Claire and I love to share a chunk of smoked eel on the beach, licking the grease from our fingers in the most shameful of acts... screw the diet!

We have had a great increase in enquiries regarding the B and B and have bookings right into December. We have had to pass on some of the enquiries to the B and B across the road as we have only got one room and they needed two or three. On talking to those that have booked with us it is very evident that they were impressed with the web-site and what we have to offer so we just hope that we can live up to that expectation.

We have been working on the breakfast menu trying to give it a local edge and at the same time attempting to add a little je ne sais quoi. So for example we are offering scrambled egg with Mrs Temples Binham blue cheese melted into it.The cheese is made just 10 miles from here, the eggs are laid in the village and the bread is made in the house!

I have invented another local dish which we have called The Great Snoring Breakfast. This is a lighter cooked breakfast and consists of a toasted English muffin with a large mushroom on top in which sits a bruschetta made from home grown tomatoes and basil. Nestling on top of this are 3 Quail eggs from a farm 7 miles away in a village called Great Snoring.

There are two villages called Snoring, Great Snoring and mine and Claire's favourite Little Snoring. Litle Snoring conjures up a most poetic, idyll of a village. We chuckle away at the thought of the Little Snoring School full of Little Snoring children being taught by Little Snoring Teachers. It tickles us as we reflect do they have Little Snoring Police men and the church HAS to have a very muted Little Snoring Choir with a Little Snoring congregation which isn't an issue as in the pulpit the Vicar is also a Little Snoring Reverend. Then to our absolute delight this village has one of the few remaining world war II airfields that is still in service. Does it have Little Snoring pilots flying Little Snoring aeroplanes if so how safe are they being controlled, yes you've guessed it by the Little Snoring control tower.
This village is genuinely what you would call a sleepy little village but I still turn into the small entrance road with great care. After all I wouldn't want to hit the sleeping policeman would I?



We also have Kippers straight from the smokehouse at Cley just over 10 miles away and crab cakes made at a wonderful seafood shack at Salthouse called Cookies Crab Shop. A favourite haunt of Stephen Fry.

Cookies have one of the biggest selection of smoked and unsmoked seafood that you will find anywhere and Claire and I love to share a chunk of smoked eel on the beach, licking the grease from our fingers in the most shameful of acts... screw the diet! I don't know why it is called Cookies, something that I will look into as Crabbies would be more logical. There are a lot of names in Norfolk that kind of illustrate the persons job, you know like Mr Thatcher in the old days was the thatcher and such like. Well in my limited area this still seems to continue and is very much Normal for Norfolk with my supplier of logs for the fire being called Mr Wood and my Electrician is called Mr Wyre. The most unlikely name co-incidence that I have come across is my Dentist a Mr Holt who works as a dentist in the small market town of...... Holt.
Finally tomorrow I am due to see a surgeon who specialises in fixing leg problems as I have a bad knee and his name? Mr Hopgood.





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Frankly we had enough raw material to actually grow a whole orchard from just one Ikea bag!

My Daughter and I were in the Butchers the other day buying a pound of mince and mulling over with them all sorts of ramblings as we seem to do. I was talking to James whilst Claire was talking to Pip and every now and then I picked up a key word from their conversation. We were discussing the fact that I was going to see Katherine Jenkins at Blickling Hall and that they normally have a patriotic big ending to those concerts.
I broke away to look in the freezer and as I returned I heard Claire mention the Proms. Keen to demonstrate how much I liked the proms I informed them so and explained that I particularly like the bit where they all bounce up and down to the Sailors Hornpipe. There was an awkward silence as all three looked at me as they tried to comprehend what an earth I was on about. Apparently they were talking about the school Proms where the kids all graduate and get driven around in big stretch limo's making my comment and the accompanying little knee bend bounce that I had put in for effect look a tad weird.

