Christmas Eve Parties

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You know when you mishear something?

Well, I was at my upholstery class and we were chatting in a Sussex Housewife sort of a way when I mentioned that I was thinking of having a poker party on Christmas Eve.

Someone said, ‘Blimey that’s rather retro and risqué ‘

‘Not unless it is the strip version,’ I said.

‘Well, there’s not much to strip,’ she said.

‘What?’ I said.

‘You’d just unwind it,’ she said.

‘Unwind what?’ I said.

‘Well the sheet, the tablecloth, whatever,’ she said.

‘What??’ I said.

‘The toga,’ she said.

Now I had not thought about a toga party for a long time – and it did bring back a range of memories…..

Two days later, I was in a charity shop as is my wont, and I was looking for a pair of curtains (unsuccessfully as it turns out, but charity shopping is always a lottery.)

Another woman was also rootling around looking at a large white sheet/tablecloth/duvet cover and we got chatting.

‘I’m going to a toga party,’ she said.

‘Really?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘ We do it every Christmas Eve.’

Blue Trousers

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‘By the way, it’s a black tie event,’ said my best beloved as he headed off to somewhere in Bulgaria leaving me with a very busy week – and nothing appropriate to wear.

I had just sold on eBay the only dress I had which could have passed muster at a black tie event and now had three days before the event and really no time to go shopping.

As you may recall, dear reader, I am a dedicated charity shopper and the thought of paying money for a posh new frock I would not have just cause to wear for the next ten years, seemed just silly.

But one of the first rules of charity shopping is that you cannot go looking for something specific, in your size, in your style, and available on that day – it just doesn’t work like that.

But, optimist that I am, I thought I would find something.

As I mentioned, I did not have a lot of time – book sorting, dog walking, refugee good cause meetings etc etc take up time, even for a Sussex Housewife.

So, I raced around the charity shops of Petersfield and took stock, as it were.

That looked nice, but not on me. That was nice too, but sadly wouldn’t go over my shoulders or pulled the other way, past my bum. That was a nice colour, but that was all that was nice about it. That looked like something my gran would have thought nice. And so on.

In the end I went back to my wardrobe and rootled out a rather lovely garment that I had worn for a friend’s wedding evening do.

It is a bright green turquoise with yellow embroidery – bear with me, dear reader, it is striking, but not garish. It is long and has what we used to call, in my youth, a Mandarin collar – do they still call it that?

Anyway, it is long with buttons from throat to nearly the floor but it also had slits up the side from nearly the floor to nearly the hips. I am not Elizabeth Hurley.

On the previous occasion, I had worn it with jeans and rather liked that jeans-with-posh look but even I know that jeans at a black tie occasion at an Oxford College celebrating its bicentennial was probably a step too outrageous for me to carry off.

Never mind, I thought, as a speed-dash around the charity shops again failed to provide me with navy skinny trousers, we can get to Oxford in good time and I will find something there.

I guess you have an inkling where this is heading.

I could not find navy skinny trousers in Oxford for love nor money.

Well actually, in panic, I did find them, for (a lot of) money.

Suffice it to say, L K Bennett, not even in a sale.

And they are glorified leggings.

( Very, very good leggings and a delight to wear but even so, dear god, what a price shock to the person not used to paying more than £5.50 for a good-label item.

I am now wearing them at every possible opportunity. There’s that thing that if you wear them more often then each wear has cost you less, and eventually they feel like a bargain – I am not, dear reader, at that stage yet.)

That night, I put them on and my striking Mandarin collared ‘dress’ and went down to the pre-dinner drinks.

I did a head count to find fewer than ten other women in the room and not one was wearing anything different than you would wear to an office meeting with your immediate boss. I have dresses like that!

Was I gutted? well yes and no. I did feel the best dressed woman there – and though was wearing bloody expensive posh leggings I needn’t have bought, I also had a very stylish charity shop find on too  – and I will bet no one else in that room could have said that.

Leviticus and Box Sets

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French telly is a lot of men in black polo-necked sweaters either in films where they smoke Gitanes and then strip off to ‘delight’ young women, or they keep their sweaters on in news programmes to talk ‘meaningfully’ about the issues of the day.

Or at least that was my experience, and what is more, they spoke so fast my fledgling French understanding couldn’t keep up.

So, there was the time when I thought someone was complaining about almond croissants and was infact talking about feeding growth hormones to cattle – hormone de croissance.

