Back on the blog again......

So there I sat, the lights had dimmed and the familiar opening bars of the Overture to the musical Les Misérables crashed out accompanied by a stunning opening film sequence. I was sat in The Odeon cinema in Leicester square watching the private showing for the cast and crew of the film of Les Misérables as the personal guest of one of the movie's Producers a day before it premièred in the cinema across the other side of The Square and a month before it's release date. THIS, I thought, is about as far away from my life in Norfolk as I have been since we moved there two years ago and here I am hobnobbing with the likes of Cameron Mackintosh, Hugh Jackman, Anne Hathaway and other such likes.

You may ask.... How did this welcome break from the never ending cycle of refurbishment work at The Old Bakery come about?

You may well ask....


At the beginning of October we shut down the B&B and started a refurbishment that was to be completed by the second week of November. Ha!  In Grand Design tradition the clock ticked and the calendar flicked page after page and day by day the next set of guests loomed including the guests that had booked the new room that at one point was missing the door, door frame and half a wall for that matter.

I will post more details of this journey over the weeks leading up to Christmas but throughout this process we have also been spending some time trying to give the allotment some basic structure. I wanted to build some compost bins and went on the scrounge for wooden pallets. I asked around the village to no avail but then I had the brainwave to ask the local Jewson builders merchants if they ever had any spare ones that I could have for free and filled my car with 6 of them, then went back for more. I then recruited my octogenarian parents to do some hard labour and set my mum to dig for Britain and my dad to build the compost bins whilst I unleashed the sledgehammer...

 My mum told me of her days just after the war when she would go on farm holidays. Well at first this all sounded tickty boo until she explained that she had to dig up potatoes all day. Blow that for a game of back-aching soldiers and then she explained that she didn't get any pay for digging up the potatoes. Then... that she had to pay for her accommodation! So when I summarised my understanding of this holiday "So you paid to get there, you paid for the accommodation and you weren't paid to dig up potatoes (by hand) all day, you called this a holiday?"
She explained, "Well it wasn't as bad as it sounds, he gave us the food for free."
"How kind", I replied "Was it boiled, mashed or chipped!"

In hind sight, reviewing this photo, perhaps I should have suggested my father swapped his lightweight cotton baseball cap for a hard-hat!
Why is a sledgehammer called that?
 In what way was it ever used in the manufacture or in the process of sledging?

Anyway I managed to drive in the supporting posts without causing any long lasting damage to myself, my father and sadly to some degree the very posts that I was trying to ram into the ground.

And here you see the master craftsmen admiring their handy work. We were not only posing for the shot but I think we were trying to hold the thing in place at the same time.

This was way back in September when the warm Autumn sun beckoned me down to the allotment. Winter was coming and as there is no water supply down there I had been keen to acquire some large water butts. Each week I watched out for them in the local auction but they were often too expensive when they did come up for auction.
However my patience paid off and I managed to get these two for £45.

I have since connected them up to the drain pipe from my shed. A few weeks after doing so and after much rain I went to check on them. I was disappointed as I approached them as they appeared empty but when I got close up and checked the pipes I suddenly realised that the first one was completely full and indeed over flowing. 1,000 litres salvaged from the sky.
Since then the second is well on the way to being filled.

Other than this all I have achieved is to clear a few areas of dead weed from the plot and I really need to get back o the allotment soon, but No, no I had to go off swanning down to the Old 'Smoke' to see a film, albeit a very, very good film.

Over the last two years I have used a local electrician to do the work on our house. The guy that he sends to me has become my 'regular' and is an absolutely brilliant bloke at what he does. I happened to see that he had been working on a local house right over the summer and when I asked him he explained that it was a film producers house and what a lovely down to earth couple they were.
Anyway about 2 weeks ago she invited him and his partner down to see the cast & crew viewing of Les Misérables as she was a Producer of the film. I was so jealous as this is my favourite musical... ever. He was really concerned about going as he had no idea about the story. I leant him my CD (3 hours long) and explained the story in a Readers Digest précis form.
He was talking to the Producer about me and our conversation and she asked if he thought I would like to go too "As he certainly knows his stuff about Les Mis."  Well he knew the answer and she kindly invited myself and a guest. Sadly Alison couldn't go because we had guests and so I took my big brother, Jim. This was a lovely thing for this lady to have done especially when you see her list of other films that she has produced......

The film was absolutely fantastic, I urge you all to go and see it and if Anne Hathaway and the director do not win Oscars for their shot of "I dreamed a dream" then there is no justice in this world.  Just superb!!!






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