Spring finally springs...

Isn't this weather absolutely bloody marvellous?  You know it can't last, don't you?  I mean, this is Britain we're talking about here.  This'll probably be it now - it'll start raining tomorrow and that'll take us through until the clocks go back.

But it's jolly bloody lovely while it's here.  And how are you all, my lovelies?  I'm doing exceedingly well, actually.  The swifts have arrived for the summer, which always perks me up, and that, combined with the sunshine, means I'm feeling remarkably cheery!

We had a nice family get-together this past Sunday - it was a sort of joint birthday beano to celebrate my 50th that was on 23 April, and my mother's 75th which is today (Happy birthday, mum!!)  Just a small gathering of immediate family with lots of lovely food, and it's always a great joy to me to see my brother and his family, and see how his kids are growing up.  We decided to walk off the humungous lunch by taking the kids to the nearby playground, which wasn't there when Chris (my brother) and I were growing up.  We just had to make do with the field (the 'rec', as we called it), the nearby swimming pool and the very tiny old-fashioned playground nearby that just had swings, a wooden slide (yes, wooden!) and a lethal Witches Hat thing that looked like this but which has now been banned due to health & safety concerns:

But a great deal of money has been spent on it now and it's brilliant.  All that was missing was an outdoor cafe where parents could sit and have a coffee while keeping an eye on their kids.

Even we had a go - this rather dark picture is my brother having climbed to the top of this dodecahedron-shaped climbing wall, being photographed by his eldest daughter:



And today I decided to pop back over to my mother's to take her some flowers for her birthday and also to pick up my brand new shiny incinerator so I can start burning things again (bwahahaha!!), and I got home to notification that my very own Fuggler has been "constructed, restrained and sent on its way" to me!!  You remember I told you about Fugglers?  Back in this post - they're psychotic-looking handmade stuffed 'things', often carrying flick knives or small axes and always sporting alarmingly realistic human teeth, and I think they're genius (wish I'd thought of them...)

What else?  Oh yeah, TLH and I have been doing the 5:2 Fast diet since mid March - this is the diet where you eat normally (more or less) for 5 days a week, then on 2 days you restrict your calorie intake to about a quarter of what you would normally eat, so 500 cals for women, 600 for men.  I've lost about 8lbs and TLH has lost at least 14lbs and more like 20lbs.  It's a very easy diet to do and because you're only restricting your calories for two days a week, it's not much of a hardship because you can still eat what you normally would on the other 5 days.  So we still have curries and fish and chips and bottles of wine and chocolate, just not on 2 days of the week!  The weight comes off slowly (unless you're TLH, that is) at the rate of about 1lb a week and you will fluctuate but the other health benefits you gain from this are almost more important than losing the weight.  You can, of course, do more fasting days per week if you want to lose weight more quickly, but that might be counterproductive in that you'll feel more restricted and 'punished' (if you know what I mean).  You can also watch what you eat a bit more on the days you're not fasting (which is sort of what we've done) and also increase your exercise (which is what TLH has done - he's run a total of 19 miles over the last 3 days!)  Today is one of my fast days (the other is Thursday) and so far all I've had is a boiled egg and a single slice of unbuttered Ryvita with a cup of tea with skimmed milk for breakfast; a cup of low calorie instant hot chocolate over at my mother's (who is also doing the diet and has lost over 10lbs)); and a small pickled gerkhin at about lunchtime.  It's now 2.35pm and I'm feeling a little peckish so will probably have a cup of tea when I've finished this and go and find something else to do.  Dinner tonight will be chicken breasts stuffed with very low fat creme fraiche with lots and lots of herbs (tarragon, chives and mint) which have been baked on a bed of leeks and cabbage.  No fat, no carbs, very low calorie and extremely tasty.  Tomorrow I will be eating as normal.  Then Thursday will start will a breakfast of half a tub of very low fat cottage cheese with 100gm of raspberries - yum!

