Humbug

Started a post last week about the fabulous hand-dived scallops to be found in Lyme Bay and a wonderful micro-brewery called The Piddle - named after the river where the brewery is to be found; however the snow fell and the temperatures have remained firmly below zero, getting in and out of the village is virtually impossible and so we have slipped into hiberation/Christmas mode.  GW has courageously got out the motor to slither to Bridport to do a bit of shopping while I do something with the turkey.

The original plan was that my two children and one small grandson would come over for Christmas from Brussels so I ordered a small free range turkey locally.  We have all been following the weather forecast constantly, together with all the problems that the snow/ice has caused in England with the result that one day they would be coming, the next they weren't; yesterday looked positive and GW was going to do a round trip today and collect them.  The weather has gone downhill rapidly in Brussels where they have had a huge amount of snow and here is not much better so we decided to call the whole thing off and wait for the weather to improve.

But I have a turkey!  There is no way we are going to eat it in one go even with a greedy husband.  And I am not a fan of turkey, and even less of a fan of leftover turkey.  So I have just carried out major surgery, taking off the legs and the wings and tomorrow we will cook the crown traditionally.  We then have the rest that we can do things with in a proper way, rather than eating rather recycled turkey that becomes drier by the day!  So the giblets are stewing away quietly on the Aga ready for the gravy for tomorrow and I have put the carcasse in the oven to roast - a wonderful trick I learnt in the Perigord when I lived there years ago where the carcasse is left to go all crispy in the oven and then you rip off the bits of skin and meat with your fingers - lovely.  All I have to do now is make some stuffing, roast potatoes and brussel sprouts and that is it!  And cook the turkey crown of course.

This evening we will slither down to the pub for a Christmas Eve drink and listen to some live music and then struggle home again - I think there is a carol concert in the church and midnight mass but heathens as we are, the pub will win.

So a bit of a sad Christmas without my favourite children (and my dog) but at least we are all safe - the thought of all my loved ones on the road tonight would have been too worrying.

I hope you all have a lovely Christmas and from freezing, darkest Dorset I send you all the very best of everything for the New Year.

We are the champions!

Yes, we won the pub quiz last Sunday night (we won't mention that there were only half the number of teams due to the weather).  We each made enough to pay for our participation and the pie and peas served after the match, so we went home happy!  Weatherwise the week has been atrocious with -7° at night and a north wind blowing relentlessly.  The cottage is now classed as freezing.  We have the craziest heating system in the county, relying on domestic fuel (for the Aga) wood and coal and a bit of electricity that heats the hot water at night - during the day the Aga takes over the hot water duties.  We have worked out that if we want to be warm everywhere in the cottage we will have to rob a post office, so I am permanently in the kitchen with 'my' Aga while GW freezes quietly in his hell hole the dining room.  The sitting room fire is burning up most of the woods in Dorset and seems to heat the crows sitting on the chimney pot rather than us.  Today it is mild and the wind has at last dropped after two weeks of constant blowing but I fear this is most temporary.
Only two weeks to go until Christmas and I have done ... nothing.  Well, I have ordered a small turkey from someone down the road and that is all.  I still don't know if my favourite children are coming over from Belgium for Christmas.  Despite emails telling them to book tickets before they cost a squillion pounds I still have not heard.  There is no point in phoning as their state of the art mobile phones are tuned to refusing calls from their mother but not from their friends and I know that they are on their laptops as they are permanently hooked up intraveniously to Facebook.  I hope they will come but if they want to stay in Brussels for Christmas and not spend all their hard-earned salaries buying ridiculously overpriced air tickets then I quite understand.  Just think of GW and I, my little treasures, huddled up to the Aga trying to eat 4kg of turkey!
Oh, and if anyone is interested, for Christmas I would like a pair of mittens so that I can still use my laptop!
Over the weekend I will try and do a post about the wonderful scallops we have sourced from Lyme Bay ... one of my most favourite shellfish!

Serves me right

Well, the snow came so that was good.  At least now we feel part of the general breakdown of the system ... obviously the ploughs and gritters haven't been through the village and yesterday the weekly rubbish collection which we all religiously put out was still there at the end of the day and there was no hate mail post either.

Having stamped round in the snow a bit, checked that the birds had food and other various snowy jobs, by the afternoon the excitement had worn off, so I decided to tackle my Mac.  Mid August as we were in the process of moving and when I needed access to important emails, my .mac account just disappeared.  One minute it was there and the next - gone.  I twiddled around a bit, but with about a week to go before moving out I didn't have the time to waste trying to sort out the problem, so moved everything to my gmail account and just hoped that all the important paperwork I needed ended up there.

