A WINDOW ON THE WORLD

The cat loves to watch the birds out of any available window. She also likes to climb up onto the crossbar and ballet-foot across the middle. We have windows that open awning-wise in all rooms so we needed to find a neat way to stop the window swinging open far enough to let her fall out from three storeys up.

This is the result. Well done DJ! We went to a lovely old fashioned ironmongers called Defty's up in Crook. DJ spotted the brass chain and that was it. We came home and fitted it to all windows.

Good thing we did!

You can see the muscular frame of the bengal cat in this pic. She isn't fully grown yet. She is strong and quite adult sized but still rushes around like a mad thing at least twice a day.

On Sunday we went north up the A1 and through the Tyne Tunnel to North Shields. We walked around the lower prom to Tynemouth. Past the old flats and Admiral Collingwood's statue.

I used to live in the Melbourne suburb 0f Collingwood for a few years and of course Collingwood is one of the major Aussie-Rules football teams in Oz.

The town of Tynemouth was very busy and the Metro Station Market was heaving. We wandered but bought nothing and then returned to North Shields for a "fish and chip" lunch.

However, there were many ahead of us, even at ten past midday. Obviously the Waterfront is the place to go.
We shall return.
Cheers Gillian

IS GOING AWAY FOR XMAS A GOOD THING?

Well, we tried it.
We went to the Imperial Hotel in Blackpool. We stayed for three nights...xmas eve, xmas and boxing night. We were looking forward to it. It was well advertised and seemed to be full of fun and activities. I wanted to be sure that the food would be good so read up on tripadvisor. We visited in the summer and selected a room overlooking the sea.

We arrived to find that we were not on a shared table, as had been offered. We were looking forward to joining in with some others (one of the reasons for going away is to have a party with others). We sat on a table for two throughout. It might have been a good thing, it might have not.

OK...I give the room 9/10. I give the hotel generally 9/10

 

I give the food 7/10. I give the entertainment 6 or 7/10. It was good but very much the same every night and they did the "save money" routine by having a "DISCO" which is a cheap name for playing a lot of records.

The weather was not too bad and we managed to walk a couple of times. DJ won a sheet of Bingo and got a bottle of wine. The pantomime "Cinderella" was on at the Grand Theatre and we had a great Boxing day afternoon. A lovely old toothless fairy/lady sat beside me in the Dress Circle. She was very old and had all her shopping with her and sang every word and responded with every "He's behind you!!!". She was so happy that she had been able to get a ticket just the day before. I was glad she had got a ticket too. The usual pantomime routine was great. Buttons was the star of the show and the "celebrity" from "Emmerdale" who played the Prince Charming was very lacking in voice and confidence.

The theatre was magnificent. We were so glad we had added some fun to our stay.

New Year was more exciting. The above is a picture that I finished for my Aunty for xmas. It is known as "Featherbed Rock" and is at Seaham Harbour. We used to go and climb around it when we were kids but I'm sure it was a lot bigger then.

The seas have been so big since last visit that they have exposed the wreck. It has been hidden under two metres of sand for a couple of years.

The new steps at Seaton Carew have at last, been re-exposed. I love numbers. I shall try to estimate the amount of sand which has been removed recently.
WIDTH  OF BEACH ....5,000m
LENGTH OF BEACH.....2,000m
DEPTH OF BEACH....2m
Volume removed during high seas...20 million tonnes of sand
The Council are still working out a way to "FIX" the seafront!

There were lots of people out and about on NYD . It was sunny and mild. My favourite view was as above.

You'll probably find this weed in a picture soon.
Cheers Gillian

Happy Xmas Everyone

December has ambled along. The weather went from fiercely cold and icy to dismally wet and rainy. We hate the rain because it trickles down the walls on the third floor. The chimney rebuild was a great success! They are the best chimneys in the street, but the assumption that "the flashing looked OK so it was OK" has turned out to be erroneous. Obviously the flashing that we can't see is not OK. More work is now needed and so the scaffolding will go up again in January. Old houses have atmosphere and interesting features but they also exhibit the wear and tear of ages specially on the outside where the weather hits the roof.

