“Some people want it to happen, some wish it would happen, others make it happen.” Michael Jordan

I have never believed that fate is pre-ordained, no I believe that fate simply falls out of life, supplied under the rules of the chaos theory. It is the luck of the cards that deals your fate from the very instant you are born, from where you are born to whom your parents are, just luck, good or bad some things are simply out of your control. Well both Alison and I were handed the Ace at birth and both of our sets of parents were the good ones, strong, supportive and loving.

I am very aware that as I write this it is just minutes to midnight on New Years Eve and one of the worst times to wax lyrical about the ones you love, especially cringe worthy after a few drinkies. But I have had no drinkies except the Yorkshire brew cup of tea that I am sipping as I write this and my only reason to touch on this sentiment is to highlight how lucky we have been and the thanks that we owe our parents is simply immeasurable.

So we are both only too aware how lucky we have been. Then you need to put your spin on your luck and try to bring the odds onto your side to improve your life's lot. You know, who you choose as friends (and we have been blessed there too) and finally how you 'manage' your working life. I think our philosophy has been to expect nothing, give everything and be as true to ourselves as possible in everything we do. This seems to have paid off and I believe neither of us have any regrets with our career decisions.

There is one last card that I have not mentioned .... Our family. Two children, Stephen & Claire of whom we are immensely proud, and Alison my wife and Bestie! For without a shadow of doubt I, WE, would not be doing what we are doing now if there was not the initial momentum from Alison. It was her drive to satisfy what was both an escape from an inevitable decline in my career as age would creep in and cause me to struggle in later years and a small pipe dream of possibly an enjoyable occupation to take me towards (and perhaps into) my retirement some 15 years hence.

“Some people want it to happen,

some wish it would happen, 

others make it happen.”

 Michael Jordan                                        

 Alison is that "Other" person.

So we sold up our home of 25 years in Sussex and here we are, running a B&B and Holiday Cottage in the heart of Norfolk and I have to say really enjoying it. It is said that it is better to regret something that you did do than to regret something you didn't do and whilst I still had some wits about me it was clear that it was now or never.

The decision made Alison looked for a suitable position within her Bank for a job any where in England and eventually landed a job in East Anglia that covered an area from the Humber in the north down to the Thames in the south and across to the Chilterns in the West. From that vast area we chose to live in North Norfolk to try to start my new venture in a reasonably high tourist area.
From the whole of North Norfolk we could only find one house that looked like it would fit our criteria for a B&B and that we could afford, in a small village in the centre of the region. It was one of those villages that was so in the backwaters that many of the locals never even knew it was there!
So then we put a bid in on this random house called The Old Bakery, because up until the last owner bought it in 1974 it had been a Bakery for about 140 years.
Then my brother recognises the name of the village from way back in the family tree and long story short he identifies that two of my uncles 5 generations back lived next door to the self same property in the 1840's!
THEN he makes the connection, another to generations back, that ties me in as a relative of the guy that actually built the Windmill on this site and turned the building into the Bakery that gives it its name today! (the person was my 7th cousin, 3 times removed).

I don't believe in fate, or maybe I do...? Or not,  errrr well I mean to say, ummm,  mmmphhh. Is that fate? Is that co-incidence? I just don't know now!

Then he finds a photo of this relatives (John Pegg) daughter, her name is Hannah Pegg, my 7th cousin 4 times removed (I think!).

We bought this 260 year old building at random and find that we have a blood connection to a person that owned it about 172 years ago and we even believe that we have his photo on the wall in our dining room....

We believe he is one of the three adults by the cart and now I look again is that Hannah by the horse?

Now as I sit here in my armchair, fire burning in the hearth, I'm sitting behind the window that is behind the horses head in the above photo I have to question my beliefs regarding fate and all I can say is that they are no longer black and white but as is the picture above they too are formed with shades of grey.

Happy New Year everyone.






3,266

Of Cesspits, Septic Tanks and all things unmentionable.......

It's official! The Old Bakery is NOT connected to the Mains Sewerage which is quite contrary to our understanding at the time we bought the place. No one was really sure where our sewerage actually went but the general consensus was that it flowed into a redundant cesspit and out to the mains sewerage that was built in 1984.