Getting the wrong end of the stick is a speciality of mine which I practised at great length in my old job. I once had an elderly oriental man come in and ask, abruptly, "Do you sell Dog Chops?".
I have to admit that I was taken aback at the thought of selling any sort of butchered dog and naturally dismissed that racial stereotyping deciding that he must mean chops for dogs to eat and I asked if that was what he wanted. "No!" he snapped back at me "Dog Chops. Dog Chops!". Well he was quite insistent that he wanted Dog chops and I became sure that he was after a Poodle to go with his noodle and so explained that we don't sell Dog chops..... "Yes you do!" he cut in, "Dog Chops, Dog Chops" he continued far more animated now and with some clear frustration at MY stupidity. "Chocolates for dogs!" he rather helpfully chose to clarify. "Ohhhh" I said as I finally got his drift "You mean Dog Chocs....."      "Yes,yes, Dog Chops, that is what I was saying" Well it may have been what you were saying Sir, I thought, but it was certainly NOT what I was hearing and off we went to the pet section to find his little bag of dog chocs.

This, however, was not the most embarrassing of misunderstandings that I have had to apologise for. No one of the most awkward was not even my doing. My Wines and Spirits manager (Mac) in the Tonbridge Store was about 60 years old and very much a gentleman, always dressed smartly and carried himself with great dignity.
He was approached by one of the checkout packers, who like many of them, had learning difficulties and who went on to explain that there was a lady in the next aisle looking for condoms. Mac prided himself in his customer service and met the said lady in the aisle as described. The lady was NOT your typical Condom purchaser. She was actually far more likely to go to the same Bridge club that Mac may have belonged to. They were like two peas in a pod, both in their 60's, both far too posh to be living in Tonbridge, both with their half glazed glasses perched on the end of the nose with a loop of leather so they could drop the glasses to the chest when they were not required. Both of them were true blue Conservatives and what neither of them would do (from appearances) would be to go to the supermarket and ask an oik for condoms!
But here she was and she had done just that so Mac, who was tenacious on such matters, would not let her down and off they went to look for the condoms. I came across Mac and the Lady a few minutes into the quest, in the Health& beauty aisle, just as he was showing her the range including both ribbed and flavoured. It was just at this point that she sought clarification as to why he he was showing her the condoms range. "Because that was what you wanted" he sensibly replied.
"I asked the boy" she clarified "To tell me where the Puppadoms are!"

Once again it was left to me to apologise and sort the customer out but it does show the importance of listening, something that both my wife and my daughter tell me is a skill that I have still yet to acquire.

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The fruit harvesting has started as all of you out there that grow such things are very much aware. Part of our 'hook' for the B&B is that our jams are all wholesome home-made and as such we have used fruit from our garden and some from local pick your own farms. 

The first major harvest was the cherries in the garden. Of course these are not the nice sweet ones, no, they are the bitter things so you could not enjoy eating any as you picked them. Despite this they do make great jam. Poor Claire seemed to be the one that ended up both picking the vast majority of them and worse still de-stoning them, a thankless task (although I did actually thank her for the record).

On one of our explorations last year, as we drove up lanes without a clue as to where they went, took us to a car park somewhere in Norfolk the location of which is a secret and I'd have to kill you if I told you the exact whereabouts. All I will say is that it is at the end of a 3 mile long stretch of road that goes absolutely nowhere.

In this car park there are about 20 plum trees half of them have red fruits and half yellow fruits and they abound with these tiny wild plums (called, we think Mirabelle plums). They literally weigh the bows down as they hug the branches like grapes to a vine.

Well, free fruit, if I have learnt anything from the TV programme The Good Life it is that you should always make good use of any food going free in the wild and also that boy was Felicity Kendal Hot!

Last year our harvest made enough jars of jam to last through to this year but this year we are running a B&B so we need even more plums. The problem was that the lower branches had already been ran-sacked by others (the cheek) and so we had to go higher up the tree. I could only see one way of achieving this and so I pointed the car straight into the heart of the lower foliage of the tree, not without much scraping against my not so precious cars paintwork.The car in place all I had to do was to climb up through the sun roof, place a large Ikea bag on the roof and pick and drop.

