Two in one

 This is another two days in one Journal entry.  My days seem quite full at the moment and finding time to make a Journal entry can be challenging.

So let's start with Friday. It was a beautiful morning so I did something that I haven't done for many years. I dug out my camera and took a few photos of the vegetable garden. It has occupied much of my time in the past few months and I felt I would like a record of how it looks now we have finally started to take a crop.

The raised beds featuring carrots,
Spring onions, leeks & beetroot

cabbages & runner beans

In the afternoon I set a few salmon steaks to marinade in the fridge overnight, as B&H are coming over for dinner on Saturday.

In the evening we both did something else that we haven't done for years too. We wandered down to the local Pub with the dogs for an early evening drink. This unusual activity was instigated by a local couple that we often meet when out dog walking. Basically it transpires that they used to be semi-professional singers and someone had twisted their arms to put on an outdoor show in the pub beer garden.

Six o'clock saw us seated at one of the many picnic tables outside the pub with D&P serenading an enthusiastic audience of locals.  Music was provided using backing tracks and they were really good. we stayed and listened for a couple of hours and only departed because our stomachs were rumbling.

By the time we left they had people up and dancing and we could hear them continuing to belt out pop classics as we wandered down the lane towards home.

Saturday morning saw further culinary activities as I attempted to make a chocolate mousse. I don't know what I produced, but it certainly wasn't a mousse.  30% deemed it beautiful and rich, but it was incredibly heavy and I really wasn't happy about proffering it as a dessert. A review of the recipe and a forensic search of the internet suggests that adding alcohol to 85% cocoa dark chocolate may have been one of the issues making it so dense.

The annoying thing is that I am certain I made a mousse using the same recipe twenty years ago and it was amazing. 

Anyway, I put my frustrations behind me and we headed out to the Heart of England Forest to view a sculpture exhibition in the gardens. It was a fund raising event to enable the charitable trust to further extend their reforestation and habitat regeneration activities.

We had a pleasant morning strolling through the gardens viewing sixty statues on the themes of Heroes & Villains.  If I am honest, I found most of the statues quite uninspiring. They definitely did not have the appearance of a collection that had been assembled and curated with care and knowledge over an extended period.  Instead they tended to look more like they had been purchased from a catalogue or had been bought as a job lot.  I will say that the Minotaur and the Rhinoceros were quite splendid, but most of the others were meh!

I will, however, reaffirm that we had a lovely stroll with the dogs in a very pleasant garden setting.

The afternoon saw a mass tidy up of the house before B&H and their daughter arrived for what turned out to be an hysterical and very boozy evening. They are delightful company and one of the key decisions from the evening was that 30% needs to get us another narrow boating break booked in the Spring of 2025.