The downside is that you do have to be very conscientious about calorie counting, and therefore weighing food, on the two fasting days but a set of electronic kitchen scales helps together with the MyFitnessPal smartphone app.  We've both been very pleased with the results so far - TLH is going to need some new trousers before long because the ones he's got are just not staying up anymore!

And I've finished yet another flower painting, one I'm really very pleased with, but I'll do a separate post about that.

So I hope everything's copacetic in your corner of the planet as well!!

Achievement unlocked - half century attained!

 **Warning - gratuitous overuse of the word 'lovely' in the following post.  Apologies in advance**

Yesterday was eventful at Jones Towers.

I turned 50.  I'm not entirely sure how it's happened but I don't seem to have done anything more than just staying alive for the requisite number of years.  And there's been at least one occasion when that might not have happened.  But here I am, made it to 50 years and one day.

I don't feel 50 at all, more like 25.  And, rather gratifyingly, there was more than one Facebook comment yesterday expressing surprise that I'm as old as I am, which was rather lovely and good for the self-esteem.

A friend asked me how it felt to have reached half-a-hundred years old - I told her I wasn't sure yet but the beautiful weather has helped a lot and, frankly, being 50 is better than the alternative.  Sadly I know a few too many people who didn't manage to make it this far, through illness or stupidity, so, on the whole, I'm really quite pleased to just keep buggering on.

It was a quiet birthday - about a year ago I was pondering whether to try and have a 50th birthday party, but then realised (and this isn't a self-pitying whine, I'm just stating a fact) that I don't really have that many friends and most of my relations live a long way away and just wouldn't be able to afford hotel accommodation, etc., so there was no point in having a bash.  Which, actually, I'm okay about, because I would have only stressed about it to an enormous degree and, consequently, not enjoyed it much!

Yesterday was, of course, a work day which meant that The Lovely Husband was out at meetings all day, so I would have to entertain myself.  My mother rang to sing 'happy birthday' down the phone at me, which was lovely - she and my step-dad are off to visit relatives in Holland so I won't be seeing her until the beginning of May when she'll give me the incinerator that she got for my birthday!

Yep, that's right - one of those shiny galvanised metal dustbins with a small chimney on the top.  Absolutely awesome for burning garden prunings in.  The one she bought me for my birthday several years ago (do you detect a theme here?) has now practically rusted into dust and I really couldn't think of anything that I absolutely needed when she asked, apart from a new one of those, so that's what I'm getting!

She did, though, also get me a surprise orchid which she gave to me last week.  I collect orchids as I seem to be able to keep them alive quite successfully by pretty much ignoring them - always useful in a plant, I find.  I'm now restricting myself to only getting unusual colour combinations because I've got white ones and pink ones and pale purpley ones and scented ones, but she found a very pretty pink and green striped one that I found a purple glass orchid jar to put in, and it's now happily with the others on my windowsill:



.

I had a few birthday cards in the post, my very favourite of which came from The Lovely Husband:



And, as I mentioned, lots of lovely birthday wishes from Facebook friends and relations, which made me feel very smiley.

As it's a 'big' birthday, this means a 'big' birthday present from my beloved.  For my last big birthday, 10 years ago now,  I got the most stunning 5-stone diamond ring.  So, for this one, and knowing my love of sparkly bling and that diamonds are always the answer when asked 'what do you want for your birthday?', my fabulous man got me a pair of diamond solitaire stud earrings, totalling 1 carat (i.e., half a carat each).  *screams*  I KNOW!!!!  How utterly, gobsmackingly wonderful is that?

For the last 10 years or so I've been wearing a pair of Diamonique (i.e., good quality cubic zirconia) stud earrings but now I've got the real thing!  Plus this means that when the Zombie Apocalypse arrives and the Petrol Wars cause civilisation to fail, I've now got portable wealth that can come with us when we flee to safety!  Hooray!