However it is now quite clear that it all flows right through our garden into a next door neighbours garden where it enters a small, and I mean small, Septic tank. Remember a septic tank allows the solids to fall into it and the liquids come to the top and then seep out of the tank via an exit pipe. From there the liquids filter out, probably through small holes, into the earth below the next house to his. Gosh I bet they grow big parsnips there!

THERE IS, HOWEVER, A PROBLEM. Once the tank was emptied it became very apparent that it is far too small for the job. It is built from brick and measures just 5' deep, and about 30" square totalling just 31 cubic foot. This has to process several dishwasher loads, showers, clothes washing machine loads, the odd bath full and of course many toilet flushes in any one day. The tank can barely hold two and a half bath fulls!
So where does all that liquid go to? Well that is the big question of course. It is clear that the waste does get to the tank, but only just because the pipes 'fall' is no more than about 3' in 100'. No wonder I've had a few blockages!

It does appear that the Land drainage allows the residue liquid to drain away, but there is also the possibility that the brick work is allowing it to seep out of the tank (my neighbour is concerned at how much moss is growing in his lawn).

Now all we have to do is to monitor the now empty tank and see how it copes with our waste quantities, because if it does not perform we may have to replace it with a normal size tank which is about 5 times bigger, although that only does an average house and in reality for the B&B and the Cottage use we would probably have to think about a lot bigger than that, more like ten times the size. This plus the cost of the extensive earth works and pipe laying could cost in excess of £4k!

So at the moment we are 'monitoring' the situation. I predicted in my blog back in mid-November that this drain issue would turn out to be a bigger problem than it initially seemed. If there is one thing that I have learnt it is that when you buy a 260 year old property there will be problems, the only variable being just how far up the creak it takes you whilst leaving your paddle way back in Timbuktu.

The driver of the tanker that took all my slurry away helped to clarify the situation and unblock the drains and was generally very helpful. I have always considered that all of us give an equal contribution to our society no matter what job we do and so go out of my way to treat everyone with the same respect. In the light of this I thanked him for his trouble and shook him firmly by the hand, the hand that had just loaded all of his dirty pipes onto his wagon after they had been pumping out all of that poo. It didn't matter, I had made my point, I respect you and I respect what you do. I am not too proud to shake your hand after you have done it.

That was yesterday and today I feel like crap! I have got a bug and whilst I'm not naming names or blaming anyone, lets just say that is the last time that I shake a commoners hand! 





3,197

With all my might I lifted the Cow right up into the field from which it had come....

Do you know one of the things that I relish most about giving up my last job to run a small B&B?

NO TRAVELLING TO WORK.

I wake up, go down stairs and that's it.    I'm there.  On goes the kettle and were off! So, so simple and, of course, really economical.

For 30 years I hauled myself out of bed at some ungodly hour, went out into often treacherously poor weather, in the cold dark night to take sometimes a journey of an hour and a half only to do the whole thing in reverse at the end of the shift. By the way when I say 'in reverse' I don't mean that I drove the 90 miles home backwards, in reverse gear, No I mean reverse as in back the way I'd come in the morning.....



Tomorrow morning Alison is doing just that, actually not driving too far but travelling early, leaving at 04:45hrs to drive to Norwich to catch a train to Stratford (London) to then take the tube to the Docklands for a meeting at 08:30hrs. That is the downside of living in such a tranquil land that time forgot....

Don't misunderstand me, at the time I loved it, Out on the road, never knowing what adventure or challenge I was going to come up against next. There was a buzz, out there I was my own boss (until I got to work of course). Nowadays I'm a little, OK, a lot older and my priorities are different, more sedentary, less challenging. The most challenge I get is trying to find my damned spectacles!