There were two flaws to this plan, the first being that I, like Alison & Claire, was in my glad rags as we were all on the way back from Claire's graduation ceremony (CONGRATULATIONS CLAIRE  WO-HOOO!)

The second flaw was my ability to get such a quantity of plums into the bag. It was a big enough bag and it shouldn't have been a problem but they seemed to have a randomness about their falling that I could not second guess. They rolled down the windscreen, in through the sun roof, bounced on my head and even went down my shirt.

Do not try this at home kids.

We have been recovering plums ever since from within the car and one even sat by the windscreen wiper the whole way home. In the end though we had a big Ikea bag full which I used my heavy duty weighing scales, that I had bought from the auction, to weigh them, a total of 30lbs of plums. All of these needed stoning and Alison parents made the vital error of visiting us a day later and so were requestioned to remove pips as the jam making commenced. We had removed so many pips that frankly we had enough raw material to actually grow a whole orchard from just one Ikea bag!

By the time they left to go home I think they were sick to death of plums, they even had to have plum crumble for pudding.

In the last few weeks we have accrued (including with Alison's mothers help) over 80 jars of preserves and there is still the Blackberries to come!

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Living in parallel lines, never to meet but destined to be joined by a commonality that is a house and a home.

As I write this I am watching a Top of The Pops retrospective, you know the ones where half way through the song they put up a few interesting notes about the artist. It has occurred to me that most of these songs were actually being heard for the first time when the previous owner of the house was purchasing it, slap bang in the middle of the 70's.   

I have no idea if the retired vicar that moved in here was into Bowie, the Kinks or Marc Bolan, my guess would be to the contrary,  and it seems odd to think that he was just starting his retirement whilst I was just finishing secondary school. Then to realise that he and his wife moved into this place and lived here for the next three decades whilst Alison and I left school, got a job, I moved to Birmingham, Worthing, met and married Alison, moved to Littlehampton, West Hoathly, had kids, crashed cars, went on holidays on canals and to Dorset yearly, Wales, Scotland, Barbados, just about every county of Britain, most of western Europe, drove down to Venice and back, Ireland, Miami, Brussels, Amsterdam, New York, London, Paris, Munich, Everybody talk about pop musik!

We've had 5 cats, the kids have all grown up and got themselves degrees and stuff and been an absolute blast to have been with, proud of them both, throughout we have both worked, seen Petrol, bread and petrol shortages again and again , miners go on strike, Firemen too and the Green Goddesses come out go in and come back out again. We have seen things sent to Mars and Saturn and the Berlin wall fall, our country has been to war and Concord has crashed out of existence. Through all of this turmoil and for the majority of our 'informed' years the previous owners lived and were part of this houses history. That my friend is a long time and I feel a great sense of respect for the 30 plus years that they put into this place.

This respect is further enhanced by the knowledge that a five times distant uncle (I think), appears to have lived next door to this house in the 1800's and even more crazy than that there is an extremely high probability that we have a family connection to the people that bought this place and built the windmill and actually started the first Bakery business in this very property!

Yesterday evening I was sitting in the back garden contemplating the co-incidence of us buying a property that 'family' had owned some 160 years earlier. We (Alison, Claire & I)  had been sitting on the swing seat facing the house and watching the bats carry out an acrobatic display of excellence. I had pulled Alison and Claire out to watch as the bats were putting on a particularly spectacular show, speeding towards our heads then swooping out of the way just at arms length from us. The sky was late dusk and so it highlighted the silhouettes of the little creatures beautifully as we sat, like an audience at a show in the deathly hush of the evening all that you could hear was the flapping sound of the bats wings.

The view from the swing seat last night as we watched the bats.

Claire and Alison left me to watch the bats and as I sat there watching them flutter past I mused about this house, what we are trying to do with the place and wondered how long we will stay here. We may have stayed in the same house in Sussex for about 25 years ourselves but I am pretty carefree about the future, I know that I should be more concerned about the pension and security of retirement (when I get there!). But I am ever aware of the many that were so concerned about the future they forgot about the here & now and the only true certainty I have is in the now. So I intend to live it, strive to make this business self reliant and supporting but at the same time enjoy what I've got 'cause you never can tell what destiny has got tucked up his sleeve.