I've also bought myself a Fuggler.  Yes, that's right, a psychotic, flick-knife wielding 'teddy bear' with fake human teeth.  Because who could resist this face - I know I can't:

Should you decide you can't live without your very own Fuggler, then hurry on over to Mrs McGettrick's Fuggler Emporium on Etsy, and adopt one of your very own!  I first saw the Fugglers on the intertubes about a year ago and they touched my blackened, stoney heart so much that I decided I would order one for my 50th, and so it has come to pass.  I'll show you pictures when he arrives.

Birthdays also mean a good meal out and we decided to try somewhere we've not been before - a rather fancy Italian restaurant in Godalming called La Luna.  We're not massive fans of your usual Italian food - far too much emphasis on tomatoes, pasta and pizza for our liking - but we're aware that there is good Italian food out there, you just have to find it.  And La Luna has the reputation of being a really good restaurant, if a little pricey, but, hey, you don't turn 50 every day!

I'm going to do a Katyboo here and give you a restaurant review!

We were surprised to find the place about three-quarters full, which isn't bad for a Tuesday evening, when we got there for 7.30pm.  Nice interior, dark wood floor and tables, mushroom coloured walls, lighting not too bright.  Proper Italian waiters too.  Only slightly odd touch was that the music being played was Nirvana!  But the menu was fantastic.

This is the sort of proper Italian restaurant where it's naturally expected that you will eat four courses - Antipasti (starters), Primi (pasta), Secondi (main), and Dolci (puds).  Which is exactly what we did as it would've been rude not to.

We had a couple of gin and tonics to start off with.  Then for antipasti I had the Calamari Fritti (squid rings in tempura batter) which came with a little pot of parsley pesto and mayonnaise for dipping.  It was good - the calamari rings, although quite chunky, weren't at all chewy.  TLH had beer battered zucchine with a tomato guazzetto dip - this was long thin pieces of courgette which had been battered and deep fried, with an utterly delicious tomato and basil dipping sauce.  I have to say his dip had more flavour than mine, but as we tend to eat communally and share everything, we each got to enjoy both dishes.

For our Primi course, we ordered small dishes of pasta - I had the orecchiette (ear-shaped!) pasta with pancetta, broccoli, chilli & garlic.  It was ok but the flavours could have been a bit more robust, I think.  Beautifully cooked and the pasta was properly al dente.  TLH had the Neapolitan spaghetti with king prawn, courgette, and basil pesto - his tasted quite basil-y to me, which isn't a bad thing at all, and he said his king prawns were yummy.

For Secondi, I ordered the Pan fried halibut supreme, with capers & Amalfi lemon sauce and steamed samphire but they didn't have halibut that day, it was Turbot instead, which was fine by me.  TLH had the South Downs rump of lamb, minted broad bean & courgette, with Bagna cauda (Piedmontese hot dip sauce).  The lamb was cooked using the sous vide method which involves putting the meat into an airtight vacuum sealed plastic bag and cooking it in a hot water bath for many hours in order to retain as much taste as possible.  It did look amazing - lean and slightly pink in the middle, soft and easy to cut.  The Bagna Cauda sauce was a belter too.  My fish was very nice but, again, I think I somehow managed to order a dish with subtle flavours rather than something a bit more gutsy.  We ordered a side dish of steamed spinach with chilli and garlic (no spuds for us at the moment) which was, frankly, the best spinach I've ever eaten (and we always order it if it's on the menu).

Finally, for the Dolci course, I had 3 scoops of homemade Italian sorbet; one each of lemon, raspberry and pear.  This was utterly orgasmic.  Strong, zingy flavours and the pear sorbet was totally to die for.  TLH had the Madagascan Vanilla Panna Cotta, with rhubarb compote which he also thought was incredibly good.

We were very good and only had one bottle of red to accompany the lot, and didn't bother with coffee because, well, TLH doesn't like Italian coffee very much and I don't tend to drink very much coffee anyway.