So, instead of French tv, we watched box sets on our very small television.

( The television was bought some years before in Brussels as a stop gap until we got something bigger which we never got round to buying. And, when the remote got lost in the move and I thought it was a chance to buy something just a little bit bigger, the Best Beloved sent to North Korea or somewhere nearby, to get a replacement – and it turned up….)

There were two stand-out favourites: The West Wing and The Wire.

( The Wire, in case you don’t know was the parallel lives of drugs dealers and the police and we spent quite a lot of time leaning forward and saying to each other, ‘What did he say?’ After all, a very small television with poor sound does not help with black Baltimore ‘patois’ for two middle aged white people.

The drug dealer did a qualification in business and the police went out and got drunk – but of courser, dear reader there is much more to it than than that and I highly recommend you find yourself some wet-winter-time to settle down and watch it.)

Friends of ours in similar situations used to ration themselves to one episode a night – or in some puritanical households, to one a week.

But the BB and I are greedy and used to egg each other one for ‘just another.’

We watched The West Wing – all through, all seven series, several times.

Good Lord, I wish Jed Bartlett was the current president of the US and Josh and Toby were in charge and C.J was handling the press corps, but we have what we have.

There is one scene when Jed who, in case you don’t know is the President, is doing a press conference and one journalist doesn’t stand when he walks into the room because she is against his liberal policy on gay rights.

Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1T9vmN62wf8

After that, dear reader, you shouldn’t be back here reading this, you should be out buying the brilliant West Wing box set.

(And in case you want more ammunition here are some others you can use http://www.tickld.com/x/the-next-time-someone-uses-the-bible-to-say-homosexuality-is-a-sin)

 

 

 

Cockroaches and Balls

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The other day seemed to be one of those when the strangest donations come to light in the Oxfam bookshop.

A lot of our donations are repetitive and can I say, just sometimes a little boring, but now and then you find something interesting and odd in many senses of the word.

I am sure there is a book about any and every subject out there somewhere and many seem to find a (hopefully, temporary) home in Deepest Sussex.

Before now, I have found a book on making your own horse-riding equipment and one on how to chop and stack wood the Norwegian way.

So, the other day I found a coffee table book on Anatolian Vernacular Architecture. Not a usual find and one that is, perhaps surprisingly, worth a bit and now is listed, should your heart be beating a little faster, on Oxfam Online.

And then I came across a collection of old Spurs books. I am not a football fan but I was rather taken with the delightful History of Tottenham Hotspur FC 1882 – 1946. Spurs was referred to as the Hotspur Athletic Club – how charming is that?

And then, my cup runneth over when I found this:

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Now isn’t that splendid?

And if that wasn’t enough, I found this book which was the answer any anyone’s Christmas book present dilemma. It is the book, I thought, that anyone would want in their stocking. This is it:

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I tweeted to that effect and it got a few likes and re-tweeted gently around the Oxfam network, and it made me laugh.

Low and behold, I was at home this afternoon when my Oxfam manager rang me and said, ‘I’ve had someone on the phone – something about social media and cockroaches – is that anything to do with you? ‘

Someone wanted the buy the book! So over the phone, I directed my manager to various alternative possible places where I could have  stashed it.

( You should go behind the scenes at an Oxfam bookshop one day to understand that things are run on stashes, piles, boxes, shelves, bags and things stuffed into all sorts of places.

Every now and then I get round to sorting out an area and find all sorts – the skeleton of a forgotten volunteer, for example.)

Anyway, he found it, we put the price up a bit, and I wait to hear who bought it. If I’d been there with the customer I would have asked for the whole story about who was going to be so delighted on Christmas Day but I guess, I will never know.

 

 

 

Friends and Acquaintances

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There should be a word for the people who fall between friends and acquaintances.

I was talking about this with my hairdresser the other day, and she is a case in point.

I have known her for about six years and she has helped me collect necklaces for the village festivities stall, she has helped recruit Oxfam volunteers from the bored women whose hair she cuts.

(She tells me that she hears lots of stories, confidences and has people telling her stuff they would never tell their friends and she is not their friend.)

Her mum and I dog walk, I know her sister who now and then gives me a pedicure and her other sister who helped the best beloved recuperate from a back operation.

But we never see each other socially.

My fellow Oxfam volunteers are another case in point.

