Bitterly cold today – it was -4C when taking photo, but some lovely views from the front door.

Changing J’s bed in the spare room today prior to him coming up for Christmas. Once the bottom sheet was on, Saphy decided this could be a good place to sleep. She also acquired a new ‘project’ to work on yesterday when R built me a new office chair. The old one was seven years […]

My Mum, J and I do the Jacqui Lawson Advent Calendar every year. I tried to get R into it a few years ago but it is not his cup of tea. The Jacqui Lawson website is great for sending HTML greetings cards by email, and every year she does an Advent Calendar – for […]

He is still as voracious as ever. One way and another he is cadging about 8 pouches of Felix a day out of us. This is way too much and he is now being cut down to one pouch per feed apart from overnight when he can keep on having two. He annoys me by […]

This was the homemade chowder we had for lunch today. Some people put smoked bacon in theirs, but I am not that keen on it, so I just leave it out. Served with a homemade cottage loaf. I use the breadmaker to make the dough (with my dodgy arm kneading dough would be very difficult). […]

Apparently along with humans suddenly having developed violent gluten and lactose allergies in the last ten years – cats are following the trend too and now “you shouldn’t give your cat milk”. I’ll put this one firmly in the category of “you shouldn’t let your cat go outside” as a big bunch of crap. I’ve […]

Well, Dan’s eclairs and macarons let me down and he didn’t win. Matty was a deserved winner though. I watched the bake off this morning rather than last night, because I have a subscription to Channel 4 OD which lets me watch it without adverts. I am violently allergic to adverts and use an ad […]

I made my small contributions to Christmas yesterday. Normally I make loads of stuff like Christmas cakes, mince pies and shortbread, plus prepare and freeze all my own vegetables and accompaniments. This year I will have just had my operation and will have my arm in a sling, so virtually everything is coming pre-prepared from […]

It has been a few years since we have had a sheep in the garden, but this wanderer has obviously escaped from durance vile and was spotted by the bird table this morning. Here she is having a quick graze before fleeing. Lucky appeared on camera a few seconds later, so it may be that […]

Every year I have a little personal sweepstake on the winner of the Great British Bakeoff. I’ve had some success (I got both Nancy and Frances) and I generally get my candidate through to at least the semis. So this year my candidate was Dan (I chose him before he won star baker the first […]