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!