But I did enjoy those journeys and many of them were indeed eventful and on occasions tragic too. That is tragic for the poor wild life that seemed to dive at my car with wild abandonment often resulting in nothing but death. I think the death toll is something like many doves, even more pigeons, several Rabbits, Pheasants, a deer, 1 Squirrel, a Blue Tit, a Robin and very, very sadly a cat.
Whilst I know that this makes me appear a very bad driver, you do need to put it into context. I spent a good decade driving across the Ashdown Forest, which many of you will know is the home of Winnie the Pooh (one of the few beings that I hadn't run down.... Ooooh, can you imagine the hoo-har if I'd run him over).
The Ashdown forest is teeming with wildlife and the vast majority of these 'incidents' occurred  there.
There was one particularly infamous trip, it was very early in the morning and the rabbits were playing the same game as the pigeons and doves do. This involves standing absolutely still on the side of the road, a grey Rabbit or Pigeon on a grey tarmac on a grey twilight morning, not even wearing day-glo jackets would you believe! Then, without warning and as if they owned the forest, voom they shoot across the road right under your wheels. The first you are aware is this blur from the kerb side quickly followed by a small bump as the front wheel bounds over the thing, quickly and rather ominously followed by the second bump as the back wheels finish the job.
Still reeling from this shock and literally within 500yards of it, just as I was gathering my thoughts a large Roe Deer belts out from the passenger side of the road, I immediately swerved towards the side he had just come from in an attempt to get behind him and not in his path. As I hit the muddy road-side he decided to stop running leaving me the choice of hitting a tree or a Deer. The Deer lost.
BANG! He bounced to the opposite side of the road and I came to a halt a few yards further on. I looked at the deer, it was standing again but it had a large gash on its haunch. I made a note of the location and when I got to work I called the police who said they would send a warden out to 'deal with it'. Mmmm, Venison in the canteen down the Nick tomorrow, I thought.
When I got to work I realised that the animal had severely damaged the wing of the car and a colleague of mine went out to see the damage for himself. As I was looking at the piteous looking wing of the car he walked around the front and said "Oh man! Where the **** were you driving? On the set of Bambi?" I went around to the front of the car and not only had I killed Thumper and wounded Bambi  but, it appears I had taken out one of the Blue birds for firmly wedged in my front grill, wings fully open as if in mid flight, was a Blue Tit. It hadn't stood a chance.


I feel that I should balance the above incident and record some of the animals that I have saved the life of. For instance one day at the crack of dawn  just outside Tonbridge in Kent I happen to come upon a flock of sheep all revved up with no place to go.Covering the whole width of the road, as sheep do, there must have been about 20 of them, all bleating their little socks off. The vast chasm left by a large 5 bar gate suggested the escape route and this was supported by the several dozen sheep remaining in the field in complete ignorance re; the success of the escape committee.
Just as I was pondering what to do another poor sod arrived at the scene from the opposite carriageway. We got out of our vehicles and approached each other, the sheep separating like the Red Sea as we did so. After a short discussion and realising that there was no obvious Farm building in site we decided with a rather foolish naivety that we would heard them back into the field after all how hard could it be?
VERY HARD, Shep made it look so easy! A quick "come-By", a whistle and a pant and it was all done. Well it was laughable as you went for a biggish group, arms held high and kindly asking them to"go on girls" (I don't know if they were Ewes or not but it seemed the most appropriate gender at the time), "go on girls" I'd shout, but they didn't go on at all. No two went west, three East and the other disappeared behind me, it was as if you had dropped a dozen bouncy balls and they were all flying off at random. Thinking back now it must have been great to watch and I wonder if some mile away across a field there was a farmer with his feet warming in the Aga chortling away whilst looking through his field glasses at our buffoonish attempts to reinstate the sheep with their field. I think we finally managed it when two other drivers joined us and with the last sheep in to the field it was with great relief that we seured the gate.

No such shenanigans here at the Old Bakery B&B, by an equivalent time here I would still be fast asleep in the distant land of Nod!

This was not the only farm animal that I have rescued, oh no! A few years later on a small lane just a mile from my old Village I had to slam on the brakes having come around a sharp corner only to be presented with a very young calf in the middle of the road. Now there was a big embankment on one side, about 15 foot high, but a fairly gentle slope and at the top was a Moo Cow. I don't know much about sheep but I know even less about Cows, however I knew it was a Moo Cow because it was Mooing .....   A lot. To me this looked like it was mummy and I could see the disturbance on the ground where the calf must have fallen through the hedge and slipped down to the road.
This time I knew where the Farm was, or at least a farm, and so I drove the mile back to it and knocked on the door.  

Nothing.

It was 6am, all farmers are up by then, I know this as a matter of fact and as a keen listener to The Archers, I knocked again.

Nothing.

The milking sheds were nearby but there was absolutely no activity going on there and being very concious of the dangerous position that the calf was in I decided to try to get it back to the field my self and set off back down the road.