Tinker entertains herself during the inclement weather by climbing the stairs instead of her out-door climbing frame. She found this wool in the stash on the top landing and liberated it.

It was a left over ball of white angora and probably had a more interesting aroma than the rest. She brought it down to the ground floor and then bit through the middle. Two very small things will now have to be knitted from the remains. I can't bear to throw it away. It was the only angora in the stash!

I do lots of cooking when I'm rained indoors. Here is a boiled fruit cake I made. You boil up the fruit with sugar, butter and in this case, fresh pineapple, juice and walnuts.

Then cool it and add the flour and eggs. Then you bake it. Oops!

But it tasted really good and we have nearly finished it all.

Just to go on a bit more about the gloomy weather and because it's the shortest day of the year tomorrow, I thought I'd include this pic of the workmen nearby using spotlights at 9.30 am so that they could get on with their work. It should amuse folks in Oz who rarely get up in the dark. 

Still it's not as bad as Siberia. Birds can freeze solid if they attempt to fly across the road in winter and they fall to the ground like a stone. No! don't ask me what they were doing there in the first place, they should have migrated. I just read it somewhere in a book and have carried a picture of it in my mind ever since

Cheers to all for the festive season.

Gillian

Christmas Creeps Closer

They started having xmas at the beginning of November in the shops up here but we are still undecorated chez nous. The first card arrived on Saturday and is standing in lone splendour on the mantlepiece (not counting the e-card!). I went to Artison to refresh my lino-cutting skills and knock up a card or two.

I shall do some more at home. It's the sort of craft that quite suits the kitchen table and the gear is cheap enough to acquire.
I have also been trawling the auctions and ebay for xmas gifts and came across this...

...lovely comfy recliner chair for the bedroom. It wan't possible to make it into a secret present so it is already in place and being used. In fact right now!
The great weather on Saturday got us out to Seaton Carew to examine the progress on the beachfront.

It would appear that the sea is still winning hands down. These steps are still under two metres of sand

and these ones needed 200tons of rock to protect them from the waves.

It is an enormous beach and there is a constant attack from the North Sea waves against the seafront.

Sad to say, humans don't do any better in places. This burnt out and derelict building occupies the best site on the seafront. The council are attempting a compulsory purchase order so that they can demolish it and..... well I don't know what they intend but I hope it's better thought out than the steps.
There's a good layer of snow on the ground this morning and the car will need to be cleaned off before we go to Lidl to take advantage of the £5 voucher to buy a lobster or two. They are advertising them at £5.99 each so we may well need two for a fine feast. Our voucher is for £5 off a £35 total purchase so I shall top up with other xmas fare and wine at the same time.
Cheers Gillian

Wet Weather

The rain has slowed a bit so it might be stopping soon. All the rivers round here have burst their banks and many roads are cut by flood waters. We are fine chez nous and not quite as much water is running down the wall as it did before we had the chimneys fixed. However, there still is ingress so there is still some fixing to be done up on the roof.
I have been painting quite a bit but nothing is finished yet. A lot of it is a bit experimental and not always a success. I have been using a painting knife and trying to be freer.

This is a mixture of brush for the sky and knife for the land.

And this all knife and still unfinished. I'm trying to get more streams of sunlight through and add more texture to the foreground.

Last Friday was a lovely day at a place called ArtiSon. They do an enormous variety of art day courses and I signed up for "Industrial Landscapes" I had great fun playing with watercolour and ink washes, over-painted with industrial icons.

It's difficult to find an existing pithead around here now. They have all been demolished but the tutor had some old photos so I used one to copy this silhouette.

And here's my favourite local industry, the steelworks at Redcar on a watercolour and sepia wash.

Apart from that I've been slaving away at making blancmanges. It was Jubilee Party at the WI and because I was last to fill in the food-to-bring clipboard, I got "blancmange". I entertained myself by making a mixture of the original Pearce and Duff packets, white chocolate panna cotta and a free-from coconut milk dessert with blueberries.

I arranged them in a RED WHITE & BLUE display and off I went. The white chocolate panna cotta was a hit, the red berry blancmange went well too, but the blueberry and coconut milk was not popular. DJ warned me that it was too alien a colour. I had made it dairy-, gluten- and sugar-free but loaded with E122 to give it a fine blue hue.
I ate a couple and the rest went in the bin.