With one or two exceptions, I never see them outside work but I know how their weeks pan out, I know the names of their grandchildren and share recipes, their daughter’s triumph of design for a national trust Christmas extravaganza, cover on the days they want to go up to London to see a show or to Portsmouth for Christmas shopping.

And, the friend/acquaintance thing is a spectrum.

There are those people with whom you share all and everything – well not everything, as sex between consenting adults over a certain age should never be discussed in my view, and neither should be the frequency you check for unwanted facial hair, but you get the general idea.

There are people in your life who you don’t see very often but when you do, it is as if you are just picking up where you left off.

I schlepped over to Lewes this week ( and though in the same county, Lewes is a bit of a schlepp from here) to have lunch with someone who started off as an employee and morphed into a good friend.

We haven’t seen each other for three years ( this was news to me who would have said I saw her a few months ago, but memory works like that ) and it was, as I say, as if we’d seen each other last week.

There are friends who you have known for years and somehow come in and out of each other’s lives and there are a considerable number of those who I currently feel bad about not seeing.

(When I was in Brussels and Paris, I used to make the effort to arrange lunches in London and invite my friends so that I would have chance to keep up with them – sometimes there were three of us who could make it and sometimes there were 15.

Since I have been in Deepest Sussex, I have let that habit lapse and I am ashamed of that.)

At the other end of the spectrum there are people who are barely acquaintances.

Usually I know them from the Oxfam shop and we have a chat when they come in – they are regulars.

I don’t know any of their names.

There is the couple who come in every Friday morning and he looks for books on something he is currently learning – electronics, physics, maths etc and his wife, who I also know because she volunteers for cancer research, looks half-heartedly through the embroidery books.

When I bump into them in town, we always stop and have a chat about the weather or whatnot.

Then there is another customer who comes in looking for all sorts of interesting stuff and I know he goes to the city sometimes in the week. But now, apparently he is going to give it all up for a life in the church.

There is the now retired woman who worked in Waitrose and always talked to my visiting niece and asked when she was visiting what we were going to cook.

There are the women who work in the Boots pharmacy who help me sort out the medicines I collect for a volunteer who has been ‘off work’ for months.

But they are definitely acquaintances or even less than acquaintances – and there is no word for that.

But back to the main issue – what do you call someone who falls between the two stools of friend and acquaintance?

We, as I have mentioned before, have a lunch every now and then called a Lizzie Lunch.

It is because some of those of us who knew and loved her, need to seize the day and not let the business of life stop us getting together – as I failed to do with Lizzie.

There are a couple of women who come who were definitely in Lizzie’s friends category but I don’t know them that well – what would I call them, a friend or acquaintance?

There are people I have done intensive summer schools with over the years but never see in between and if the summer schools no longer happen, will probably never see again – apart from on Facebook.

There are the BB’s old friends from university who I see every now and then but they are not in most cases, my friends.

There are people who I see quite often because I am involved in the Rural Refugee Network and so are they, and we sort out fundraising events and will do the kiss, kiss thing when we meet but I don’t really know them.

The list could go on forever.

So, if anyone knows what you call people who have ( and here comes the I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue purple-prose metaphor) slid down the hillside of aquaintanceship and are languishing in the un-named valley, never to climb up the hill of friendship, please let me know.

Supper For Eight

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I am never quite sure just how it happens that you do for a supper for just eight people and it is not fancy, so no implements for removing lobster flesh for example, but by the end of the evening they have created enough dirty plates and glasses to generously coat every flat surface in the kitchen.

Admittedly, at that stage of the evening my loading of the dishwasher can be a little less than perfectly done, ( it never is perfectly done according to my best friend and dishwasher-loading perfectionist).

And to be fair too, we don’t put our glasses or cutlery in the dishwasher as they are old, from various French flea markets, and go cloudy or tarnished.

Even so, it is remarkable how eight nice, polite, interesting people can wilfully create such a lot of dirty stuff and laugh cheerfully throughout the evening as they do it.

But, whilst I can throw several shades of a dicky fit over my best beloved’s inability to put everyday breakfast bowls and mugs into the dishwasher, I don’t actually mind the clearing up after a ‘do.’

Dog and husband have a very clear attitude that this should be left to another day and that anyone who wants to be awake at 1am loading dishwashers, is on her own.

But I quite like that wind down with the BBC World Service telling me what is happening in Nigeria or about Indonesian political scandals, whilst I go about my business.

And I like restoring order after the chaos.