We were right royally stuffed and agreed it had been a very good meal indeed, and I expect we'll be back.

Then, to top it all off nicely, I got home to find that The Guardian had liked a photo I'd sent in to them in response to an assignment they'd issued to the general public so much that they wanted to publish it in a picture gallery on the front page of their online edition!  Bloody hell!  The link to the picture gallery is here and my photo is number 9, of a woodland waterfall and a pond.  It's credited to Boudicca23 in the text underneath and Kaz Jones in the bottom right - they're both me!!

And with that, we went to bed, having had no room left for the cake I'd bought earlier in the day (and which we won't now be touching until Thursday as we're both on the 5:2 Fast Diet - and doing very well - and today is a Fast day).

It was a really lovely day!

One year older but not much wiser...

At the time of my last post I was 48 years old.  I am now 49.

Yesterday a friend of mine gave me a lift to the garage to collect the Big Car from having its MOT.  In the back seat was her delightful youngest daughter, 12 year old Jamie.  Mum and I were chatting and she was telling me how her other teenage kids were astonished/horrified/sceptical of the fact that both her and their father quite often forgot how old they were.  I said that happened to me too and I frequently have to work out it from the year I was born.  Jamie piped up from the back to express her disbelief that anyone could forget how old they were - inconceivable!

I explained that once you get to about 21, the only birthdays that really matter from then on are the ones with a '0' at the end of them - 30, 40 and so on - and all the others just sort of blend into one really.  She was really surprised by that and stated that it was important to celebrate your birthday because 'you're one year older!'  Bless.  I told her that, when you get to my age, you don't actually want to be one year older.  I love her, she's such a poppet.  And I'm horrified to realise that in checking how old she actually is (I have a birthday calendar on which I've put the years people were born so I know exactly how old they are), I realised that I completely missed her birthday on 10 April!  I know why I missed it, it was slap-bang in the middle of my week of menopausal misery when I was barely capable of getting out of bed, never mind anything else.  I have just sent her a very apologetic text - I don't like missing peoples' birthdays.

So, how was mine?  It's always a tricky question for me to answer.  I always, always feel disheartened as it starts looming into view.  I've learnt over the now-49 years I've been alive that birthdays very rarely ever live up to expectations.  And I've had one or two truly horrible ones over the years.  This one wasn't too bad at all.  TLH, through no fault of his own, didn't manage to get me anything so I told him that he could pay for my drawing and painting course, and materials; his relief was palpable.  He also managed to get out of work at a reasonable time for once and took me to the refurbished The Percy Arms pub in nearby Chilworth (it was gutted by fire a couple of years ago and has just reopened) which does the best steak this side of the Atlantic.  And, yes, I had steak.  Yum yum.  He also brought home an extremely chocolatey birthday cake - hooray!

I didn't get many gifts but what I did get was fab.  My lovely mum gave me a huge box of chocolates and a most unusual orchid (I have a small collection of orchids) that is totally upright with flowers growing on each side of the stem (sorry pics are a bit murky):

And the very wonderful indeed Ms Katyboo gave me two glorious 1970s original one-disc Wedgwood Sheringham glass candlesticks in the most luscious Amethyst colour (yes, there are a pair but for some reason I only photographed one):

Beautiful, non? A few cards were received from relatives and lots of well-wishes on Facebook, and with that I entered my 50th year on the planet.

So what else has happened since I was last here?  The appalling weather has conspired to keep me indoors and out of my running shoes for over a week.  It really has been that rainy here.  Constant, bloody rain, and not just drizzle but proper heavy rain.  As a friend of mine said, 'Drought, my arse'.  Indeed.

