Back on line - Part 2

So. Off we went to view the compromised Mill, thinking we'd just pop in & carry on with the 4 other viewings we had that day. But no. Even though we knew about the river & the flooding we were simply overwhelmed by the house. This was Grand Designs, the kind of house you dream about. It was huge. Beautifully finished! But the river... the floods?? On further investigation & chatting we discovered the house was built specifically to withstand flooding. The "ground floor" was in fact the first floor ... and there was a walkway built specifically to ensure access when the floods were at their worst. And then we realised The Mill was easy walking distance to the village, a village that offered pretty much all you need to live a comfortable life .. and was only 15 mins drive to a lovely market town ..  hmm ...

Our heads full, we went off to view the 4 other houses. The next was VERY rural, hard to get to yet completely surrounded by other properties. That's a no then. The one after that was old & creaky and too much of a project. The next had an annexe but was upside down & very close to the main road. Nope. And the final one felt - well TINY - in comparison to The Mill. So off home we went, thinking hard.



Once home we couldn't shake The Mill. So we went back 2 weeks later dragging the FSTeens with us - we needed another opinion - were we mad? As it was right before Christmas we were greeted by an 18 foot Christmas tree in the entrance hall - and a VERY swollen river. So we donned boots and coats and went outside. It wasn't nearly as bad as we imagined (but to be fair it then got horrible and the owner took photos to show us). Again off we went home pondering. And then watched the news and saw villages all over Cumbria & Lancashire swallowed up by floodwaters; we saw houses we'd looked at with water sloshing around their now ruined kitchens, villages we'd considered with water coursing down the main street and we looked at each other and thought - hang on. And so we made a VERY big decision. With some to-ing & fro-ing it all fell into place.

Reader, we bought The Mill!

Back on line - part one!

Apologies to the few who log on and read this blog - I took a very very long break not least as I was surrounded by death last year (after Cally there was another family death) and I just got fed up of writing about sad things.



During the down time however I kept myself fully occupied - I took a full time job for 4 months back at an agency I had worked at years ago & got back into the world of commuting (which was VILE - it nearly killed me 1 1/2 hours each way - that's the reason I didn't stay on which was sad as I loved the job) and enjoyed (!!) a full on truly nasty menopause (7 months of full body sweats, no more than 2 hours sleep a night and frequent changes of clothing, brain meltdown - hideous) which I am now (fingers crossed) through. I now understand why middle aged men suddenly up & leave their wives of 20 odd years - menopause turns rational, sane and reasonable women into emotional, exhausted, physically wrecked, blithering idiots!!

Oh and FSHubby and I finally bought our forever / run away to home!

We spent the latter part of last year really focussing on our 'get the hell out of dodge' plan; we spent weekends trawling the country - well after deciding that Cumbria and Lancashire were now seriously out of our price range (and we had quite a significant sum to spend!) trawling Wales; we realised that estate agents stretch the language to its limit - we saw amazing piles with astonishing views that needed £100,000's spending on them to become even liveable, we saw tiny places where we both had to duck to get through the front door, a crumbling, wonky floored15th Century Hall in Llanfyllin (pictured left) where Charles 1st reputedly spent a night, and an uber modern house precariously perched on the side of a hill that demanded a 4x4 to get to and because of its position enjoyed the full volume of the very busy A4655!

And in the spirit of widening our horizons we found ourselves celebrating our 8th wedding anniversary in a little boutique hotel called Pen-y-Dyffryn (http://www.peny.co.uk/), a lovely little place just outside Oswestry which is officially in England - Shropshire to be precise - but is very near the Welsh border. We had a clutch of houses to see in & around the area but one bothered us slightly. A converted mill sitting in an acre that seemed too good to be true. And when I rang the agent to discuss it, it transpired it was - I discovered the grounds were prone to flooding by the river that ran through the garden. So I immediately cancelled the viewing. But the agent was very persuasive and pointed out that as we were already in the area and that we had to virtually drive past it to get to another house we wanted to see, what did we have to lose?