When I got there mummy was Mooing for England and the Calf was making a poor copy of the same noise. I checked the gate but it was locked so then I started to contemplate getting the animal back into the field the same way it had come out, up the embankment. It looked do-able.
Again, niave.

It was after all a very small calf. So I tried the trusty ye-ha with a slap to its Rump. Clearly it had never seen a Wild West film as it took no notice at all. So then I gave it a push in the right direction and it thanked me with a kick to the shin.
Now I was getting late for work and so desperate measures were needed. I had parked my car back down the road just prior to the bend so any other car would not smash into either of us.
Then I placed my left arm under its neck and my right arm hugged, and I'm not too proud to admit this, around its bottom. I then heaved with all my might and we started the ascent of the embankment. It must have looked very.... intimate and we were about half way there when it dawned on me that cows are not the cleanest of beasts and I was dressed in my stupid work supplied brass buttoned blazer. I took a glance at my right arm, it was not a pretty sight.

The embankment steepened at the top and things came to a standstill then. There we were so close and yet so far, mum mooing and me and the calf on the edge of slipping all the way back down again.
Everything was very precarious to say the least.

Meanwhile back to the future at 6am I'd normally be asleep in the Old Bakery probably not getting up for another hour.....

So as I stood there on the cusp of failure I was suddenly spurred on by an horrific thought, what if the farmer came around that corner now? What would he think was happening? GOD, he might think I was rustling and call the police or even shoot me!

All of a sudden I found a new superhuman strength and with all my might I lifted the Cow right up into the field from which it had come where it then stumbled through the hole and mother and baby were reunited.

Having read this back several times I could quite understand you accusing me of making this up. Why would I go to such trouble, it wasn't my problem, I could have been hurt. All very true and do you know what I cannot answer that. Only to say that I must have had a pathological compulsion over which I had no control where I had to solve the problem before I could leave the scene.
In hind-sight I now see that I was simply NUTS!

NEXT BLOG...... Tales from the Cesspit......








3,197

Much flushing, slopping, and splish, splash sploshing......

On Wednesday we hope to find out a little bit more about our house because it is on that day that, eventually, the pump-out man cometh. As I reported several weeks ago we have trouble brewing! This is with regards to our sewerage in that whilst everyone is more than aware from whence it comes nobody seems to really know where it goes to.
Sorry this is a vulgar subject, I know, but I said that this would be a diary recording the events and issues regarding the setting up of The Old Bakery and however unsavoury this subject is one such occurrence!
The story so far.... Our drains are very slowly backing up, I tried using drain rods to clear the blockage but to no avail and so then following the route of the drains into next doors garden I had to introduce myself to my new neighbour and immediately talk of the pressing matter of the gutters. That is opposed to discussing the Levison enquiry which was strangely enough also talking about the press and the gutters.
He managed to source a basic drains map for his property and after much flushing, slopping, and splish, splash sploshing we were able to establish that there were two receiving tanks, one for each property, and they both appeared very full indeed.

Now I don't actually know if this is technically a cesspit or a septic tank. To be honest never ever having either I'd had no reason to even contemplate that the two things were actually different.

So for the record then....
Septic tanks are used where this is no public sewer available. They work on the principle of breaking down solids by anaerobic bacteria in an enclosed chamber. The final purification of the liquid is in a filter bed. The effluent is sometimes discharged into a humus chamber, which allows the unstable material from the filter to settle. The water resulting from the process then passes into a soakaway. Water from a septic tank should not be discharged into a ditch, stream, river or pond.
Cesspools are used where there is no public sewer available and where the sub soil cannot soak away the liquid from a septic tank, or if there is no suitable stream or river to take the final effluent from a processing plant. They are simply a large enclosed chamber to collect the effluent, which is then removed on a regular basis and taken to a sewerage treatment works. Cesspools are considered to be a last resort for dealing with sewerage. http://www.clearawaydrainage.co.uk/faq.html#n


Now that was all well and good but I still don't know what I have other than his plan shows pipes going to "land drainage" and I can just see a small piece of pipe leading out of my pit in that general direction. So , I think, I have a septic tank. Anyhow a man is coming to give my house a gynaecological clear-out on Wednesday and just hopefully he can diagnose what I've got and how I should 'manage' it. I used to manage nearly 300 staff now it has come to pass that I can barely manage a septic tank and spend my days being harassed by two women and a cat. How the mighty have fallen!