The result of this was that I failed to do the Clandon Park Run on 21 April that I signed up for back in March.  The course is mostly cross country, across fields and through woodland.  I was envisaging Somme-like conditions and really, really didn't fancy running knee-deep through mud that had been churned up by 100+ runners in front of me, so I decided I'd give this one a miss and look for something else in the summer to do, perhaps a 5k run.  I felt incredibly guilty about not going and cross, as well.  I'd been really looking forward to doing it and had geared my training (such as it is) towards doing it, so it felt like a huge let-down to not go in the end.  But I honestly don't think I would have enjoyed it very much so hopefully it'll be to the good.

And still the rain has fallen this week - I finally managed to get to go out yesterday as, amazingly, it remained dry and even *gasp* sunny.  I decided to just go out for 2.5miles/4km but, as I've been sitting on my expanding butt all week, figured I'd push myself a bit to see if I can up my speed.  And, astonishingly, it worked!  Last week I was running at an average pace of 15:08 and 15:04 minutes per mile but yesterday managed to turn in an average pace of 14:25 minutes per mile!  And it felt like I was doing 'proper' running for the first time too, not just a shuffly-jog type thing, so there's definite improvement.

The other thing is that I've started my Drawing and Painting for Beginners adult education course.  It's always a bit daunting walking into a room of people who already know each other, but everyone seemed pretty friendly and I'm quite good at bluffing bonhomie to folks I don't know so it was fine.  The room was stinking hot, though, due to the fact that there had been a life drawing class in there in the morning and the model - who is, of course, nude - has to be warm!  I'd walked up a hill and then several flights of stairs to get to the class so was, rather attractively, sweating as if I was in a sauna, and continued to drip until about halfway through the class!  My next class is tomorrow and I'm going to have to dress appropriately, I think - t-shirt and sandals, no less!

Anyway, this first class involved looking at tonal shades - basically shading and shadows.  The teacher gave us all a plastic ball and got us to look at where the light was falling on it and where it was darkest, and how the shadows fell, etc.  She got us to have a go at drawing it first without any instruction from her, then she would talk us through the tips that a 'proper' artist uses and guide us through a second, more directed, go at drawing it, to show us the difference.

This was my first go (again, apologies for the darkness of the images, they were taken with my phone, but I think you get the idea):

And this was my second go:

Somewhat improved, I think.  The teacher said it was fine but a little tentative, so I think I'm going to have to get bolder with using the pencils and graphite stick.  Next class is tomorrow so I'll report back.

I think that's all the news from my little corner of Jones Towers for now, so I'll bid you adieu and will check in again when I have something even vaguely interesting to share with you all!

PS.  Every year I keep an eye out for the first sighting of Swifts and they're late this year.  2011 they arrived on 21 April, in 2010 it was 22 April.  Mind you, with this shitty weather, perhaps they've decided to stay in Africa a bit longer!

Finally did it.....sort of....

I wrote this post over a year ago.  It was a post about dying my hair properly pink.  I was umm'ing and ahh'ing about it but decided I would probably do it, when I finally plucked up the courage.

I finally plucked up the courage.  And it's sort of worked.  But, hey, look, I took pictures to show you the progress.  However, a bit of backstory first:

I decided last week that I'd had enough of shoulder length hair.  It clogs up the bath plug.  It makes the back of my neck hot which means, every summer, I have to sleep with it pinned up high on top of my head.  It takes an age to dry and I hate, hate, hate it hanging all wet and limp around my neck but I also don't like using a hairdryer.  The plus points to having long hair is that it doesn't cost you anything at the hairdresser because, um, I didn't go to a hairdresser.  When the ends got splitty or the fringe too long, I just took a pair of scissors to it myself, and job's a good 'un. Or, at least, a respectable 'un.

Having a complete restyle in a fancy schmancy salon would cost an arm and a leg but I found a friend of a friend who works in a salon during the day and does private customers (clients? patients?) after work for a very reasonable price.  So I contacted her and she came round on Wednesday this week and she hacked it all off.

