Christmas and New Year Greetings!

To wish everyone a very Merry Christmas 

and a Happy New Year 

The photo was taken in the Cristallerie Lehrer in Garrebourg on the Rhine-Marne Canal last May. They make thousands of baubles, all hand-blown - each year for the Christmas market. The barge we were on - with us on it! -  featured in the Timothy West/Prunella Scales programme where they did the same canal in the opposite direction. For a fleeting second you can even see Mr Bufo among the people waving on the foredeck. I was inside knitting!

(I note with horror that I haven't posted anything since last April, and hope to do better next year!)

Flat Out Rainbows

No, it's not the Christmas card again, but the curtains at my new flat. I suddenly saw them in the mirror, and realised the similarity...

We are loving our little 'weekends away' - though some of them are 'midweek breaks'! - to the flat. It is very comfortable and relaxing, and we have the added bonus of rainbows that appear at certain times of the morning, when the join in the glass of our balcony, or the corner of the balcony upstairs to our right, become prisms. Was it one of the Pollyanna books where an invalid has rainbows in her room from a prism hanging in the window? 

We had an 'out' yesterday, to see one of my favourite places, Cleeve Abbey, and on the way, had a splendid lunch at he Luttrell Arms in Dunster. The Luttrell family, in the person of George Luttrell, played much the same role at Cleeve as EJO gives to Sir Antony Abinger.

Here he is, looking very much a younger version of the man EJO describes as Sir Antony:

And of course, no visit to Dunster would be complete without calling into 'Home Coming' - this is an Aladdin's cave of a shop and we had intended to get Mr Bufo some new slippers there ... this time they had some rather nice Blue Faced Leicester wool, so I indulged.

There are 6 black and 4 speckled tweed balls, so I should get a reasonable jumper out of them.

A Snowdrop Day!

What might have been a drudge around to take some stuff to an auctioneer and pick up an order from the farm shop became a magical day yesterday. 
We set off soon after 9 and got through Salisbury & Wilton without any trouble - not always a given, so doubly welcome when it does happen! We noted on the A27 on the way to Salisbury that the snowdrops were out in the usual places along the roadside, but it wasn't until we turned off the A30 and were on our way to Teffont that we began to see more and more of them along the verges. Then we turned south at Teffont, and the narrow road there was lined on both sides with a marvellous array, all the way through the village to the church. Several more clumps as we went through to Fovant and rejoined the A30, and then all the way to Shaftesbury we came upon patches; some rather the worse for wear from the muddy spray coming up off the road, others gleaming white.
We had a very pleasant lunch and collected our meat and one or two other things - is it possible to go to the Udder Farm shop and not spend a substantial sum? - and set off towards home again. 
Most of the time it had been impossible to stop and take photos, but we did manage to get these, by the side of a lay-by on the A30 near Swallowcliff, on the way home. 

They are in a rather messy grassy area, and not as spectacular as some we had seen earlier, but it's the best we could do. 
I'm sure we saw several different types, as some seemed larger than others, and it wasn't just that some were more open than others. But I'm not an expert! I have a very small clump in the front garden that are also in full bloom, but they'd be embarrassed to be shown in this company! 

It's getting closer ...

Just spent a few days here getting things sorted and organised. 
Soon more pictures will be available ...once we have things like curtains, and beds, to make the place look a bit closer to our vision.
Meanwhile, this is the outside...