3,177

With... 27 radiators expelling money into the atmosphere we have had to carefully think through our heating strategy.

The Old Bakery has a built in air filtration system. Cutting edge you may say. State of the art you might query. Wow, how sophisticated is that, you might exclaim. Well not very, I'm afraid as the 'system' is actually less of an Air filter unit and more a culmination of poorly fitting windows, doors and general holes allowing the mother of all draughts to build up and whiz past the back of my neck.

In all fairness this is a very old building. Claire and I visited the Norfolk records office recently to find out just how old it is and we managed to find written accounts going back some 260 years. We are sure that it is even older than that but the preceding years were all written in Latin, or as we called it gobbley-gook, so two Dyslexics trying to decipher that was like asking a bossed eyed man to thread a needle on a ship in the North Sea. So then we just gave up.

Anyway we would be lying if we said there were no draughts because there are but this is not necessarily a negative as they allow a fantastic up draught for the flues and the fires which kick off with a hearty roar. I say fires because we have just doubled our fire count from one to two. When we moved in we only had an open fire in the living room and we also had a wood burning stove at the opposite end of the room but this was not 'plumbed in'. Although it still had a fire set ready to light inside its tummy, a fire that had probably been laid by the previous owner and that had lain dormant for the best part of 3 years.

With the price of heating oil being so high and having a total of 27 radiators expelling money into the atmosphere we have had to carefully think through our heating strategy. Naturally we turn off all the radiators that we can but even then there must be a mile of pipework assisting the radiators to flitter away our hard earned cash. The furthest radiator from the boiler is some 100 foot away.
So after doing some sums we have realised that wood is comparatively cheap if we used it to heat half the house and the best way was to re-commission the wood burning stove. So I got my friendly builder back in and he discovered that our chimney was already lined and all he had to do was make some connections, expand the hearth and stick a chimney pot with a cowl on our stack. This was particularly fortuitous as whilst up with our chimney he found that the flue to the upstairs fireplace was completely exposed (a hole about 18" square), the heavy rain that we had suffered from this last year would have literally poured down the flue. This would certainly account for the damp at the top of the breast in the room. So he capped that for me with a paving slab from the garden.

Eventually the fire was lit and we stepped back, waiting with baited breath, to see if any smoke should leak out. Nothing, all clear, so then we really fired her up and soon a warmth started to infiltrate the whole area. Job done.


Now we had the final test, how would the stove perform when we lit the open fire at the other end of the room? There is a danger that there would be a conflict of air flows either suffocating one or causing smoke to seep back into the room. However there were no such issues and they both beamed beautifully at me.

There was only one problem, nothing serious but a dilemma none the less. Scribble, the poor thing, could not decide which fire to sit in front of. First she smelt the heat from the new stove (a little warily) then she trotted off down the other end of the room to check out that fire and after an umm and an arrrr she eventually drifted back to the exact centre of the room equidistant from the two fire places and slumped her tiny body down.

After a while she started to fidget and appeared unhappy then, clearly realising that being right in the middle does not give twice the heat, she gets up and returns to the old trusty open fire and balance was once again restored in the cosmos...

3,157

I look back at my school days now in awe at my total lack of awareness, one in which I drifted into a comatosed state for the vast majority of it.

Claire regularly accuses me of being too easily distracted and in so doing I have a habit of forgetting what I was meant to be doing in the first place.
She is, of course, quite correct in that my mind is continuously doing it's own thing whilst the logic side is battling against it to get some specific objective completed. Frankly it literally has a mind of its own.

I'll start off with the objective of making the guests bed up and this requires me to iron the Duvet cover so off I trot to get the broom. Why, you may ask, do I need a broom to do the ironing? Well the Duvet is super-king size and will drag on the floor when I iron it. So I set up the ironing board right next to our very large dining table which enables me to lay the cover right across the table and then over the ironing board. Then I can iron it with some reasonable level of manageability allowing the ironed cover to drape a little onto the floor. So obviously the floor has to be clean and as it is a tiled floor I naturally sweep it first.
The broom is in the porch at the back of the house and whilst in there I notice that the small tub we have for composting items is nearly full and needs emptying so I pick it up and take it out to the compost bins. Now on the way back I go past the wood pile which reminds me that the fire needs making up before the guests arrive and so I collect as many as I can (without the wood basket) and head off to make the fire up. Having got the wood to the fire I realise that I'll need some paper to make up the base and so I dump the wood in front of the fire place and head off to get some.