You need to know at this stage, I am not complaining about the mess because we had a great evening.

It was a kitchen supper not because we are posh people trying to show that we can do casual and informal, but because we are not posh people and have nowhere to sit everyone except in the kitchen.

The mix worked well – always a lucky break and not guaranteed, though in this case was a pretty sure bet – and though I know I am repeating myself, we had a lovely time.

I am sure you couldn’t care less what we ate but I am going to tell you anyway so if you are not interested, time to leave.

Mushrooms chopped up by a whizz in the food processor and saluted lengthily ( you can’t overcook a mushroom) with tarragon and then mixed with a very tasty cream cheese from Cornwall via Waitrose. Put on bruschetta from Lidl.

Winter minestrone with chard and beans and carrots and celery and garlic etc. The secret is to keep the rind ends of parmesan in your freezer and put one or two into the soup as it cooks.

Thin lamb chops marinaded in pomegranate molasses, olive oil, garlic and lemon zest and then shoved under a grill or in a hot oven until they are rightly done – not overdone, mind.

And my current favourite recipe – slices of new potatoes cooked in water, olive oil, garlic and saffron, mixed with artichokes ( please note from a tin, rinsed and sauted, not done from fresh, you must be joking,) green olives , parsley and it all coated with creme fraiche – then put in a puff pastry pie – and no, of course, I didn’t make the pastry.

( If you want the real version of this google ‘Cranks artichokes puff pastry’ but Nadine makes you do stuff with real artichokes and adds nuts and stuff which I am sure is pretty delicious, but my easy version wins for me I am afraid.)

Can I just remind you at this stage that there is something in the make-up of parsley with counteracts the next day less-than-delightful garlic breath so it is a must add if you are using as much garlic as in this ‘menu.’

I don’t eat desserts and am rubbish at making them, so very kind friend/guest made lovely lemon mousse thing – it disappeared without touching the sides.

Cheese, chocolates and all that malarky – but to be fair, cheese and chocolates hardly add a smidgen to the washing up.

A non-invited friend, who is not a cook, was practically salivating when I told her about the pie and I (gaily) thought I would have plenty of leftovers because of a lifetime habit of over-catering – blame my Lancashire grandmother who instilled the idea that hospitality means lots of food.

I invited her, her husband, my best friend and her husband for Sunday lunch.

Dear reader, there was little in the way of leftovers but that is another menu story…….

Seaglass

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Easington Colliery is not a place that you would normally think of as holiday trip destination but we went there not so long ago – and it was great.

Yes it is really a colliery village – or more to the point, an ex-colliery village – and you can park and then walk across the rec , as I am sure it is called,and down a lot of uneven steps to the pebble beach.

My best beloved picked up a lovely little stone which looked liked a smoothed glass pebble which was, say, a pale jade or if you like your colours posh, teal.

Along the beach was a woman looking very intently for something and I wondered if she was a fossil hunter.

Anyway, and there is always an anyway in my stories, I went off to walk along the beach leaving the best beloved sitting on a rock with the dog running between us.

I was looking for more glass pebbles to add to the collection the BB was giving me.

Anyway, imagine my surprise then when I looked back to find both had disappeared.

Now my BB is not a man who these days can gallop of across rocks and up hills and down dales, so I was worried.

I went (galloping) across the rocks looking for both of them and shouting their names – nothing….

Of course, dear reader, I found them – both happily mooching and the BB beckoning me to look at some landslide or another – as you do.

(The dog meanwhile, was suggesting that I had fretted over nothing and she had the situation all under control.)

Together – with me making sure we were all a pack together – we went back to the main beach and the fossil hunting woman was still there, looking intently at the beach and moving very slowly.

It was my BB who asked her what she was hunting and she said, ‘seaglass.’

She was American and had learned to pick up seaglass as a child – her mother had found some and set her children to find more.

(Wise woman who found a way to send her kids off and keep them occupied.)

Seaglass is the rubbed shards of glass from all sorts of bottles and you can look it up on Wikipedia.

Anyway (again,) this nice woman said she had come to this part of the world on an especial seaglass hunt and apparently there was a bottle-making factory up the coast and this was a great beach to find seaglass.

She had a bag full – or at least a plastic food bag half full – of these very same ‘pebbles’ of pale jade.

As we were talking she pointed out several pebbles and, generously, handed them to me.