In the back of my mind I'd been preparing for this, and the subsequent bleaching and dyeing, so had been growing the old colour out and letting my natural, fag-ash grey colour dominate, so that I could start from a clean slate, as it were.

Anyway, this is what it looked like before I let Hannah get her magic scissors on it:

Sort of fairly nondescript, shoulder length bob that's pink at the ends but greying on the top.

Hannah then did this to it:

And suddenly I was turned into my mother.   This is no reflection at all on Hannah's skills as I think she did a really good job, it's just, all of a sudden I seem to have developed the neck of an almost-50 year old woman which had been successfully hidden by lots of hair before, and even though I am an almost-50 year old woman, I don't really want any of her bodyparts knocking around - know what I mean?  The haircut itself was fine but I was just not sure about it.  I felt a bit 'mumsy'.

TLH arrived home, though, and decided he loved it and made me put my new sunglasses on so he could take a picture and, I must admit, it doesn't look too bad here, but then I always look better slightly out of focus:

Thursday (yesterday), I decided I might as well slap the bleach on that I'd bought and see what happened.  If I didn't like it, I knew I'd got some brown hair dye and also some Eastern European hooker purple colour hair dye in the cupboard left over from when I used to dye it that colour, so, if the worst came to the worst, I could always use either of those.

When I used to bleach my hair totally peroxide white, back in the 80s, I used to use a brand that didn't have added colour - the idea was that you bleached the feck out of your hair, then added the colour that you wanted.  And, stupidly, I thought that was what I had bought this time.  Turned out it was a brand that had a colour already in it.  In this case it was 'gold'.  Oh well, I thought, let's give it a go and see what happens.

So onto my head it got plastered while I sat and watched a minor black and white Alfred Hitchcock flick on the box ('Shadow of a Doubt' with Joseph Cotton - pretty good, actually):

 (By the way, these are all pictures that I took of the process to send to TLH during the day, so he could see what I was up to!).

The end result was quite interesting, a sort of pale goldeny biscuit colour.  And because I had so many different colours in my hair to begin with - naturally dark, grey, silver white, pink - it looked like I'd had highlights:

I actually quite liked the colour, and was half tempted to keep it.  But then I knew that was not going to fulfil my dream of having pink hair so decided that I'd carry on with my plan.

This morning, Friday, I had to nip out to run a few errands before I got down to it, so it eventually took me until lunchtime to get up to the bathroom, brush in hand.

This is the colour I'm using - Special Effects Atomic Pink:

Which looks blood red in the bottle and is, actually, that colour when you put it on, but comes out pink.

I'd squirted out about a third of the bottle into the bowl, loaded up the dye applicator brush, raised it to my head and then stopped.  I almost, ALMOST bottled it, right there.  I started wondering what the hell I was doing?  What was I trying to achieve?  For Christ's sake, I'm forty-bloody-eight years old with the figure of a grandmother, not some willowy eighteen year old art student.  What if I hated it?  What if it looked really, REALLY stupid?

Then I remembered that it's just hair, it grows out.  And I have two packs of back-up 'normal' hair colour that I can use if I freak out.  And - okay, I admit it - while I do want people to notice me, I really, honestly don't give a toss what they think about me; I just don't want to be invisible.  Zandra Rhodes is my role model.

So I took a deep breath and started plastering it on:

No going back now!  Oh God - what have I done?????

You're supposed to leave it on for 15 minutes, and the colour will be brighter depending on how porous and/or bleached your hair is.  I left it on for 45 minutes, as I wanted to be sure the colour was as strong as it would go.

You know what?  It's fantastic:

I think it would have been even brighter if I'd managed to get my hair peroxide white to start off with, rather than biscuity golden, but I still think the colour's pretty good.  Plus it's actually brighter pink in real life, and, yes, I know there's gratuitous cleavage in that shot - don't say I'm not generous to you all...

So here I'm looking like my mum still but at least I'm ROCKING PINK HAIR, DUDES!!!

