What I did at the weekend

Right. That’s enough excitement, I think. Let’s go back to dull and quiet and this-is-what-I-did-at-the-weekend blogging.

And what we did was to go down to Salisbury (the trip that was relocated from last weekend).
It was very interesting driving down. Up around our area the gardens and fields and hilltops were still covered in quite thick snow. Then we got to the area around Birmingham and there was no snow anywhere. No indication that there ever had been snow. Not a skerrick.

Then we got to Cirencester and decided to stop at the Highwayman for lunch. That little area of the world is under about a foot of snow – still! The people in the pub said they had been snowed in until snow ploughs could reach them and dig them all out! And still the side roads are largely blocked.

Not much snow in Wiltshire anymore.

We dropped by to see Barb to drop off some seeds which I had got ready to bring down when The Builder had come down for her mother’s funeral. I had sorted them out, packed them in a bag and put the bag in my basket. And yet somehow they had remained resolutely on the dining room table. This time I carried them out to the car myself! We had scones and jams and cups of tea in front of the fire and made an attempt to get her fruit cage to stand upright, after it had been squished by the weight of the snow. I’m not sure how successful we were with that!
Then off to The Swan for the night.

I had completely failed to realise, when I changed the date of out trip down, that we had rearranged our visit for Valentine’s Day. The thought had crossed my mind at some point during the week, but I hadn’t really done anything about it. This meant that when we got there, there were no tables available for dinner until 21:00! The upside of that was that it was fairly quiet when we did eventually go down for food. This meant we had a chance to talk to the staff, who we have got to know quite well over the past 7 or 8 months. There are two Australians on the frontline staff. Matthew, who comes from Queensland, and a lassie whose name I don’t know who comes from Melbourne. Her family had been largely unaffected by the fires. But poor Matthew’s family had been quite dramatically affected by the floods in Queensland – his uncles’ houses have been flooded and one, I believe, is effectively destroyed. People come into the pub talking about how awful it has been in Australia. He asks if they are referring to the fires or the floods. They say: What floods? (I have to say that I have noticed this too). The media here, which would have normally reported the Queensland floods, has been so taken aback by the Victorian fires that it has remained entirely silent about the Queensland dramas.

The Victorian girl’s working visa is about to expire. She is obliged, with very considerable reluctance, to go home. She didn’t seem to think that her boyfriend (also Aussie, also working at the pub) would take too kindly to my suggestion that she could fix this problem by marrying an Englishman! She and he are going home, via several weeks touring in Europe and won’t be there the next time we go down. Pity. She’s a nice girl. I shall miss her.

We took Gwen back to the Swan for lunch on Sunday. We have never thought to have Sunday lunch there before and I really can’t think why. The food generally is of a fantastic quality and you’d think we would have inspected the Sunday menu by now. And we should have done. The options were: roast beef, roast pork, slow roasted shoulder of lamb and roasted pheasant. You almost never find pheasant on a pub menu! I had the lamb, and I have to say it was fantastic. We will absolutely have Sunday lunch there again! I wish we could move them to Derbyshire!!! (I’ll write a fuller critique of Sunday lunch on the food blog, if you want to know more).

And then we came home. And now we are back at work. The temperature has risen noticeably, the snow is almost entirely gone (apart from in a few very sheltered spots up high out in the country). We are poised at the start of a new week. Let’s hope it’s uneventful!

This is now the second time we’ve changed the date of a weekend down in Salisbury based on apocalyptically awful weather reports. And it’s the second time the weather has been entirely uneventful and we could have gone as planned after all. Maybe next time we’ll take a chance and just go. After all, there are worse places to be stuck than the Swan!