Slow summer days

Rustic heart on our front door

Our back yard; the pots are starting to look really pretty.

Current WIP.  These are hexies that I printed ever so slightly too small, by accident.  Not sure what they will become.

Pretty Tilda fabric.

Lizzie photobombing.  Again.

I am having a quiet summer and loving it.  The days are long and hot.  I am working, sewing, watching a little TV, reading and swimming.

Man, I *love* going off for a swim when it's hot outside.  I have started to meet an old friend at the pool on a Friday evening and I'm really enjoying our dates.  We meet straight after work and swim half a mile alongside each other then have a good gossip in the spa before we each head home.  K is getting married in September and it is so nice to hear her wedding news.  I didn't enjoy planning my wedding at all and wish, now, that we'd gone for a smaller affair.  Don't get me wrong, my wedding day was the happiest day of my life, but I did not enjoy being the centre of attention.  I've changed since we got married.  I care less about what I ought to do and more about what I want to do.  I think if we got married again I'd hold a bunch of wildflowers in the local church with just my close family and friends.  I'd wear a pale pink dress and we'd all spend the rest of the day squashed into in the garden at home with lots of fairy lights and amazing food.  Anyhoo.

I am keeping a low profile socially.  I'm lucky to have a lot of really lovely friends but I went through a phase of over-booking my social diary then cancelling and letting people down, which would ultimately make them (and me) feel bad.  So I've scrubbed the diary clear and I'm letting things happen spontaneously where possible, which makes me feel much more calm and, oddly, in control.

My book stash is severely depleted; I am tearing through it.  Really enjoyed Tracey Chevalier 'The Last Runaway' and followed it up with 'Falling Angels' which I also liked.  I've then read the latest Peter James' 'Want You Dead' (another excellent read) and have this afternoon finished Mo Hayder's 'Wolf' (which is a decent read but a bit slow and not as scary as I'd hoped).

J has been with us this weekend.  I fetched him on Friday afternoon and we spent a lovely hour or so on the swing seat in the shade, catching up.  His school prom was a couple of weeks ago and he showed me the photos of him and his friends.  He seems to have a really cool group of friends; fun and cheeky but with enough nouse to work hard at school and get good grades.

We went into London last night to have dinner and see Derren Brown live.  It was stifling in the theatre but it was such a good show.  Made a change to do something different and it was really nice wandering through the busy streets of London on a hot summer night, sipping cold drinks and discussing the show.

But I've kept my best news 'til last.  My sister gave birth to a gorgeous baby girl last night.  She went into hospital at 6:30pm and the baby had been born by 9:30pm.  She did it all with just gas and air, lost a lot of blood and I understand it was *quite* painful, but they came home this afternoon and all is well.  I am going to see them after work tomorrow.  I cannot wait.  I adore my niece and to be given another… well, I couldn't have had better news this weekend.  Happy days!

Have a good week, lovely people.

Nicki

x

Let's finish with a little grumble, since I'm constantly hot and therefore a little bit ratty:

• My make-up is flatly refusing to stay put in this weather.  My eyebrows melt off my face within an hour and hayfever gives me leaky eyes, ruining my eyeliner.  I look, frankly, rank.

• Every day is a bad hair day.  My locks are well overdue a cut and colour so I am spending the summer resembling an aging rock star with long, greasy, dark roots and dry ends. 

• I am still smarting from my doctor telling me that he will no longer prescribe the contraceptive pill for me after Christmas.  Feels like it is only a matter of time before he suggests a hip replacement and heart pills.  I am NOT old dammit! 

A gorgeous vintage wedding and a little moan about the weather

I am a true English gal so I am going to start with a mini weather report.  It was appalling last week - not just rainy but extraordinarily windy too.  My carefully nurtured little seedlings have, for the most part, spent their first vulnerable weeks in the earth being battered by heavy rain and strong wind.  Every morning I've nipped outside in my jim-jams, anxiously checking for damage and tipping excess water out of the flooded vintage enamel trugs.

I am not enjoying this weather at all.  I am fed up with damp clothes drying all over the house, I am annoyed that I have to switch the lamps on before lunchtime and I generally just feel cross that flip flops, ice cream and heat rashes do not feature in my foreseeable future.  (Well, actually, that's a fib.  We've got a couple of holidays coming up, but you know what I mean.  I want sunshine at home! *wails*  In fact, I demand sunshine!  *stamps feet*)

♥♥♥♥♥

There is nothing quite like a forthcoming wedding to really ramp up the weather-related wobblies.  One of Andrew's oldest friends was getting married on Saturday and the wedding was one of the loveliest I've been to. (And there was no rain!)  I hardly took any photos because a) I was too caught up in the emotion of the day, b) the only camera I had with me was my iPhone and c) it was so windy that I had to hold down my dress to save flashing my [enormous tummy tucker] pants at passers by.  So I'm afraid that you will have to just take my word for it that the wedding was beautiful.  

Imagine a very slender and strikingly attractive bride in a creamy silk vintage sheath dress, her hand-span waist accentuated by a plain silk belt and diamante buckle.  She wore a little fur cape over her shoulders and just an embellished silk hairband to set off her thick blonde hair which was pulled into a low side ponytail.  She carried a posy of flowers that looked as though they had just been plucked from an old English garden and the shoebox-sized church was filled with peonies, roses and candles.  She and her husband (tall and handsome in a grey suit with bright pink socks) grinned from ear to ear all day.  It was such a treat to be part of their special day.

