Last night I went out with 18 of my WI friends for a meal at Patchole Manor. This is a local B&B at Kentisbury Ford. It's such a small world round here, it is just down the lane from the original farmhouse that we were going to buy before we were gazumped. The couple running Patchole Manor used to have a farm at Combe Martin and also kept sheep and cattle on the field that backed onto our garden.
The house was very tastefully furnished and decorated and felt very Christmassy something that has been lacking elsewhere. I had an excellent meal of goat's cheese souffle & mixed leaf salad, chicken breast with a light lemon sauce,apricots and chestnuts and for dessert I took a chance on a creme brullee. The sugar crust was a bit too generous and some of us feared for our teeth, apart from that it was an excellent meal all cooked on an aga. What luxury to sit there, have such lovely food and at the end of the evening no clearing up to be done. As a family we almost never went out for meals because by the time you multiply the cost of anything by 5 it is just too expensive. Being in an old farmhouse there was lots of reminiscing about life for previous generations. One of my friends was brought up in the Hebrides and her mother cooked everything, including roast dinners, in a single pot suspended over an open fire. Their fireplace was so big that the tin bath in which they bathed fitted into the fireplace beside the fire. Others recalled food being cooked in wall ovens where you make a wood fire inside the oven and then cook food in the heat of the ashes.
Lately there has been a group of heifers in one of the fields by the drive.
They are very tame and if you call them they come running over.
Then they stand there waiting to be fed and trying to chew my fingers as I stroke them. The weather has not been too nice and they almost seem to be saying "Take us back to our nice warm barn."
Today as I drove into work at lunchtime that is just what Andrew the farmer was doing. Luckily I met them fairly close to the farm where they were headed and hadn't had to follow them the whole mile and a half from our drive. Note the dog travelling in style in the back of the landrover. He often travells on the back of a quad bike. One of the heifers got spooked and climbed up and over the hedge on the left so Andrew had to follow and guide it through a gateway.School this afternoon was not a lot of fun as the children had to sit still! for an hour during a play rehearsal apart from when they went up to do their group dances, oh and they were supposed to join in the songs. This was after 2 boys in my class had been in BIG trouble at lunchtime for peering over the toilet partitions and even crawling under the partitions, yuk! then as I was getting my class ready to go down into the hall another 2 boys for some reason had been in the same classroom toilet and one had we'ed over the other one's trousers, lots of denials and I was already frazzled before the rehearsal started. Then just as the children were getting ready to go home, the sky darkened, heavy rain came followed by hail followed by lightning followed by thunder. Children were squealing as I tried to make sure that all coats were done up and hoods on. I breathed a great sigh of relief when the last child had been safely delivered to her mother.