The paper is in the porch and whilst there (having now completely forgotten about the initial trip to get the broom) I notice that the cat litter tray could do with emptying and so proceed to do so taking the next ten minutes to clear it then hose it down in the back-garden. Whilst I'm hosing it down I happen to look up and observe that the bird feeders are almost empty and so I now head off to get the seeds with an aim to top them up. The seeds are kept in the conservatory (which is, as it happens, where the Duvet cover hangs patiently awaiting it's date with an iron) so totally ignoring the creased duvet cover and as it happens the poor hungry little birds too, I forget all about the seeds because I have just noticed my cross headed screw driver which reminded me that the top tread on the stairs needed screwing down so I pick it up and head off to do the deed.

Having accomplished this little chore I decide to return the screw driver to the tool kit in the garage and off I go with the said tool in me hand. Of course I never get there, no, I need to stop and freshen up the flowers in the vase that are displayed on route. Oh and whilst I'm doing one vase, I might as well do the others and I head up stairs to get the ones out of the guest bedroom. It is somewhere around the point that I am in the room and happen to have a brief look at the bed that I finally remembered that I am supposed to be ironing the duvet cover!

So back down stairs I trek and head off back to the porch to get the broom, again. Well whilst there I couldn't help but notice that the recycling bin needed emptying and so once again off I march.......



You see I just can't concentrate on one thing at a time. They say that women can multi-task and men are really poor at it, well I seem to have landed on the other extreme in which I am multitasking so much that I am utterly clueless as to what the actual objective was in the first place.

This is not an age thing. No I was just as bad as a kid. My mum would walk down the garden path with me to the street where she would wave me off watching me the whole quarter of a mile that I had to walk, as a 9yr old, before I turned the corner heading for my Junior school.
She would see me stop and stroke a cat, then a few yards further I'd stop and stroke another, then another or I might investigate a bush covered in caterpillars, slipping a few into my satchel to play with later.

The point is my mind wanders.

 The hell can start right at the beginning of the day and is normally worse when my conscientiousness is still asleep. For instance getting out of bed switching the night dream into the day dream mode I have picked up the tooth paste and carelessly doused a dollop of it onto my toothbrush only to find (with quite a shock to the system) that it was not toothpaste at all and in actuality it was Savalon that I had squeezed out of the tube, "Urrrgggggggggggg, not nice I can tell you! The flavour not to savour.

I think it is just my inability to concentrate. I look back at my school days now in awe at my total lack of awareness, one in which I drifted into a comatosed state for the vast majority of it. My maths class was by far the worst, situated on the south side of the building the warm summers sun lulling me into a warm cosy dream world as my teachers impossible to understand ethnic accent washed over me like a hypnotic chant I'd frequently slip into another place, a happy place only to be awakened by the thud of my head hitting the desk as I finally nodded off.

They'd often give us pieces of paper with little drawings on and instruct us to answer the questions, you have 10 minutes. Well frankly I could have had 10 hours and I would have been none the wiser. What sillyness was this? There would be 5 similar shapes and it would ask me to tick the odd one out. I hadn't a clue! Why was I doing this? What does it all mean? Well I now know that these were probably IQ tests and I assume that I have on my record "This child has absolutely no IQ what so ever". I would add that this child had not a clue what so ever. I generally coloured them in with my special pen which had 20 different colours - just perfect for such a task.

So I am truly sorry Claire that you have to put up with this lost and wandering mind but I feel that I should be more pitied than scolded.





3,086

The blackened muffin looked up at me with, I sensed, an unhealthy air of mischievousness.

Hi, sorry my blog update has lapsed a little this last week or so. No really excellent reason other than a lot of bits and pieces taking up my time. The idea that I left my Supermarket job to have both less stress and more 'me' time seems at odds just at the moment. Don't get me wrong the 'less stress' bit is a no brainer and much to Claire's annoyance I'm far too happy which, apparently, means I'm a royal pain in the neck more often than not.  But the 'more time' bit is not quite as much as I'd hoped. Well that's not strictly true. It feels like I have not gained more time because I am working at both ends of the day and a little in the middle too.