Yesterday in a moment of rare stupidity genius, I thought that if I put in the install disc and reinstalled the system, saving all the other stuff, I would eventually find my .mac account again.  Press all the right buttons, the Mac whirs away and bingo ... nothing.  Everything had gone.  Totally everything.  The Mac has been completely lobotomised.  Oh yes, I have my mac email page back but all mails are through gmail but four years of work have disappeared totally, utterly and completely.  And more importantly, four years of photos.  Gutted.  I am just hoping that somewhere inside my machine they are tucked away and that some brilliant person will be able to find them for me.  The police seize computers and manage to extract information from them, so I am sure someone, somewhere will be able to rescue my 3500 photos ... at what price?  But that will have to wait until 2011.  Apart from that, there is a load of design/artwork that took me hours that has also disappeared in a puff of smoke, and tons of other stuff which I can't remember but will when I need it.

And after all that messing around, any mail sent on my .mac address just gets thrown back in my face - I don't exist, address not recognised, error 20009987333, whatever ... so until the snow melts perhaps I will go to the geeky Apple site and see if there is help to be had.

Stupidly courageously got the car out last night to drive to the pub as I had run out of cigarettes it's the only place where you get a mobile 'phone signal and catch up on the days excitement - who had/hadn't been to work, who had crashed their car, whose heating had broken down, usual sort of stuff.  Funny how 4WD cars are regarded kindly when the weather is rough!  Although down here at least half of the cars are 4WD, so no-one is rude about mine!  I was slightly nervous as the roads through the village are in fact lanes with passing places and stone walls on either side seem to be de rigeur - not ideal on snowy, compacted driving surfaces.  However the motor behaved well and we got there and back without transforming it into a Mini.  GW has to go to town today as he has run out of heart pills (quite an important thing to have around when you need them) so we will see if we get there and back without transforming the car!

Where is it?

I love snow.  You don't live high in the Swiss Alps as we did if you are allergic to the stuff.  Okay, Dorset is not reknowned for metres of snow but it seems the whole country apart from us is covered in it.  We had a dusting last week which is still here thanks to zero temperatures and that bitter northerly wind, but now I want to see evidence of why we are freezing.  I am lucky in that I don't have to venture out the house to go to work and find that there are cars skidding everywhere or that the trains have been cancelled, so I can enjoy the snow.  I still have all my Swiss gear but have yet to lay my hands on a decent pair of gloves or one of my silly hats so perhaps it is time to dig deeper into the removal boxes ...

I'm not quite sure how we would get out of the village if we did have snow - I don't think snowploughs or gritters will be seen here.  The lane into the village is extremely steep so no-one would get up or down that without reshaping their car - there is the lane that leads south from the village which is fairly flat so I suppose everyone uses that.  How we get out of the drive is possibly another concern - it is very steep with stone walls on either side and at the best of times I have a foot either side of the car - if the motor goes into a slide ...

The birds are looking rather hungry, so I am out making sure they have enough food - when I put it out there seems to be no-one around but within two minutes all my locals are there gobbling up food as fast as they can.

So I will spend the rest of the day scrutinising the clouds, checking on the temperature and watching the weather forecast - perhaps I ought to go and do some shopping before we get snowed in!  And of course buy some cat litter - not that we have a cat, but to keep in the car as it is great if you have tyres that are whizzing round and going nowhere.

 Just a photo of Angus when we lived in Switzerland - like most dogs he loves snow.  Throw him a stick and he just looks at you - throw him a snowball and he becomes demented!

NYE Music

Down the pub the other night ... for New Year's Eve everyone has to choose three songs that they want to hear during the evening - these will be put on a CD and sold with the profits going to charity.  Everyone managed to write down their songs in a twinkling of an eye - not me!  My favourites?  Popular? Susan Boyle?  (no that is a joke).  Not classic that's for sure, probably not jazz either, rather a few wrote down their football team's song ...

Suggestions on a postcard please.


It was a glorious albeit freezing day down here and whilst out shopping this afternoon I saw lorries full of salt - nothing going on the roads though.  Perhaps they were off to Bodmin Moor.  I have just found my electric blanket so it in on the bed, plugged in and it will be warmer than sitting here!  Bonne nuit!