And now Abba are belting out Waterloo on the Top of the Pops, stunningly beautiful the two ladies could really sing couldn't they, even more remarkable then that they could not even speak English when they sung their first few hits in English! They just learnt the lyrics and that was it. As this footage was recorded they could only dream of selling more hit singles but could have had no idea just how many and how big their career would be. They sold, so the note on the screen tells us, over 375 million records, who knew?


Watching the bats was, and is always, really cool. I may romanticise things though sometimes. For today I have been whinging to Alison & Claire for most of the day as whilst I sat out last night in my T Shirt and Shorts some little #@****@ds were biting me and I have gained several very large and itchy bumps around my body. That is the reality of life I guess, but hey, worse things happen.....



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I follwed Claire step for step as if we were in a mine field and our lives depended on it, well actually lives DID depend on it!

The builders are back. Well that's Martin and a couple of chums that he works with, but they are 'The Builders' and like all good builders they have spent the best part of the day un-building, if there s such a word, which there really ought to be because that was exactly what they were doing, un-building. To be precise they un-built several stud walls that were put up, I guess once again in the seventies, which were making appalling use of the space. The toilet and shower were just nasty and had a municipal bath look about them. It was with a sense of duty that we instructed Martin to remove the obscenity of a shower and as he pulled off the tiles on the wall so came the plaster quickly culminating in the exposure of what was to be very damp brick work behind.

There are many who take a little glee in proclaiming "You see, you never know what problems you'll find with an old property do you?" or (after a sharp in-take of breath) "Are you sure? Mark my words you'll watch your costs rise, no, best stick with a modern place if you ask me" And there is nothing more irritating than these wise old sages being correct. So on Monday Martin returns to climb up on my roof and see if he can workout what the problem is.

It is the area of exposed brick in the centre of the photo that is causing the problem and the dampness seems to have spread under the plaster behind the toilet too. On the plus side (I suppose) it was a good job that we initiated this work load as we would never had found out about this issue and it would have carried on quietly, secretly breaking down the bricks integrity.
You might also note that the floor is in no way level, the left side being about two inches higher than the right, yet another problem for Marin to sort. This is strange as the actual concrete that the floor tiles are laid on appears perfectly level. The wall to the right has also had all it's tiles and plaster removed and the exposed wall is dry but shows an interesting mix of building materials, design and method. There is a feel about the wall of history, probably several different builders making repairs or extending the height of the building.

The black lines going across it are where wooden battens had been built in, probably to give the owner the ability to screw something into the wall. However one of the battens had completely disintegrated and is now just an empty hole. I feel that there are still more surprises to unfold here and perhaps some more interesting discoveries too!

Yesterday evening myself and Claire went cycling. I am getting fatter, quite clearly now, and so with my bad knee slowing me down I urgently need to get back to regular bike rides again. I am seeing the specialist at the moment and have had a snooze in the MRI machine this afternoon. I really don't know how I manage to nod off in this machine as it is like laying inside a massive tin can in the middle of a metal work shop with every lathe and drill turned on full power. In short it is a VERY, VERY noisy machine and you are in it for some 25 minutes. But they seduce you with some headphones and the lathe sound is very monotonous and I'm listening to Jeremy Vine on Radio 2 so frankly I think it was quite understandable that I should 'nod off'.

The last time I went for an MRI scan they gave me a locker to put ANYTHING MAGNETIC into and so I diligently off loaded my phone, my wallet, my car keys, belt and even my trousers as they had a zip, locking it all securely in the said locker. I walked out and was shown to the scanner where I lay in the required position, they started to slide me into this whirring beast and as they did so I became aware that my left man boob appeared to be growing, quite rapidly, and even more strangely it felt like it was trying to lift me up. It was at this point that my little, rather simple, mind became aware of the cause of this rather odd feeling and I shouted out to the lady to stop the machine.
When she approached me I put my hand into my breast pocket and took out the locker key that I had absent mindedly dropped in after locking my stuff away. I mean what is the point of giving me a metal locker key after making me remove all things magnetic?