Now, I am not sure that Easington Colliery was much of a beach destination in its heyday as a colliery – and I wouldn’t have expected to have it part of my holiday, but to find a lovely American woman who had flown across the Atlantic to be there, was indeed a surprise.

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The Club Sandwich

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I think I might have said before that I do realise ‘tales from my holiday’ are something close to gloating and should be avoided.

However, unless you want to read my four page seminal work on how to sort and price a donation of books to Oxfam written this afternoon for new volunteers, this is all I have.

Arriving late into Lisbon, we had opted to stay the night there rather than get the hire car from somewhere in the airport and drive three hours across the country in the dark, to a place that barely registered on any map.

Last time, and for that matter the time before, we were in Lisbon we stayed in a lovely, posh hotel which was built into the castle walls. Suffice it to say, it had its own peacocks.

(On one stay there, we had a bodyguard.

Actually, he was guarding my husband, not me, as he pointed out when I said that he must be tired and we would be perfectly alright on our own.

I could, it seems, have wandered across the city on my own risking all sorts but as long as the best beloved was protected to the very door of the very nice hotel, all was right in the world.)

This time it was a chain hotel near-ish to the airport and that -ish later became important.

We arrived to a very polite and friendly welcome and settled into the bar area and ordered a club sandwich.

Now a good club sandwich is a nice thing and the benchmark for us was set by a hotel in Reading, yes really.

We had arrived, do stop me if I have told you this before, footsore, hungry and weary after train chaos on the way back from watching rugby in Cardiff and unable to use any form of public transport to get us further towards Petersfield.

It was about 10pm and we had no luggage, but the receptionist promptly produced a pair of toothbrushes – and that was a very nice gesture.

Room service, she told us, could rustle up a club sandwich, a beer and a glass of white wine.

So we went to our room. It had a huge bed, a good film on the telly and minutes later the best club sandwich (with good chips) arrived – it was all very good indeed.

( I may have overused the word good, but really it was!)

So, back in Lisbon, the club sandwich was fine, but not a patch on Reading.

Now, the receptionist had told us there was a taxi strike the next day but all we needed to do was to call down when we got up and by the time we had showered and got dressed a, presumably strike-breaking, taxi would appear and all would be well.

I did have a moment’s thought about black-legging but I compared that to lugging cases around the public transport system and swallowed it.

Next day, however it turned out there were a lot fewer strike-breakers than would have been ideal in the circumstances.

We were advised by the day shift receptionist that we should take the metro. Now that would have been OK if not for the fact that as we left the hotel there was a airport shuttle minibus about to set off.

The night receptionist had failed to mention this fact and therefore to advise us to book a seat. There were no seats available for hours.

I won’t bore you with a minute by minute account of the Lisbon metro ( it is fine, really) and will just mention that there are signs in all the carriages explaining, in a variety of languages, smoking was prohibited.

But the English translation was ‘No Smokers!’

A bit harsh I thought, and how could they be sure of every passenger’s personal habits. But maybe it explained why in the face of a taxi strike, the trains were surprisingly empty on the last leg to the airport.

There are times when I wonder

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There are times when I get fed up with Oxfam. Well, actually it is nothing to do with Oxfam, just the bookshop.

Today I put out a lovely collection of textile art books and thought that instead of working five or six shifts this week, I could use that time to reinvent myself as a textile craftsperson.

Instead of coming back from two weeks’ holiday and finding the place so full of books that you could hardly move – most of which dear reader, as you might know by now, went in a sack – I could do something delightfully creative and in my own time.

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But it is not going to happen.

Firstly, I need structure and left to my own devices, I would fiddle about with time week after week, after week, until months had gone by and I would have nothing to show for it.

Secondly, I need contact with people and am rubbish at doing stuff on my own – I am not sure how many collective textile art beginners groups there are in Petersfield, but I am guessing not that many.

And I like my fellow volunteers and enjoy their company. The dog is great and the Best Beloved is great too, but they are not as good at being bossed around and they have their own stuff to do all day – sleep and write history, though the dog’s book is coming along very slowly she says.

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Thirdly, I would really miss the books.

For all the sacks there are gems. For all the depressing piles of browned Dick Francis collections, collections of  guides to the stately homes of England, all creased, and  who wants to buy a second hand guide to Windsor Castle? – there is a delight.

At the moment, I have a collection of old books on nature – ‘Nature for Bright Boys’ for example. Dull boys presumably should go off and make model aircraft or something.