Shame

I feel slightly shameful plugging our on-line shopping site on my blog, but we all need business and other people do it, so why not.  So I will just slip in the link here and get it over with!  I hope also that apart from just ordering goods from us, people will be able to get an insight into the suppliers here in Dorset and that the site will be a little more personal than the normal 'click and pay'.  We have met all our suppliers personally and they are a great bunch of people who are dedicated to their job and work hard to distribute their products.

During the Food Festival in October there is a very creative idea called Screen Bites - a mini Film Festival shown throughout the county at village halls.  All the films shown are food related and before the film starts there are around a dozen local producers of food and drink who set up their stalls and offer samples of their goods.  We went to the showing of 'Chocolat' starring Juliette Binoche, tried some truly great food and I actually enjoyed the film, although I seem to remember that it wasn't very well received when it first came out.  I hate to admit that the evening the event was in our village, we missed it!

Apart from our on-line grocery biz we also have another one (www.verybestplaces.com) which is a directory of good places and people in Brussels and which we are also starting to develop here in Dorset.  GW went to film an excellent fish shop in Bridport the other day and on the site he always puts up a little video which makes the page more interesting.  He sent me the link which I will try and paste - how to fillet a plaice in less than 20 seconds!  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2kv6kMiAIM


Although we don't sell fresh fish on-line (unfortunately) we also have a smokery in Bridport who sell wonderful smoked haddock, kippers and salmon amongst other things and we have a lot of expats in Brussels clamouring for kippers!


Now plugging my sites is done and dusted, a little news from the village.  GW came back from Brussels yesterday with a zillion removal boxes (still some more over there!) so our little cottage looks amazingly messy at the moment and we have friends coming to stay this weekend!  I have a dismantled Ikea bed to install in the guest room but it would appear that the screws and Allen key are somewhere else so there are lots of nasty bits of fake wood propped against the wall.  Ikea furniture is not meant to be dismantled - hateful stuff!  While in Brussels he clipped the side of the van on one of those stupid metal bollards that towns love to install - I am sure there is a plot somewhere between the local councils, the bollard manufacturers, garages and insurance companies.  A chum came to the house to help him unload the heaviest oak chest known to man and of course when we popped into the pub that evening GW was the butt of all the jokes!


I am starting to get a dowager's hump from sitting at the computer all day, so after a few admin things that need to be done, I will start on the unpacking of the cases that I packed all those months ago and with a bit of luck I should find some winter clothes as I have been living in jeans and sweaters and wearing walking boots for the last two months ... thus saying, what else does one wear out in the sticks?

Because I miss you ...

This is for you, Angus!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=US1gfk1ynP0

Coming home

I never thought I would come back to England ... I left in 1977, married a Frog in 1978 and started a new life. I possibly became more French than the French and still tend to think in French. Having only been back here a couple of months, I find my English slightly stilted and old-fashioned, I use quite a bit of franglais and there are words that I learnt in France that I am incapable of translating into English without a dictionary. I have also noticed my spelling is quite bad at times - me who used to be able to write faultless English!
I moved to Brussels three years ago after having met GW and although I had 'instant' friends through him, living in a city is definitely not my idea of heaven. Although we lived in a lovely house near the University and had all the basic shops on our doorstep, there was always the hum of traffic, sirens, people shouting at 3am, street lights etc. and this is not for me. Although Brussels in mainly French speaking, if you go to the Flemish speaking areas, you do not speak to them in French (I cannot speak Flemish) but always English. The language problem in the country is causing an uncomfortable undercurrent in a country that is basically rudderless.

I can remember saying to an English friend in Brussels last year that the idea of going back to England filled me with horror and I would never contemplate it - a year on and here we are! I know that we live in one of the most lovely and desirable areas of England but coming home has been a joy so far. I am aware of the terribly depressed areas of England with their knife culture, drug dealers and binge drinking (and know that this also happens down here to a lesser extent), but our reintroduction to England has been marvellous.

Getting ourselves back into the system after having been away so long is quite complicated, but all the people we have dealt with so far have bent over backwards to help us - possibly we seem as though we have stepped out of a time machine or are starting to lose the plot, but the system works efficiently and things get done. After my dealings with the French civil servants (always out to lunch or on strike) and the Belgians (go away, you are bothering us) it would appear that here we are welcome!