Anyway, Claire and I went out on our bikes and having cycled only about half a mile out of the village we became aware of tiny stones moving on the road, then, whilst still cycling, I thought that these were big spiders, but a lot of them. So we stopped and stared at the road surface.....  Hop.  Hop, hop.  A small, nay, tiny frog (or toad) took a little leap, then I saw another and another, and another. There were hundreds of tiny frogs a leaping and a frogging across the road. They were about the size of a penny and as we looked it became evident that many, many had not made the journey as little squashed grape like splodges decorated the road for as far as you could see. We cycled on with caution.

A dead one of them......!

 Our return journey was not so easy however. We had purposely gone out to take photos of what looked like and indeed turned out to be an excellent sunset. This unfortunately meant that we were returning in the dusk light. Now thee appeared to be twice the amount of these frogs but half the light with which to see them. If we had any heart or soul at all cycling was simply not an option, no we would have to proceed on foot with caution. We dis-mounted and with Claire in the lead (with her young eyes trained on the road ahead) we walked on very cautiously. "Frog at 2 o'clock" Claire would shout as a small hopping motion drew her attention. Then "aghh" as a frog tried to jump under her wheel.

We have never witnessed such an exodus of frogs before.
As we gingerly took each tender step I became aware that Claire was walking on tippy toe to minimise the danger of squashing them under foot. And so this strange spectacle went on, two people walking their bikes along the road at a snails pace on the flattest of roads, the front one on her tip-toe as if she was walking on egg shells with the 50 year old man pushing his bike in the exact path that she was walking just inches behind, wheels almost touching as if they were negotiating a mine field. This went on for near on a quarter of a mile and the real shame was not what the odd car that drove past us must have thought, for surely they could only have labelled us as simpletons, but more that each and every car that came past took out a squadron of these leaping beasties undoing all the work that we were putting in to protecting them!
Every time a car came near we found that we were walking nearer the middle of the road to try to protect them, but all we were really doing was protecting those that we could see in the half light. The truth is that on the other side of the road they were quickly becoming frog smoothies.

So we took our photos of the sunset and saw some Deer wade through a field of Wheat too and when we finally got home we did one last task, more to allay our feelings of guilt than for any other reason, we both discreetly checked the soles of our shoes..... Phewwww, all clear.

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Oooops!

The builder has arrived this week to start work on the Annex. Connected to the main part of the house this part of the building was probably originally part of the actual bakery that housed the ovens. We have an old photograph, taken in the 1920's, that shows this corner of the house was later used to house a shop (as well as the General store situated in the main house),  The area has been used as accommodation for many, many decades but the standard of conversion is really poor and whilst this area can be used as a separate living accommodation it is in dire need of a refurbishment.

For example the Main bedroom has a split level floor. 6' into the room the floor suddenly rises by about a foot and then carries on for a further 6' to the far wall. On the face of it there is no logic to this and it makes it impossible to place a double bed in the room. It is only when you view the room from in the garage below that the reason becomes apparent. You can clearly see an old shop front that has been bricked up. The old door and shop window were so high that the internal ceiling had to be raised to accommodate them, thus the floor above was affected.

So now it has fallen to us to get the builder to drop this floor back to its original level, as it was about 100 years ago, and in doing so we are actually, at the risk of sounding pompous, carrying out a restoration. Sadly all the floor boards were seriously damaged with woodworm and had to be removed but the original main beam has been exposed. It is unaffected by woodworm and you can clearly see that it was taken from a large branch or a small tree as the outer curves of the tree are still visible.

The floor prior to restoration.

Floor removed you can see the old shop window and door. The central heating pipes run in front of them.

When the floor was removed it exposed the top of the window where the lintel is missing and we needed to replace it immediately. There was no logic to its disappearance other than some one may have nicked it to use it somewhere else.

