My washing basket decided to disintegrate over the summer. So I pressed the ironing basket into service as a washing basket and carried on.

This last couple of weeks, the handles of the ironing basket have been inexorably unravelling. Time for a new basket, I think. A wicker one. I like wicker baskets. And the two that have just died were amongst the first things I bought when I came to England, so they’ve lasted quite well!

So, while we were pottering about on Saturday morning we decided to call into Homebase for a new basket. Hmm. No baskets. Not unless we wanted a cheap and quite nasty plastic one, or we wanted to spend £30 or £40 on a wicker one. Which seemed slightly excessive for a washing basket. Off we trundled, on our quest for a basket. You really wouldn’t have thought it would be quite so hard! Eventually, I thought: Dunelm Mill. They’ll probably have washing baskets. Let’s go there. So we did. And they did :-) Mission accomplished. (But it really shouldn’t have been so hard!!)

When we got married, Jess (Ant’s partner) had made for us two beautiful covers for European pillows. This confused me a bit. I had never heard of European pillows. I went out hunting for large pillows. No luck. I searched for European cushions on Amazon and eBay. No luck. I went out again, looking for large cushions. There were lots of large cushions but none which were the right size. Hmm. I looked on the John Lewis website. No European pillows. I looked on eBay.com.au. Found European pillows. Also described as Continental pillows. Of course! That’s what you might expect them to be called in the UK. A trawl through the online shops and John Lewis’s website brought up loads of Continental pillows. We decided that a trip to Nottingham or Derby one weekend to explore the John Lewis pillow selections might be an amusing way to spend a day.

In the meantime, Jess’s pillow covers were draped decoratively over the spare bed and seemed to be quite happy.

I forgot about the Continental pillows.

Until we were mooching about in Dunelm mill, having found a new washing basket. Suddenly found myself confronted by piles of Continental pillows of varying sizes. Happily, The Builder remembered the size we needed. We now have a Continental pillow adorning our bed and the spare bed. I’ll take photos of them this weekend so you can all admire Jess’s handiwork (I tried on Sunday, but the photos came out all fuzzy ;-( )

So that was all very exciting. Two missions accomplished, one of which I had completely forgotten about, on one trip out!

So. What to do on a drizzly Sunday? One of my Twitter foodie pals had mentioned on Saturday evening that she had had a lovely time at the Belper Christmas Market in a big house just outside of Belper. We decided that that sounded quite fun – plus it had the advantage of being inside. So we hopped in the car and took ourselves along some interesting and pretty back roads to Belper. We got to the house at about 11. The queue to get into the parking area was really quite long. This might not have deterred us. We don’t mind waiting. But then we noticed that the parking was mostly in a very muddy field. This was a bit disconcerting. But what made us abandon the plan was the presence of tractors and JCBs equipped with chains for dragging cars out of the mud. We decided to go for a nice drive through the pretty Derbyshire countryside and made our way home again, once more through back roads.

So we had our Sunday roast earlier than planned. And very nice it was too. Then we just sort of drifted into Sunday evening, and reasonably early to bed.

Then I had to get up on Monday morning and come back to work. Something of a shock after a nice three day weekend!