The reception was held in a black barn deep in the Suffolk countryside and a vintage double decker bus was hired to drive everyone there from the church. (They travelled separately in a chauffeur-driven pastel green classic VW camper van - so cool!).  Inside, the barn was gorgeous.  There were fairy lights and tea lights everywhere you looked, the table decorations were an electic mix of vases and old bottles filled with pale pink blowsy blooms.  If only the silver window vase on one of the tables had fitted in my clutch bag! :-)   We drank plenty of fizz, ate the biggest strawberries I've ever seen and washed down huge chunks of chocolate wedding cake with tea drunk from vintage china.  

The bride and groom have been together for ever having met in Australia when they were both on their travels.  When the groom, as part of his speech, thanked his parents for lending him the money to go to Australia, all those years ago, I felt a lump in my throat.  Aw!   

But every wedding needs a few minor incidents to make it memorable.  I will never forget the best man's speech which was shocking and hilarious in equal measure.  The entire wedding was translated into sign-language by a lovely jolly-looking grey-haired old chap and I still chuckle to myself now when I imagine how he interpreted some of the more 'blue' stories!

♥♥♥♥♥

So the jubilee bunting has been packed away and it's back to a full 5-day week at work for me this week.  Our spa membership is proving worthwhile so far - we've been a few times already.  In the evenings there are very few people and we often get the swimming pool entirely to ourselves.  RESULT!  The jacuzzi outside is uh-mazing and one of the other members told me last week that it's even lovelier out there when there's snow on the ground so I'm quite looking forward to that this winter.  I'm having my gym induction on Wednesday lunchtime and so don't expect to be fully mobile until the weekend afterwards.  I am ridiculously feeble in the gym.

Have a great week! 

Nicki 

x

Lashings of summer cheer!

If my blog was a stage I'd be tap dancing my way onto it right now, repeatedly tipping my sequinned top hat and grinning my head off.  That's how I feel - it has been such a lovely weekend.  We've done very little but I've rediscovered ice pops, planted all of my little homegrown seedlings and had a lovely afternoon tea at a lovely local garden centre with my lovely friend.  Lovely.

Our garden is the size of a postage stamp and although I've dug a little bed for my cut flowers, it just isn't big enough for all the seeds I've grown.  So I've been planting into the vintage crates I bought last year.  They look really nice in the garden with the rusty old galvanised steel buckets and wicker planters I've collected, I'm super-chuffed with them.  

Here's the garden before we'd done anything with it this weekend.  See - tiny.  We do have another garden behind the hedge (behind the dog) but that's more of a yard and needs some serious prettifying (next weekend's job).  Thank goodness you can't see it from our lawn, it's a bit depressing!  That little bare patch with the peony on the left is now chocker with my plants.  Eek!  I just threw them all in, kind of in a random order (!) and am hoping for the best. It's my first year of growing cut flowers - this is all experimental.  When (and if!) I manage to pick my own bunch of flowers you will hear me whooping across the length and breadth of the country.  I am not holding my breath, though.  At best, I will product a decent bunch of sweet peas.  

It was lovely in the garden, we brought out the radio and did a bit of dancing as we worked (Andrew was painstakingly digging out the weeds from in between the patio slabs - a horrid job).

Today I made coffee cupcakes, which had all disappeared within an hour, and we lounged outdoors.  Then I put on a floaty summer frock and took my friend out for afternoon tea to celebrate her last day of singledom - she's getting married tomorrow.  (Good luck Mel and John!  Big kiss!)  We had a really nice time - there is a garden centre near us called Beckworth Emporium which also has a big farm shop and cafe/restaurant.  I love it there.  We sat in the garden and ordered afternoon tea:

Not the most elegant presentation but it was bloody delicious.  We took boxes of the cake home with us.

We sat in the shade and had a good gossip for a couple of hours.  Mel was all glammed up with her hair, fingers and toes all buffed up. :-)  We came home with bellies full of cake and brown paper bags full of fab things - fresh strawberries and cherries, pink geraniums, old-fashioned ginger beer and fabric patchwork Union Jack bunting.  Happy girlies.

Tonight, Andrew and I laid a blanket on the lawn and had a picnic of cheese and coleslaw open sandwiches with apricot flapjack and big mugs of tea.  We followed it up with a late evening walk with the dog through the fields.  Absolute bliss.

♥♥♥♥♥

Now, we are music lovers in this house - the radio or ipod is always playing, more so than the TV (I hardly watch any TV at all).  One of my favourite ever albums is perfect to listen to in this weather and I thought I'd share my fave summery track from the album.  This is Hafdis Huld and 'Daisy'.  Hope you like it. 

It's from the album Synchronised Swimmers - I can really recommend it.  I can listen to this album on repeat and never get bored of it.

Have a good week lovelies!

Nicki 

x

PS - Remember in my last post I talked about dealing with the wanties?  They hit hard and I was powerless to them, but I know now that you girls 'totes' get it!  Cuckoo's fault this time:

Starry Polish ware with strawberries and cream macaroons