What indeed?!

Celebrating Cally

More sad times chez FSH I'm afraid. Really heartbreakingly sad.

A truly wonderful, full of life, amazing, kind, wise, intelligent and simply gorgeous friend of mine, Cally Robson, passed away in early May. Cancer got the better of her. And it would seem of all of us.

Her funeral will be held towards the end of this month and the next week her family will hold a celebratory church service where all who wish to can share thoughts & memories of this wonderful woman, followed by a tea party full of cake & tea & cheer.

I will attend both but I doubt I will have the strength to speak, despite the fact I have so many lovely memories.

She leaves behind her husband & their 11 year old daughter Edie. Hubby has asked us all to bring mementoes for a memory box he is creating for Edie so I will spend the next few days fossicking though photo albums and ensure I give the best away.

Never ever thought I'd quote Billy Joel but here we go.


Only the good die young.




Happy Hong Kong days

Live & Let Die

A very sad time has been had chez the FSHousehold recently. My seemingly indestructible, funny, warm, kind, generous 93 year old mother in law passed away at the beginning of February - God rest her wonderful soul. FSHubby  was / is devastated - even when you know something will happen, is inevitable, in fact must happen, it can still be a shock. So we had the trek North to attend the funeral and stayed on a week to start clearing out a house that contained a lifetime plus of memories, art, antiques  ... alongside huge amounts of utter cr*p!


She was of a generation that threw NOTHING away. The war babies (she was born in 1921 and lived through WW2, marrying an ex intelligence officer in 1949) held onto everything just in case. We found 100+ bars of soap! Wardrobes rammed with clothes - both hers & her husbands (who had passed away 18 years earlier ..!), 10 hat boxes each containing at least 2 big blousy (signature!) hats. Every drawer of every piece of furniture was rammed with a mix of critically important paperwork, empty envelopes and blank postcards, birthday cards & Christmas cards. We found boxes & boxes of slides from the '30's & the stereoscopic viewer on which to view them. Children's toys & Blue Peter Annuals from the 70's.  In the pantry we found out of date rusting tins and half empty biscuit packets, We found broken tools and Tupperware containers full of bolts & screws. Just in case....you never know!

But we also found photo album after photo album, faces from the past and from our recent history smiling up at us. Grainy black & white images of the father in law I never met as a young man, sailing a Dhow down the Nile in the summer of 1943. Grinning, skinny & shirtless with his intelligence corps comrades in Aden in 1941. Beaming clutching my mother in laws hand on their wedding day. Then the images burst into colour as we hit the 50' & 60's. He & my mother in law cuddling  FSHubby as a chubby baby, images of them sailing his yacht on the local reservoir and finally of him very ill cuddling a baby FSTeen. And the photos continued, right up until a month before my mother in law passed - family weddings, christenings, school photos, school plays, holidays, lunches & teas all the houses we've lived in - a whole family history.

So after numerous tip trips and charity shop runs we carefully packed up the memories as we prepared to head home. But when we got home I noticed FSHubby had inherited the 'keep the crap' gene ... I discovered broken toys and bits of seemingly pointless scrap paper and all manner of ancient oddities alongside the precious memories in the 4 big boxes that now languish in a garage ...  Will get ruthless one day.

May you live in interesting times ..

The title of this little post is a curse in China. It means may everything change, be different, challenge you, shake up the status quo and be - well - interesting!

I always thought I had led quite a simple life really - possibly a bit dull but generally happy, typically far away from the interesting times the Chinese curse about. But today I was asked to do a potted biography and to list a few interesting things about myself. And it transpired I have actually done one or two quite interesting things ...

I did the CV type stuff, you know, I've worked in the business I am in for 25+ years. Listed a few clients, then thought oh yes, I used to live in Hong Kong. And also briefly in Vietnam. That's quite interesting I guess.

