The new toys have arrived

We woke up on Saturday morning to discover that the world had turned green overnight. It was really quite strange after what had been a month of almost unbroken white outside! And, it was raining. Hard enough that I was enormously pleased that the temperature had risen to a balmy 5d outside. Had it still been minus 5, the rain would have been falling as thick, thick snow – and I wouldn’t have been going anywhere for the next week!!

We stayed in bed and watched the rain and messed about on our laptops and drank tea and played with the cat – until I suddenly remembered that the Man from Curry’s was due sometime between 10 and 2, and it was now half past nine and you could absolutely guarantee that if no one was up and dressed the delivery would come early, and probably before 10. Not only that, but the delivery would fail because the gate was still locked! Time to get up!

The new toys arrived at around lunchtime. It was very exciting (except that the cardboard recycling bin is now full, and won’t be emptied this week because of the number of places which didn’t get their general rubbish bins emptied last week on account of the ice and snow). The new fridge will almost certainly fit under the counter where the old one presently resides, but it will take a bit of effort and messing about to organise it all. In the meantime, it is sitting in the dining room, pretending to be a freezer!

It had occurred to us on Friday that the new telly would have nowhere to live – and no means of getting a picture to it, since the roof-top aerial blew down last winter. We hadn’t missed it because we run our small TV from a SKYbox and had never used the aerial. Seemed a bit of a waste of quite a lot of money if we couldn’t actually watch the new telly! Time to indulge in SKY multi-room. And, while we’re about it, to upgrade to a SKYplus box so we can record programs. The question now is whether to leave the small TV in the dining room, which is quite cosy in winter and where we mostly spend our evenings, or whether to move it upstairs into a bedroom because if we have a fun new toy in the lounge room, we may decamp into there. And if we move it upstairs, does it go into our bedroom, thus making it even less likely that we will bother to get up on Saturday mornings, or into the spare room to entertain our infrequent overnight visitors?

A decision for another day. First, we have to find somewhere for the rather large new television. And it’s now sat where the fireplace would be in the lounge room, had it not been tiled over (not by us, I hasten to add!). And the SKYman is coming on Wednesday to install the new box. The Builder will be in charge. I am expecting to be in Edinburgh on Wednesday.

So that was all very exciting.

On Sunday we went adventuring. I had observed that there is a Waitrose in Nottingham and in pursuit of expanding my still quite small collection of Waitrose branches, we decided that rather than heading to Sheffield we would go to Nottingham instead. It’s a bit further, but not lots, and it’s quite a nice drive. Mind you, once we got to Nottingham, we couldn’t actually get to Waitrose – defeated by the system of one way streets and no through roads! So we abandoned the car in an extremely full multi-storey car park and set off on foot.

It is almost certainly the smallest Waitrose in the world, always excepting the ones that are beginning to appear at the motorway services. Very cute, but possibly not worth making a special trip to go to again. Although, we did pick up a nice piece of fish, reduced quite considerably for a quick, Sunday afternoon sale.

We didn’t bother to go exploring in Nottingham. No point doing the shops – we don’t need anything and in any case we seem to be out of money for some reason. We weren’t entirely in the mood to do the touristy things (The Builder was recovering from an unhappy reaction to Saturday’s goulash), and there was no point in heading to the Old Trip to Jerusalem pub – we didn’t want a Sunday roast lunch because I had a nice piece of pork at home just waiting for our return, and we didn’t need a drink. So we turned around and went home again.

I have to say – it’s a very pleasant drive to Nottingham. And if we did want to go pubbing in the city centre, we could go from our place by bus. We have not abandoned the idea of Nottingham as a place for a day out. Just postponed it, perhaps until the spring and maybe on a Saturday rather than a Sunday.

The roast pork was very tasty. And it was amazing how quickly The Builder decided that his digestion was restored to full health once he discovered that there was not only roast pork, but also apple and gooseberry tart on offer!

The waggoning has been going rather better since we declared the emergency session of Lent. We are more or less doing Zoy’s weekday diet: whatever we fancy between 18:00 on Friday until bedtime on Sunday. No alcohol and careful eating outside those times. Can’t say my waistline has noticed – but my wallet has!