Moving on

Cherryfudge

Thank you everyone! The journey went fine yesterday: DH collected his new medication on the way but is feeling well so hasn’t needed it. We drove through rain and low cloud: not something I’ve seen in months! And now, while England is apparently either having a heatwave or about to have one, it’s just pleasant sunny weather here.

We arrived late tea time and we don’t appear to have forgotten anything this time around. Despite the house where we’re staying being closed up and having thick stone walls, it’s all comfortable without the heating on. The garden’s got very overgrown but we’re leaving that for them: my sister says it will be good experience for her daughter (moving back soon) to ‘open up’ a house. That says a lot about their lives: I did try to explain to her that she and I are perhaps in the minority in that we’ve ‘opened up’ empty places a few times, though I think it’s common enough for people with second homes (they live most of the year abroad due to work, and we’ve both had the clearing of our parents’ house to attend to).

We popped down to the local supermarket yesterday evening for a few bits of cleaning stuff: there had been mice in the kitchen! All cleaned up now. It was funny because there was an empty pasta packet on a nearly-empty shelf with a neat hole and absolutely no pasta. Another bag had just been started - but how odd that they’d cleared out the C0op but barely touched T.sco.

Expenditure:
Parking £2
Fuel £33.67
Housekeeping: £16.61

Cherryfudge

I woke up quite early today but that gave me an opportunity to give the kitchen a further clean. It was a quiet morning but eventually we wandered into town to check out our usual
places. The larger charity shop obligingly had a couple of tops I liked and some nice books for the grandchildren, but the tiny charity shop was a bit busy and nothing caught my eye apart from some recipe books, which I didn’t get as they didn’t shout my name loudly enough.

There is a little deli which has bargainaceous fruit and veg: I was tempted but we stuck to what we felt was reasonable. The antique shops were superb: the sort of treasure caverns you used to get in England but which are hard to find now. I bought a couple of antique china cups, possibly mid-nineteenth century and only £2 each. No, I don’t know where I’m going to put them but they are lovely.

The hardware shop, which is usually another treasure trove, was playing loud music so we didn’t really look round. There wasn’t anything we actually needed so it wasn’t worth enduring the noise.

Talking of noise - I heard bagpipes! Now to make sense of this I need to explain that there’s a lot of difference between the acoustics of a densely packed shop with speakers overhead and the sound of live music in the open air. There was a pipe band and a ‘ride out’: lots of horses, beautifully turned out and clearly very proud of themselves, being ridden through the town. There was crowd watching but it all dispersed afterwards.

We got fish and chips for lunch then I fell asleep for a couple of hours. I guess that compensates for the early start. Afterwards we had a walk in the local countryside with great views and plenty of sheep. There were so many wild flowers along the path: Rosa rugosa and briar roses, purple and yellow vetches, buttercups, creeping toadflax, honeysuckle and others I didn’t know. 

My sister told me to help myself from the abundance of alpine strawberries in the garden so I will do that when the pollen levels drop!

We needed bread and milk so called into the supermarket again after tea. I found a small watermelon marked down to 86p and a tiny butternut squash with an obscure label that looked as if it said 15p - but it wouldn’t scan so the cashier said ‘I’ll give you that’ and added it to our paid items!

Expenditure: 
Clothing £5.20
Gifts £2
Hobbies £2
Phone data £8.50?
Housekeeping: £21.49 (fish, chips and mushies came to £12).