And here's a final, glamorous, sunglasses shot which I think is pretty cool and badass, melonfarmers!

I'm now feeling MUCH happier about the haircut and am pleased I plucked up the courage to go ahead with it.  Admittedly, I haven't left the house yet to show it off in public but I'm off to London tomorrow to finally meet up with the fragrant Ms Katyboo for the first time so she'll be one of the first of my friends to see it and have her retinas burnt out!

Once more around the Sun.....

It's my birthday. I'm 46 years old today. 46. God's Teeth - how did I get old enough to be a grandmother? When did my life all happen without me noticing it? The fact that I am now nearer 50 than 40 is both exhilarating and terrifying. Being Mrs Archaeology-head I am, of course, aware that in earlier centuries I'd probably be dead by now (and, actually, I've done a pretty good job of nearly being dead in the 20th century) so I am eternally grateful that I was born when I was and that the NHS exists.

Like practically everyone else (and, yes, it will happen to you too), I envy the young their youth, it really is wasted on them but then again, I wasted mine so perhaps that's what it's for. I miss that carefree self-centred existence where, in reality, considerations such as a having a roof over your head, food to eat and bills that have to be paid do not impinge on the really important things such as trying to look like Kate Moss (or a hybrid Siouxsie Sioux/Marilyn Monroe in my case), how to look cool while smoking or how to attract the attention of the beautiful floppy-haired public schoolboys you're at sixth form with.

As for the benefits of getting older (apart from not being dead), I'm sure there are some and if I think hard enough they might appear to me. Let's see - I know I have been on this planet long enough to have accumulated a little knowledge about quite a lot of things and a great deal of knowledge about a handful of things. Probably none of which is of much interest to anyone but me. I really enjoy learning which is something I have definitely grown into. My teenage years and early 20s were so full of upheaval and externally-inflicted angst that it took me until my 30s to finally hear the seductive siren call of a University library and to discover the sheer unalloyed joy of writing an essay comparing the social contexts of burial barrows during the Neolithic and Bronze Ages in Wessex. Bliss.

I have finally grown out of listening to Radio 1. Radio 3 is where it's at for me, Daddio.

I have rediscovered the pleasure of allotment gardening. I know exactly how that sounds, or at least, how it used to sound but it does seem that, for once, I'm in front of the zeitgeist on this one. I've had my allotment down the road for about 14 months now but had been growing vegetables in my tiny garden for a few years before. Actually, this isn't strictly an age-related thing with me - I had an allotment in my mid-20s when I lived with The Artist in Guildford but I had to drive to it (I can walk to my current one), I was working full-time in an office (which I'm not now so have more time) and I could never get anyone to give me a hand (P will come along if I beg and plead) so it only lasted a couple of seasons before I gave it up. There is a deep visceral pleasure in sowing the seed, Nature growing the seed and us eating the seed. Plus being outside in the open air can only be beneficial (except when it's raining and I have to hide in the shed). Anyway I have a different blog about it for all your allotment growing needs.

I've always 'enjoyed' animals (if that's the right word) and have always stopped to speak to any cats that I find but now, as I've got older I find myself doing things like actively feeding the garden birds, to the extent that we now have a resident pair of collared doves and a robin who will eat from your hand (we also occasionally get rats who come for the bird food but we'll just skip over that, shall we?) It thrilled me no end to discover that birds are actually the descendants of dinosaurs so, to me, what I'm really doing is feeding miniature velociraptors.

This all comes from my nurturing side, the side that won't be a mother and won't ever be a grandmother. I enjoy looking after stuff, feeding it, cosseting it and in the absence of children, this is the best I can do. In an ideal world I would have a smallholding with a whole menagerie of beasts to poke and fret over, but in the world I have to live in, I don't think I do too badly on the whole.

I'm not sure what the point of this post is now. It kinda started off on a reflection of age and ended up being about dinosaurs - I get so easily distrac....ooh, cake!