Monday, December 19, 2005

What a Week!

Gosh, it's been an exiting few days. It started last Tuesday when I headed off for London for the day. I had to take the long way round as I didn't want to head down the M1 and get involved in traffic delays around the big fire at Hemel Hempstead. It was a smashing day and I enjoyed the drive down through Ludlow, Cleobury Mortimer and Kidderminster. The countryside there is gorgeous. I joined the motorway system just south of Birmingham and steamed on down the M40 towards London. As usual, the highlight of the trip was the climb up and over the Chilterns where I counted 12 Red Kites circling around.

It took about 4 hours to get to Stanmore. As I drew close to my destination I could see the great black smoke plume billowing up from the remains of the fuel terminal at Hemel. The smoke drifted off to the southwest for miles and miles. Where it was forced to rise over the ridge at Stanmore the smoke particles were acting as condensation nucleii and the plume turned to a big black cumulus cloud. Thank goodness it didn't produce rain. It would have been a nasty, greasy, sooty mess!

I went down to London for a couple of reasons. One was to take flowers to Mum, Dad and Grannie's graves and the other was to visit my friend Eve. Eve is the kind lady who kept an eye on Mum and Dad when they were alive and on our London house when we left it unoccupied for 4 years. Eve loves to play the piano, but doesn't have room for one in her house, so I was delighted to be able to help out by giving her my keyboard. We plugged it in immediately, and had great fun playing with it and experimenting with all the voices and orchestrations it has - especially the percussion. I think Eve will get so much more enjoyment out of it than I did. It was difficult to tear ourselves away, but eventually we went off to a local hostelry and had a good dinner before I set off home. Having seen that the fire was not interfering with the roads, I came back the shorter way - motorway all the way to Shrewsbury and it only took just over 3 hours to get back. Needless to say I was pretty tired, but I felt that the driving was all good practice for my test which will probably happen in late January.

Then came the highlight of the week. Most of you know that it was my 60th birthday on Saturday because John wrote to everyone I know and told them about it. The result was a flood of cards, phone calls, flowers, e-mails and e-cards. So once again I am swamped. I'm determined to reply to everyone, but experience tells me that it could take a long time to do that. When I found out I had cancer the response to that was similar and I still haven't replied to all the e-mails I had then!

My birthday was a wonderful day. We got up rather earlier than usual and over our morning cuppa tea John gave me my first present. This was my senior rail card (!) which enables me to get a discount on the trains. We used it immediately to take a train to Swansea, riding the lovely, scenic Heart of Wales railway line. The weather was beautiful and it was lovely to roll through the countryside, watching the green hills go by, seeing the sheep in the lush green meadows, admiring the glint of sunlight on babbling brooks and stopping in villages with unpronouncable Welsh names.

Here's John on the train:



This is not our first trip on this train. We rode it first when we were undergraduates after a week of sleeping rough in a barn and mountain walking in North Wales, and we've taken the same line a couple of times since. Swansea, of course, is where we went to University and where we took our brief honeymoon, so it was a return to the haunts of our youth.







Here's me!




As we rocked along John produced a fabulous brunch and when that was done he had all sorts of wonderful presents which included a couple of trial horse riding lessons (I'm keen to try horse riding as this is really terrific country for it) and a day's session on a skid pan. I've always wanted to try the latter - I've had a couple of spectacular skids in my life and found them quite thrilling. I would have enjoyed them more if they had happened under controlled circumstances where I wasn't convinced that I was about to die!



Here I am getting the skid pan present:



We arrived in Swansea in the early afternoon and just had time for a bit of a wander around and a cup of tea and a piece of cake before it was time to come home. We came back on another line, along the coast through Cardiff to Newport and then heading north through Hereford and Leominster. Again, it was really lovely till it got too dark to see anything.

We had about an hour at home to get changed and washed up and then we walked down into the village for dinner at the local restaurant. It was a great meal, and we both over-indulged, so it was good to be able to walk home. By then it was quite chilly, but the stars were out and it was a brilliant end to a lovely day.

Today I've been making (and eating) Christmas cookies. This is not a tradition here, but I wanted to make something a little different for Christmas. I've done brownies and lemon bars so far and expect to make mince pies and almond macaroons tomorrow. I'm having to convert parts of my American recipes. I'm OK with cup and tablespoon measures because I have my American cups and tablespoons, but butter is measured in grams here and it doesn't come in conveniently sized sticks. Baking chocolate is in grams and milk comes in litres. Ther are three grades of white sugar. Granulated is coarser than American, caster suger is a bit finer than American granulated and icing sugar is the same as American confectioner's sugar. There are several different kinds of brown sugar too, so sometimes it's hard to decide just what to get for a given recipe.

I'm having a helluva time with my new oven, too. I've never cooked with a convection oven before - you have to cook for less time and at a lower temperature. Most of it is guesswork right now, and we'll be eating our mistakes! Of course, it's also calibrated in Centigrade so everything has to be converted. Thank-goodness for Google's wonderful conversion feature! If you don't know about that, you should try it. Try typing the following into the Google search text window "32 degrees F in C" (without the quotes). It should come back with: "32 degrees Fahrenheit = 0 degrees Centigrade". You can use if for feet to meters, pounds to kilograms, etc. etc.

Well, it's time to go. Thank you all for your messages of congratulation/commiseration - it's been lovely to hear from you all. Please keep the communication lines open - we LOVE to hear from you.