First thing in the morning we serve breakfasts from a pretty wide choice of menu. Claire helps with this, as she does with just about every aspect of the business, (I'll really have to work hard when she goes I can tell you!). Now Claire will tell you that I lose quite a lot of time at this point as I often end up talking for a good 3/4 of an hour with the guests. Many of you think that I could talk the back legs off a donkey but honestly these chats are normally at the instigation of my guests AND their continuation is also maintained by them too. So even with a breakfast served at 8:30am it is not unusual to finally be clearing the table at 10:15~10:30pm thus the washing up and repairs to the kitchen finished by 11:00am. Suddenly it is only an hour until mid-day!

AND... before we do anything else the room has to be serviced. We then nip out to get any shopping that s required and on return it is well into lunch time.

The afternoon is spent doing the domestic chores, laundry, ironing and stuff then between 3:30 and 5:00pm we can expect the guests to return and depending on how worn out they are it is not unknown for a further half hour chit chat. We are doing light suppers now for those that want them so by then we need to start the cooking process. Table laid, guests served and content, all finished, table un-laid and all of a sudden it is 7:30pm and the day is gone.

But all of this is at my home, which if I do have to do strange hours / shifts is better than having to travel up to an hour to get to a place where I do a solid 11 hour day before heading into the madness that is the Home Counties traffic.
Yeah, on the whole I'd rather be here.

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I set the fire alarm off today. It wasn't a drill, no, it was a muffin that I had placed under a very hot grill and forgotten for the briefest of moments. The kitchen fire alarm was the first to detect it then this was closely followed by a Tsunami of fire alarms sounding in room after room. For all my alarms are inter-connected to ensure every one in every part of the house is aware that I have burnt a muffin.
The Tsunami first 'took out' the cat as she run straight into the cat flap. This was not a good thing as the flap was locked at the time! Now if this was me I'd have stopped and tried to look cool saying something like,"yeah, I knew that was locked, I'm fine.... No worries I'll just saunter out through the living room" then in a slow calm un-flustered looking way I'd sidle slowly out past the raging, penetrating, painful fire alarm screeching.

Not the cat though.  VOOOooooooooom. She about turned in a blink of an eye lid. No checking if I was injured (she'd have run across my dead body if it was in her way), no trying to save face that she had lost by crashing into the closed cat-flap. Definitely none of this leaving in an orderly fashion, no way did she give a toss about any of us, no it was in her opinion strictly every cat for herself and off she shot on the flow of the tidal wave of fire alarms which seemed to follow the poor thing through every room that she bolted through.

When the Tsunami reached our guests that cat came bouncing through with it much as Dorothy and Toto did in the tornado. It was the kind guests that opened the door to the garden for the cat, after peeling her from her Garfield like stance on the window of the door. The sound wave then crashed out of this house and smashed, without any by-your-leave into the cottage where our guests from the local show were sleeping a late night off. Not for long! Wallop, the ear-piercing sirens knocked them out of bed and they were eventually met by Claire as they stood next to the door of the house ready to jump ship at the first sight of a flicker of a flame.

I could not see any smoke and so could not work out why the alarm was even going off, then suddenly I remembered the muffin under the grill. Thinking "I must shut this thing up" I opened all of the windows and grabbed a single oven glove. I pulled out the smoking gun and realising that I had to get it out of the house I carried the tray to the porch where my hand (and I blame the oven glove for this too) couldn't hold onto the grill pan any longer and as it started to fall I made a superb catch with the other hand. I don't know why I did this because it had no oven glove on and the next thing I did was squeal like a piglet and drop the bloody thing closely followed by what would only have looked like a rain dance. This was quickly punctuated by the sound of metal crashing into enamel floor tiles.

Then there was silence as the sound wave ceased and I stood there in a daze with a chunk of ice firmly pushed against a burnt finger. The blackened muffin looked up at me with, I sensed, an unhealthy air of mischievousness.


I apologised to the guests announcing that breakfast will be just a few  minutes more.....

The cat is now safe and sound and back to her initial routine, which mainly involves curling up in to a furry ball and sleeping.. The cat flap seems un-damaged and we have bought a big box of Jellie Babies for our cottage dwellers.

So all is well that ends well, I think.




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