearly love to know what you thought of them. I'm not concerned with the fact that I am calling a halt to my book club only three books in, the real crime would have been to have had the idea and not done anything with it.

I'm taking my book and my romantic head off to finish up some bits and pieces for my shop. I like the way its coming on, even if it is a little slow. I've also managed to squeeze in a little designer work and am working on a spiffy new logo and colour scheme for all things 'website'. If you see random changes taking place do not fear, the gremlins have not taken over, its just me, fiddling, fiddling and fiddling again.

Cherry xoxox

My Current View

I'd like to start this post by thanking you all for all of your wonderful, encouraging comments with regards to the magazine article that came out featuring our house last week. It shouldn't, but it always bowls me over when so many people take time out of their days simply to say "well done" to somebody they haven't even met! Thankyouthankyouthankyou!

I shall be re-reading all of them over the next few days as I won't be moving form the position you see me residing in in the above picture. I shall explain. Here, as in most places at the moment, it is Christmastime. In my world that means that throughout the month of December there are more parties to go to than usual. I went to a party last night in fact. At said party I was having a wonderful time, flinging myself around the dance-floor with abandon and generally exorcising a whole bunch of stress and business to the sounds of classic WHAM!

I'm not sure exactly what was playing when it all came to an abrupt halt for me but one thing is certain, it got my attention. All of a sudden I just knew that something had gone and then I felt searing pain. Having met with my doctor this morning it turns out it was my right hip bone. It decided that last night was as good a night as any to pop out and then immediately pop back in again. Hence the feeling of utter shock that coursed through my body followed by red hot poker pain.

I DIDN'T EVEN KNOW THAT COULD HAPPEN, I'M ONLY THIRTY TWO!!!!!!!!!

WAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!

It's infuriating. I'm incapacitated and already bored. I have a stick to help me hobble about and pain killers that are so strong they make you feel that you've done NOTHING wrong ........and then they wear off and you pray for the clock to tick until you can take another.

So that's me for the next five days or so. Sofa girl. Settee sitter. Bored blogger. Not allowed to get on with the things that she needs to. Grizzle Girl. Moaning Minnie. Tucking into the chocolates out of sheer boredom.

You get it, right?

But I have to say that already I know why it's important to take life a little slower some days even if the pace is forced upon you. This morning the pain was so severe that even though I was laying almost diagonally in the bed I couldn't have moved even I had wanted to. I asked LBH to open the curtains to the bedroom and I lay there as the room went from dark to winters morning light. I got to watch the sun come up. I saw the smoke from all the fires being lit across town curl up and out of the chimney tops and disappear across the watery sky. I took in the shapes of the oak tree branches that resides outside my window, now bare and free from any leaves. Boo slept and eventually my fairy godmother of a mother arrived and took over my house for a day.

So yes I'm bored and super dooper sore but I got to see the sun come up on a winters morning and observed as the town was brought to life by the warmth of the fires that were being lit inside the houses and that was enough for one day.

Thanks hip bone, you naughty bugger you and thank you to the person who invented the laptop. Does anybody know if this person has been awarded either the Nobel Prize or any kind of service to humanity award?!?!?!?!!

;-)

Cherry x

Autumn Supper

Do you not find that weekends crammed with events and things that have been planned make the weekend seem altogether longer somehow? I do. This past weekend was full to the brim, but I enter Monday with the sense of having done so much. I like that. I also like the other sort of weekend which means that LBH and I do nothing but veg and eat so it's handy that we have one of those coming up.

Anyway, Friday started rather early. This time of morning is still so magical to me. We have lived here for over 6 months but I love to peek my head out the door and take a look at all that is occurring in the morning light. That evening we were having folk over for an early bonfire night supper before wandering down into town to watch the fireworks and marvel at the bonfire. So, as you can imagine, there was a lot to be done.

First off I prepped some of the glass jars that I have been collecting for my lantern project. It turns out that you need many, many jars to make the mystical impact that I am looking for, so I'm glad that I have been collecting every jar I come across. But, the good thing about this project is that it is a great way to re-cycle glass and they last, if you look after them, forever! That has to be worth the effort.

Once I had finished painting the soon to be lanterns (I'll post the tutorial for anyone whose interested soon!) I raced to the supermarket, picked up all the ingredients for the supper that I was working on and the work in the kitchen commenced.

Baking on a Friday afternoon is something that makes me so happy. I had Classic FM going in the background while the mixer did it's thing. I was trying out a chocolate cake recipe that I had never tried before and mixing it with a frosting recipe that, again, I had never tried before. But I felt like a culinary Harry Potter in my kitchen that afternoon. Switching this measurement for that one and adding a touch more of this than was written in the recipe. All was well inside and it was my responsibility to take care of people that night, making sure that they were fed and watered.

As soon as it was dark enough my mother and I began to put the lanterns that I had managed to finish out the front of the house to be lit. We placed them at different heights on the logs and the bench and the wall. Little glowing embers, hopefully working as a warm welcome to my home on a cold November night.

We popped some more tea-lights onto the windowsill to light the frame. It looks cosy in there.

I don't think that there are enough lanterns out there so I shall continue to squirrel away the glass jars. But you can see what I'm trying to do with them, no? We have steps up to our front door so I'd certainly love to have them littering each step by the time Christmas rolls around.

By this time people were starting to arrive and they needed to be fed with bread and lashings of butter, chili -con-carne and the aforementioned chocolate cake.......

And then, once the tummies were full, it was time to go to the event. We made sure that Boo was safe and sound inside and told her not to worry a jot about the loud bangs she would be hearing over the next couple of hours. She seemed to understand.

We made our way through the streets and down into the town. We crossed the town bridge, all the while keeping our eyes and ears out for the sound of fireworks. This being our first Bonfire Night since living in the town we weren't quite sure of where it was being held.