Guess who's hiding in the basket on the fridge!
Cheers Gillian

WE REMEMBER MY FATHER...50 Years Ago

My Father died fifty years ago on the 10th of this month. We were all young. I was the eldest and 14 and a half. He was buried in the cemetery at Wealdstone in the same grave plot as my sister, Alison, who had died six and a half years before.
We all returned there yesterday.

Luckily the weather was better than it had been 50 years ago. My sister, T, had prepared a lovely timeline of events, a collage of pics and a speech; which was left on the side while she spoke from her heart. There were many smiles and reminiscences, brave tears and much moving around into groups to take pics of  us all.

And then we went back to J&A's place in Barnet for a get together. We came from all over... from Bishop, Manchester, Brighton, Bournemouth, Pimlico, Mudeford, Glasgow and Barnet. We feasted and talked and drank and reminisced more. 

I haven't been party to any of these hot air paper balloons before. They are great fun, particularly if there is a perfect evening for their uplift. There were many fireworks going off and our small efforts should not have made too much mal-impact on the environment.

I returned home this morning.

Since the last blog we've been baking again. DJ started with some apple, sultana spice mix and some flaky pastry. I did the lattice-work wrap-over and then we cooked it. Fabulous!

This week we are not doing such cookery. We've bought the new "Jamie" book and there are quite a few ideas I want to follow.

Cheers Gillian

IF I KNEW I COULD DO IT I'D HAVE BAKED A CAKE

Some time last week I was watching a cookery programme on More4. It was HFW teaching celebrities who "don't cook" how to make simple, successful items. I jotted down some notes whilst watching Ruby Wax make a lovely sponge sandwich.
Hers looked every bit as good as this.

This is my first successful cake, cooked from scratch, in goodness knows how many years, if ever. Whenever I've been asked if I can cook I always respond "Yes, but I can't bake!". Even packet mixes made with chemistry-experiment-exactitude fail. I am prone to *sinking-in-the-middle, *volcanic-uprisings, *catastrophic-crumblings, *denture-danger-denseness and even *"are-you-sure-you-read-the-instructions?".

So much advice is available for the unsuccessful baker that it would take a dozen batches of scones before I could determine whether the fault was caused by ...oven temperature, too dry/moist mixture, wrong/old flour, slap-happy measurements, recipe faults and even being called Gillian etc.

Anyway, this one was a bit dry in the mix so I added a splash of milk. There is something in my well-aged experience that made me feel it was better for the added fluid. It also took about 4 minutes longer to cook because I used smaller tins and the mixture was therefore deeper (I'm quite clever sometimes!).

We managed about half of it for arvo tea. (It is smaller than it looks!). I filled it with the some of the raspberry jam made from the raspberries from Brusselton Woods, over the road from us, and added plenty of whipped cream.

I'm so proud of it that I had to blog it.

I've done some other interesting things this week too, like cook a ham hock for the first time, take DJ to a Tex-Mex dinner in Darlo for his birthday at a fabulous cafe called "The Imperial", get the boiler fixed, unpick the oversized cardigan which I never wore and start a new jumper with the yarn, and have more goes at painting with a painting knife.

G and D (DJ's granddaughter and new husband) spent time with us last weekend before returning to the Midlands to move into their new home. We had the snow, some great steaks, fabulous fish and chips from "The Almighty Cod", fish and chip shop at Seaton Carew, and a great afternoon sitting around the woodburner in the snug. Also had  good news tonight that more rels will visit us soon.

The cat has been a bit strange lately. She has always been reckless and dashes around bumping into furniture. Recently I heard her tumble. I suspect that she fell through the banisters and down a flight of stairs. She was hiding under the table when I found her and so I treated her to some poached chicken to coax her out. She was so keen to get to it that she got trodden on by me as I stepped backwards!

She now runs away when I come near her, but follows me from room to room if I move away from her. But she has found refuge in the little basket on top of the fridge. Well at least until I decided to get up and go into another room.

Straight out of the basket and back down to floor level again! She is now at my feet in the snug.
Cheers Gillian