Can you guess where I've been the last couple of weeks?

I'll give you a few clues...

Mmmmmmm!!

There's a naked man on this one if you look closely!! ;-)



Finally... a white cross on a black flag.

Have you guessed?

little onion pot

A birthday present from my mum and dad. I fell in love with him when we visited an antique centre months and months ago, and they remembered and went back for him :-) I have a thing about making objects into little characters. I really want to play with some of these from paperchase. I am always seeing faces in things.

Tomorrow I am off on an adventure. So I'm signing off for a while but I will be back with tales to tell hopefully. Bye for now!

another year older

Definitely more wrinkles than last year but no point obsessing over them! I had a lovely time on my birthday. For the first time in years we went to pizza hut for lunch where we had the tastiest pizza ever. Now usually I prefer thin base pizzas but this time we had a deep pan and ohhhhhhh it was delicious! I interrogated the waitress as to how they make them so tasty but she wouldn't tell me! Said it was a secret. I think it would be worth getting a job there just to find out!

The other real high point of the day was this amazing place. Tell me if I'm wrong but I'm pretty sure this is where they filmed the recent newspaper advert with the little boy pressing his hand up against the glass as a shark swims past. I tried to get Mr P to reenact it but he was too shy!

The tunnel where you can stand on the conveyor belt is amazing to go through. I loved seeing the fish swimming in shoals around us.

Mr P kept pretending to be eaten by the sharks. Can't take him anywhere ;-)

I laugh every time I look at this!

In the evening Mr P had booked a table at a swanky restaurant not far from where we live but we both admitted later that it hadn't been half as good as pizza hut! I know pizza is very calorific, but after eating onion soup which was literally a bowlful of cream with onion flavouring and gruyere I thought I would have to spend 3 hours on the dance mat the next day to burn it off!

So here I am, a little bit older. More comfortable in my own skin, more aware of who I am and that's it's ok not to be perfect and perfectly fine to make mistakes. It's all just a series of experiences, good and bad. I like to think when something bad happens that to balance things up something good will happen at a later date, especially when you have a run of bad luck. Like yin and yang. My french teacher used to say you make your own luck and I suppose that's true to a certain extent but you can't control everything. So that's how I deal with it. Incidentally I don't spend my life worrying that if things are great something will go wrong! That wouldn't work at all! Hopefully this will be a great year. There are some exciting things planned already!

Listen to me rambling on! Anyway, have a lovely weekend everyone whatever you're up to. :-)

a long weekend

Well the weather was a bit pants for the bank holiday weekend but we decided to ignore it and make the best of it which resulted in us getting a bit wet but didn't stop us from having fun.

We've driven past the cotebrook shire horse centre loads of times and put it on the list of things to do one day... well that day was bank holiday monday.

We were expecting to see lots of shire horses but there was so much more there and the setting was so lovely. Like a rural idyll.




We were lucky to see the farriers in action. When they were putting the new shoes on the horse the smell of burning hoof was intense. Of course the horse didn't seem to mind but the poor lad with the horse's foot between his legs kept getting a facefull of steamy smoke. Bleurghh!!! The photo below makes me laugh... he probably needed a very long shower before his girlfriend would go near him!

Lots of different characters in the hen house. I would love to keep some hens! Definitely one day!


Lots of cute baby birds and bunnies.

And of course, lots of shire horses! Shire horses are such gentle giants. This one was having a bit of a stretch like a dog does and it made us giggle.


The pub next door has a lovely atmosphere and there was a cozy fire crackling away to keep us warm. It's a proper old traditional country pub, just how I love them the most. I giggled at the photos on the wall of shire horses waiting to be served at the bar!! I think we'll have to go back here for tea sometime.

As I love making lists, some other things we did over the weekend:

• a day out in chester... window shopping mostly
• a bit of gardening
• feeling really really lucky to have a pair of redpolls visiting the bird feeders again
• cake baking
• drinking cider and dancing around to a great local band called the cheeky monkeys
• chatting with friends
• a spot of decorating
• watching amelie... again!
• planning a camping trip for the summer
• getting excited about my birthday, more about this later!!

Bye for now!