I am not a shopper; I don't feel the need to buy a new pair of shoes every week or fill my cottage with the latest gadgets, so I am rather amazed at the English necessity to shop all the time. People seem to buy and buy and you see them struggling from one shop to another laden down with bags seemingly desperate to spend everything they have in their purse (or don't have as the case may be). However I am falling in love with the English supermarkets! Aren't they wonderful? Such a choice! If you can't find something a query to a person stacking shelves sees you being lead to the product and then being asked if you need any more help, at the check out I am asked if I would like to be helped packing the bags (okay, my hair is white and I am wrinkly but I don't feel offended!) and then waiting until you are ready to leave before turning to the next customer.

My supermarket experience in France was of oldies queueing for the supermarket to open, fighting to be first through the door, boring, unimaginative food, vegetables that had been in the cold room for a couple of weeks and when asking where something was, given vague directions which invariably were wrong. Belgium supermarkets? Don't make me laugh! Customer service? What is that? Get in, get your stuff, no-one to direct you and the check out ... right, let's push all this stuff through at break-neck speed, see if we can break her eggs by crushing them with a 3 litre cubitainer, give us your dosh and f*** off - oh, and whilst you are scrabbling frantically to bag up your purchases, let's see if we can send the next customers' stuff through so they can give you a dirty look as you are still there and if we can muddle up different purchases, even better ...

Perhaps I shouldn't sing the praises of the British supermarket - they do get a bad press with their buying tactics, building in already over-subscribed towns - but like everyone I do use them. In my defense I do buy fruit, vegetables, meat and fish from our local town shops and the farmers in the area. Bridport still has 'real' shops and hasn't been overrun by the multinationals and although the main shopping areas seem to have a load of charity shops, there are still people proud of their trade and a clientèle who support them.

Off to clear the garage as the last load of our removals arrives with GW this evening - hopefully including my winter clothes and kitchen things!

An explanation

We have just moved from Brussels to West Dorset and it's not a 'flop' in the sense of 'not working', 'everything going wrong' (although things do go wrong ...). We arrived at the cottage on a Thursday and on the Sunday evening were down in the local which has a skittles alley. The guys were playing and we were given a demonstration of the Dorset Flop. This is only to be undertaken when you have been drinking all day as otherwise, if carried out sober you will possibly find yourself in Dorchester A&E with a broken nose. It is beyond my powers of literacy to explain the Flop, so if you want more information about Flopping and skittles in general, click http://www.tradgames.org.uk/games/Skittles.htm. Well, don't actually as good old Blogger won't let me cut and paste. If I can't put in the link and you are fascinated by skittles, just google Dorset Skittles and see what comes up.

(As I write it is quite late in the evening, very dark and there is a lot of shooting in the field above the cottage. Either someone is committing mass murder, slaughtering the herd of cows in the field or killing the rabbit population in the village. As long as it isn't the first two that's okay, especially as GW is away today in Brussels and I am home alone - I'm not afraid being by myself but shooting at 9 o'clock is slightly odd).

We live in a lovely village about 5 miles east of Bridport - a village we drove through two years ago but hadn't remembered the name. It was only when we moved that I remembered pictures I had taken on that occasion! We are also about 4 miles from the sea on the Jurassic Coast and at the top of the road/lane with passing places that drops down into the village there are sea views to Lyme Regis.

We don't have a village shop any more so all help and information is to be found in the pub - run by a lovely lady who works all hours that God sends to keep her pub busy. Basically one side of the room is the bar with an open fire and the other side is for food. Lots of themed nights (the other night was an Italian Night, recently there was a Thai Night) and she has also started a monthly pub quiz. A few weeks ago there was a sponsored bungee jump in the car park with money going to the Air Ambulance. GW did film that but hasn't got around to putting it onto youtube yet ... we are all waiting!

There are some lovely houses in the village, either rather grand or very quaint with their thatched roofs - unfortunately it would appear that quite a number of them are second homes and from what I hear the 'weekenders' are not too well liked - more 'ignored' rather than 'disliked' perhaps.

We run a small online grocery company (www.theinternetgrocer.com) which basically ships English food into Brussels at a cheaper price than the few sad English ingredients found in supermarkets in Brussels. We suddenly found ourselves in Food Central here in Dorset so we have been busy starting up a section of wonderful local products to take into Belgium. Having been away from England for so long we didn't realise how popular food-wise Dorset had become but of course with Hugh FW here and the winner of Master Chef Mat Follas opening up his restaurant down the road in Beaminster and lots of terribly famous people having houses here, the county has become a food paradise. We arrived here just in time for the Dorset Food Festival so we spent a month travelling around Dorset gorging ourselves on local produce and meeting so many charming, enthusiastic and dedicated producers.

I will try and add some photos later if allowed! The shooting has stopped so it's time for bed!