We needn't have worried. As soon as they began the show the lights and sounds lit up the black night and we all gazed upwards towards the sky. Shows of this sort rarely go on for longer than a few minutes and before we knew it it was over.

Mmmmmmm.....what to do next? Some went to the pub for a good old fashioned pint while some of us went back for more chocolate cake. I was in the latter group, it had been a long day after all.........

Have a wonderful week and don't forget to check out www.cherrymenlove.com for all the latest news and postings.

Cx

Let's Go Outside

Come and join me on my bench. It's a nice bench and there is more than enough room for us. I have retrieved my winter quilt, as I do every year when the temperature drops and can now be found occasionally residing outside the front of the house. The crocheted shawl that LBH's great aunt Violet gave to me when we last visited her in Zurich acts as a rather romantic part of my costume and a good pal when it gets SUPER chilly.

I enjoy being out front. It appeals to the nosey side of my nature as I can watch folk come and go. I'm a big fan of saying hello to people as they walk by and have leapt into getting to know the people in our street as much as time will allow. So far they are all truly lovely and that's nice.

I picked up this wooden wheelbarrow while thrifting in the late summer. It holds a solitary pumpkin and a rather poor excuse for a witches broomstick but I hope to remedy that this week. You see, I have discovered a love for decorating the front garden that is rather addictive. I feel very fortunate as we appear to be living in a street where the chances of my wheelbarrow or other decorative accouterments being stolen are rather slim so I feel tremendously free to continue making little scenes and scenarios for folk to eye suspiciously as they wander by. In England we don't, as a rule, decorate the outside of our houses in the same way as people do in, say, the USA. Don't get me wrong, people take great pride in their gardens but the decorating is usually saved for Christmas time. I am a huge fan of celebrating EVERYTHING and can usually find even the tiniest excuse to celebrate something  and therefore translate this celebratory excitement into something new to do to the outside of the house. I think LBH finds this a little extreme, but is slowly getting used to the colonisation of every inch of the house by me and my flights of decorative fancy.

I'm just so taken by the beautiful, clear and watery bright days that we are having at the moment, so it seems a shame to waste them by being indoors when I can snuggle up and be out of doors.

I'm beyond caring about people thinking that it's odd to be sitting on a bench, wrapped up in a quilt while reading in my front garden. This is a newly found freedom, I hasten to add, as most of my mistakes in adult life have always been caused by worrying about what people may think but when it comes to tiny, joyful activities such as this it really is worth the odd look of "Bloody hell, what is she doing? Odd bod!!"

As you can see by it's early appearance so soon after being chosen, our book club book is being read at a terrific rate. Ohhhhhh, how I love it already. Ohhhhhhh, how I love it. Lets try to wrap this book up in about three weeks time. That should give folk who still haven't ordered their copy a chance to get one.

Have a lovely week one and all. May it be filled with bright moments of clarity and lingering moments of peace. A touch of the flutters wouldn't go amiss either!

Cherry

PS
I loved hearing your own suggestions for autumnal movie watching and of course should have added Pride & Prejudice (Colin Firth version) and You Got Mail (love Meg's clothes in that movie) to my list. Doh!!! In the end I fell asleep on the sofa before I managed to put a DVD into the player and then LBH came in, woke me up and we had a chat.

A chat.

Goodness, I always get such a longing in my heart when Sunday night rolls around and I know that I won't really see him again for another week. Which begs the question...why am I still at the computer when I can go downstairs and engage him in one last chat before the week really kicks in? If you'll forgive me I'll be off now........Cx

After The Close Up, We Cosy Up!

Yesterday was such terrific fun! As you can see I had huge lights in my living room and there were two men in the house also. What on earth would the neighbours think?

Yesterday, I did what was effectively a screen test. I adore watching the screen tests of all the old Hollywood movie stars and my all time favourite one to catch on the television is Audrey Hepburn's. She is talking to the man behind the camera about the war and how the German's didn't know about or realise how her family were getting it's food. At one point in the test her face creates the most deliciously beautiful expression. It's then that they would have been able to tell a movie star was in their midst.

Mine was certainly not taking place in Hollywood but was a tremendous giggle all the same. We shot me baking and cooking and chatting and crafting and even doing a spot of gardening (which was foolish as unbeknown to anybody but me I had put my back out the week before , just moments before the Rugby started!). But you know, the show must go on and although we did far more than I was ever expecting , I found myself chirping about the house feeling remarkably relaxed.

My Dad asked me how it all went and how I was feeling after the day, as my parents knew about my back, I said it was all great fun and I totally enjoyed the day but that I also knew, after having been disappointed by many a theatrical audition, that I was to take it all in my stride and treat it as the most fun I have had in ages. Which was totally & utterly true.

After all, as soon as the camera has been packed away and the lighting taken down it's just me and my pyjama bottoms, on the couch waiting for LBH to return home. I ate a bowl of home-cooked apple & pear crumble last night while thinking about what movie to watch. I had almost settled on Manhattan and then LBH called to say he'd be home in a jiffy and that was the end of my Woody Allen night. But it got me thinking, after SUCH a glamorous day, which for the sake of my back has to now be followed by a sedentary weekend, what are my all time favourite 'Autumn Weekend Staying on the Sofa' movies? Well, it was a tough one, but I think I have it narrowed to a few.

Whaddaya think of ........

Mona Lisa Smile

Funny Face

Dead Poets Society

Moonstruck

Annie Hall

They are my pick for the way I feel right now. A little chilly, a lotta tired, an even more amount of twingeee in the lower back area and a whole heap of cosy. Now where did I put that last bottle of Prosecco?........if those naughty television boys drank it.....why I.........!!!!!!!!!

;-)

Have a wonderful weekend.

Cx