Today we went to the auction to try to obtain some furniture for the annex. Claire and I had already checked their web-site and selected, with Alison's approval on price bids, several items that we would try to bid for.
With our list in my clammy mitt we joined the Auctioneer at the first of the possible purchases.

I say clammy mitt as it is customary to hold the information on how much you are willing to pay close to you so that no one else knows your top price. So like a seedy Poker player you keep a steel coolness as you bid, giving no indication that you are about to give up as you approach your top price.

First was a sofa and armchair, we had agreed we would go no higher than £75. Very quickly the bid rose to my top price and then spilled over ending at £85, GOING, GOING, GONE! It went to a guy hidden away in the bustling crowd whom I only knew was there because his head kept giving the auctioneer a nod at the appropriate juncture.

And so it went on, a Bedside table, my price £20 & sold for £25. A pine chest of draws, My price £30 & it sold for £55. A rocking chair (for a friend) £30 and it sold for £45. A wardrobe (hand built) my top price £40 and it finally sold to someone for £85.  A dressing table, again I was gazumped and yet again with a heavy duty chest of draws I stopped biding at £40 and it bounced on to £70, I think. So far I had not obtained one item on my list and I was getting frustrated, then came lot 221 a corner unit for a TV and DVD player etc.

Well I had agreed a price of £20-£30 and the auctioneer asked for £30 straight away. I hesitated. I had successfully done this trick before and the price had dropped as there were no takers. This is exactly what occurred here.
"£25 then ?", "£20?", "A fiver then?", "Come on just a fiver, someone, anyone, this has been in my family for a hundred years, I'm just asking a fiver" This was no way a hundred years old (20 at best) and most definitely not a hundred years old! My daughter says that if I was a Red Indian my name would be Chief Full Of Crap! I'm not entirely sure why but I will say that this Auctioneer was doing a pretty good job of filling Chief Full Of Crap's shoes. At the risk of missing the item I raised my hand, made my bid at £5 and waited. Silence, then the sound of his pen bashing the clipboard denoting the sale as done and the item was mine.

What a great deal. I was willing to go to £30 for this TV corner unit and obtained it for a measly £5. Alison will be impressed with that, I thought to myself. I started to move away from the crowd as the next item was starting to be bid for and Claire came hurrying up to me.
"Where are you going? They've started to bid for Lot 221 !"
"But I've just bought lot 221" I replied rather smugly.
"No, no. Quick they've started bidding" she replied and pushed me back into the crowd. (Claire has more strength than I ever knew!).
I turned around to see that she was quite right, they were bidding for lot 221, the corner unit and suddenly I had two thoughts, the first was to start bidding to secure the item and the second being, well if this is the corner unit then...... WHAT have I just bought for a fiver?!

I carried on the bid and only slightly phased by the question of what do I now own that I hadn't two minutes earlier I ended up obtaining the corner unit for £34, £4 over budget.
I then put my mind to trying to establish what I had purchased on the prior lot.
Both I and Claire tried to get a glimpse of what appeared to be a piece of furniture hidden by many legs of other bidders. Like a jigsaw, bit by bit, as other customers broke away to follow the auctioneer down the room we saw more and more of this mystery item until finally, when all had gone we saw it in all it's kind of, sort of oldy worldly
glory. It was a small sideboard, fairly old, I think, with a nice polish and a small marquetry border in two door panels.
Claire found my action to be incredulous and considered me a complete buffoon.
For my part I was crest fallen, just minutes before I had made the purchase of the century! (Chief Full Of Crap) and now here I am with my tail between my legs having bought a piece of furniture that I had never even seen before in my life. (More a of a Red-skin than a Chief).

So back home this thing has become my 'leaflet table' and 'Hat cupboard' until I can decide if I should take it back to the auction next week. A kind of try before you buy, except I have already done the buying bit.

The £5 mystery item

On reflection it is probably best that I don't attend any Auctions of Houses in the near future!

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