The rain has come pouring down today...... ......true to form the downpour comes on the day prior to the official declaration of a drought!

I have neglected my Blog for the last few weeks which is predominately because I have just been too busy. I started off knocking a blog out every other day, then every week and now it seems every other week. It is true that as the renovation works died away and the day to day running of the place took precedence I felt that I had less to say. My daughter also points out that I have a tendency to digress and stray from the point, much as Ronnie Corbett does in his monologues, something that I neither deny nor apologise for. Yes I started out writing this blog to record the events caused by a decision to make a major life-style change and the aftermath or consequences that this caused. In doing so I feel that I have a need to record the idiosyncrasies of both my new life and as part and parcel of this I cannot help myself reflecting on the idiosyncrasies of my past life too, they are, after all bound by a common factor..... ME!

So if there are any readers out there still then please forgive me but the way I see it I am 52 years old now and soon my memory will start to tilt away from me, in fact if you ask my wife or daughter they will tell you that the onset has already began. My son tells me that I have sat, with him on the couch, through 3 hours of Leonardo and Kate getting in a tiz as Titanic went down and I am sure that I have never seen the film! Life is odd though isn't it? I had not even finished the previous sentence and the theme tune to Titanic had started to play on Classic FM, how weird is that? So the rot begins and I have a need to record things that amuse and have amused me over he years.

 I don't know why things just pop into my head but even as I wrote the above I was recalling the kerfuffle that we had in a certain supermarket branch when one of the men became one of the women. I had never met a transsexual before and actually had no preconceived views on how I expected the person to be or indeed look. As it happened he just looked like a bloke with high heels and whilst I knew that he had had the chop his voice, sorry her voice, had not followed suit so he still sounded like a bloke too. Not, I thought, a good start but I knew that he was on a mix of hormones that should make the change more convincing. Sadly it just didn't ever seem to kick in.
I joined the branch just as the contentious issue was being debated by all the staff. Things were coming to a head and a decision was required...... which loo should she use! It would never have occurred to me that this would be an issue but it was so obvious once pointed out to me that people who share the loos would have opinions on such matters.The Manager at the time decided that the only way to get a consensus of agreement would be to hold a vote from all the staff and so that was exactly what happened.
Now I was chatting to her over a cup of tea in the canteen one day and was, I admit, a little thrown when she explained that whilst she had the operation because she felt she was a woman in a man's body, a concept that I could understand, she went on to further explain that she is a lesbian and that she fancied women. I tried to clarify the situation in my head .... So you were a bloke who fancied women but was not a bloke inside but a woman in a blokes body so therefore you were really a man that was a lesbian. My momentary silence was intuitively picked up upon by her... "You don't get it do you?" She commented and I thought to myself she has ankles of a fell walker, the adams apple of a body builder and the hands the size of a Keresley miner but her intuition was definitely that of a woman, bless her.
Oh, by the way she ended up, appropriately, using the Ladies toilets.

Where was I? Oh yes I digress, ok what's happening at the Old Bakery? Well my sad and indeed good news is that my daughter has got herself a job. Having spent over 3 years in Uni studying to be a Speech & Language Therapist she left Uni just as most of the NHS funding was being pulled and so she took a year out helping Alison & I set up the Old Bakery B&B. She has been invaluable and really supportive but is now moving to work in her perfect job in a school in Somerset and I will have the final test regarding this new life style in that I will be on my own for many hours in a day. That said my parents are moving up from Sussex in just over a weeks time and so I will be able to see a lot more of them in due course.

We have had plenty of guests over the last few weeks staying in both the Cottage and the B&B and so it is great to see the business actually earning reasonable levels of money! Also the feedback from the Cottage guests has been really good too. We are currently working towards obtaining the Tourist board star rating and working through their check-list to achieve this.

You will remember, because I keep bringing it up, that Percy is our visiting pheasant (with a limp) and that he took to flirting with himself in a mirror that I had placed in the garden, so I was forced to remove it. Well he didn't give up admiring himself and he now flirts at his reflection in our greenhouse and even the French windows, meanwhile the Blue Tit has returned day after day to chat up it's reflection in another window. They are all dappy, is this national or just NFN (Normal for Norfolk). The young children staying in the Cottage love seeing Percy wander around the garden.

The rain has come pouring down today after a really pleasant March and of course true to form the downpour comes on the day prior to the official declaration of a drought! Only a week ago Claire and I were eating some fresh Morston mussels sitting on the pato with a little white wine, all alfresco like. The sun was shining and all was well with the world and now just a few hundred miles away there is chaos as the snow tumbles down. Not to be perturbed I can still pull out a photo of yet another sunset. Alison came back from work one day last week and fancied going out for a walk so we headed off to Wells-Next-The-Sea and were treated to an excellent sunset and so once again I leave you with this image...

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