And there are books with bizzare subjects. Who would think you could make your own horse equipment or why you would want to do that. Does stacking wood the Norwegian way differ from the way you would stack it in Deepest Sussex – too late to find out as it sold ten minutes after I put it out.

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A book on the children of the ‘Persian’ royal family – battered but worth a couple of hundred quid.

Books, with just really good titles.

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Old knitting books with cover pictures of extremely glum-looking children – mind you considering what they are wearing, I am sympathetic.

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So, I will – and dear reader you can no doubt see my martyred air – carry on juggling shifts and sacking books and making plans which I never get to carry out because there are too many books to sack and sort and price.

But in between all that, I will build a collection of old medical books, books which are so pristine we can sell them at Christmas as a gift that the receiver will never know is a second-hand book.

I will look up all the old annuals we have been given – some are worth something but most aren’t – and put them out with the Tintin books which sell like hot cakes.

I will build a collection of princess books around the wrought iron frog wearing a small crown – he sold so there must be a princess somewhere in Petersfield who is an optimist.

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I will polish my halo and carry on, and secretly wonder if I would ever have made a textile artist.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Emails

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Despise though I might the GCHQ watching of us all, I am minded to think that just a check through my emails when I get back from a trip might give anyone, with an ounce of sense, an idea of the life of a Sussex Housewife.

You don’t really notice the emails every day but when they mount up after a while, you can get a picture of the woman behind them.

So, here we go – a run down of the emails I get:

House of Fraser – now I am a hell-bent charity shopper but there are times when I go for a 70% off sale and if I do, HoF do it well. Last year in a moment of insomnia at about 3 am, I bought a Calvin Klein coat reduced from £350 to £79 – and I love it even though I already had a coat for every season/day/mood/colour/outfit.

I do have to say that one of my coats was bought by my mum from Oxfam about 40 years ago and I still wear it with enjoyment.

Mr Fothergill’s Seeds – up until very recently, I was a lacklustre gardener. However, the kind attention and instruction of my good friend over the road who told me what to do and how to do it, has changed all that. Now I can spend a day in the garden, dividing my irises and planting a hundred bulbs.

God knows what I originally bought from Mr Fothergill and why I signed up for his emails but I would have known nothing about what to do with them. Now I happily google what to do with my crocosmia and already the garden is looking better.

Thanks I have to say to Juliet, rather than Mr Fothergill.

Trip Advisor – now I know people are snitty about Trip Advisor but I find it a useful check. Once my best beloved booked us into a hotel in Lewes so that we had a place to change and sleep the night around a friend’s wedding. He didn’t check Trip Advisor who in no uncertain terms would have told him to think again and book anywhere but this place.

To be fair, it was billed as the oldest coaching in Lewes and was on the high street – but by god it was awful.

After waiting a while in the hallway – avoiding the sticky carpets, the jukeboxes and the very drunk people (at 12 noon) we were told that the room we had booked was unavailable because the previous people had trashed it.

Thank the lord.

I asked to use the bathroom to change and found that its definition of a shower was a hose attached to the taps….

We drove home that night.

Trip Advisor keep extolling me to add new reviews with the promise that I will get another badge – I am not sure what these badges are for but I like the idea anyway so I review away and apparently 20,000 people have seen my reviews.

I am not sure I believe that but I carry on anyway.

Refugee Action – now this is my street cred of emails. I read them and sign petitions but don’t do much else. But I do read and respond to the Rural Refugee Network which, as I might have said before, is a fab small charity which aims to make people welcome here.

Then there are all those sites asking for you to sign a petition of some sort – proper wages, the fight against people trafficking, grammar schools and so on and so on.

I sign, some of them, and then I go to Twitter and read Brian Bilston, the twitter poet and the tweets about the Archers and then I go to Facebook and check up on what other people are doing.

I had promised myself that I would never post a picture of any meal I ever had on Facebook on the grounds that I hated other people doing it – why do I want to see your breakfast?

But then we stopped in Thirsk for a late lunch – not least because we had misread the atlas and confused kilometres for miles and didn’t want to arrive at my sister’s too early.

Anyway, the best beloved was dragged away from the reasonable sandwich shop, protesting mildly, and made to walk a few yards to the next cafe where we had a wonderful lunch.

And I put on Facebook a picture of my quiche and salad – it was just so beautifully presented – and then I used their wifi to look at my emails……..