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Excuses, excuses…

I was always quite good at those ‘the dog ate my homework’ excuses when I was at school – my mother will vouch for that!  But for quite sometime I have been without a four legged friend at which to point the finger. Not any more!  So now, without further ado, I will introduce the reason why  an exciting,  colourful and in depth post about Great Dixter has not yet been forth coming… 

A teeny tiny spot on the landscape, called Higgins.

He’s very sweet…

…in fact completely adorable. It’s a shame about the noise like a crateful of seagulls when put to bed at night!  So we’re working on that, and the five am starts!

He’s keeping very busy…

…and helping me with my diary, so I’m sure we’ll be back in the swing of things very soon.

Jamming Session

Plum blossom

Some years ago I received a  wild plum tree from Country Living magazine which we planted at the edge of the garden.  I’ve always loved the delicate blossoms of the sloe trees which froth along the road sides in early spring, and I  thought that wild plums were sloes,  only really useable in sloe gin, being small and rather bitter.  It was quite a surprise to find that my little tree had produced beautiful sweet miniature plums.

Even more surprising was being able to harvest two and a half pounds of them.

Since Tim is away at work , I  felt that eating  that many  plums single handedly might have a slightly problematic effect, and I didn’t want them  to end up as a UFO (unidentified frozen object to you organised people out there who never create them) at the bottom of my freezer.  Jam is the answer… I had a sweet and sweaty session in the kitchen with David Tennant (Oh, all right, it was a rerun of Doctor Who – a girl can dream can’t she?) while testing and retesting for that scarily elusive setting point.  Eureka!  That’s it, and the jam is in the jars.

One for Tim and me, and one each for Thomas, Will, and Aimee.  Now, where’s the toaster….?

A nice cup of tea…

A few years ago I carried about a little book in which I made notes about all the lovely things I had seen that I would really, really like to own. ( They were mostly culled from the Emporium pages of Country Living if I remember rightly!) Although the book has taken itself off to the ‘safe place’ where most of my things go, never to see the light of day again – it really is a VERY safe place – I do remember that one of my aspirations was to own a piece of Gabriella Miller pottery.and now I do…!

Lunch with Jen today, who knowing me so well, had cleverly chosen the perfect present. Which can be a vase…

..or revive me with a nice cup of mint tea.

Mint tea

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