Then, staring out onto my lovely garden, I chewed my pencil some more & racked my brains & remembered ...

I sang backing vocals on a Samantha Fox single in the late 80's - a track called I Promise You .. boyfriend at the time was a record producer & they needed a backing singer pronto so I was wheeled in!

I had a job as a hand model when I was in Hong Kong .. I held chopsticks for a print ad!

I am a fully qualified scuba diver & have done wreck diving in Bermuda & dived the coral reefs off the Cayman Islands & Tiomann Island.

I've appeared on prime time TV - I was interviewed by Fiona Philips on GMTV in 1999, we were discussing advertising cars to women - and specifically a Citroen ad where Claudia Schiffer was naked!


And there's more ... I was taught to dance by Holly & Paul from Frankie Goes to Hollywood ... have been a vegetarian for 34 years ... I once 'broke into' the rooftop pool of a hotel in Barcelona at 5AM & skinny dipped ... I have had a machine gun pointed at me through a car window when I was in Russia, en route from Rostov on Dom to Krasnodar  .... I have had my taxi break down in deepest Malawi & had to pay for the puncture repair by letting the locals touch my skin (they had never seen anyone as white as me before! I was fuming as I thought I had a lovely tan!) .. I was hit on by the boss of MTV when I was at a big awards ceremony in Mumbai (I was oblivious, it had to be pointed out to me) and I once slept in Michael Hutchence's bed (sadly he wasn't there too).

Making up is hard to do

I have had a couple of very early morning starts in that London recently meaning have had to join the bleary eyed unhappy ranks of 'The Commuters'. Frankly I cannot blame anyone who has to, every day (and FSHubby is included here) fight their way on to an inevitably late train, fight again for a seat and then get slowly more & more crushed as impossible numbers of heavily coated / suited / booted people squeeze onto the train for being unhappy - it's ridiculous!

However even more ridiculous than the overcrowded train & the level of discomfort & misery was the huge number of women putting a full face on whilst squished onto a seat, standing in the aisle or even standing on the platform! Seriously what is it with that? I really honestly don't get it. Aside from the obvious perils of sticking a mascara wand in your eye if the train lurches or indeed shoving lipstick up your nose, why do something as intimate as your make up in front of a whole train of strangers?

Is this the new way? No discretion, nothing private, everyone can see everything I do? I remember as a chid peeking in on my mother & her friends transforming from ordinary women to goddesses sat at mirrors in curlers with bright lights shining ensuring everything was perfect before they even came downstairs let alone leave the house! It was magical & mysterious. Now these girls get on the train as pasty faced spotty herberts and get off, one make up bag later looking human - but 100 people have seen their tricks!

Why? From what I can tell they take no more than 5-10 minutes to do their faces why can't they get up 10 mins early & spare me the on train make up lesson. What next, bringing your toothbrush & a plastic bag & cleaning your teeth on the train? Rolling your deodorant under your blouse? Or even getting out the wet wipes for a bit of a top & tail - doesn't matter I don't know anyone on the train .. Really. Please. Some decorum!

PS there is even a website http://womendoingtheirmakeuponthetube.tumblr.com/ where I nicked these fab images from - with acknowledgements to the website people & I am pleased it's not just me!

New year, new me??

So here we are a brand new year to play with - 2015. And the Chinese year of the Sheep will unfold towards the end of February so it's time to dust off those resolutions!

I had a completely stationary & overindulgent festive break, thanks to first a ripped calf muscle the week before Christmas (I heard it go pop - it was nasty!) and second a vile cough that has sat on my chest for 3 weeks, meaning I have wolfed chocolate (feeling sorry for myself) and guzzled vino (feeling VERY sorry for myself) and due to the injury & illness I have eschewed the joys & benefits of the magnificent XTrainer and BOY am I feeling it.


This morning, acres of wobbly fat stared back accusingly at me in the Gerry Weber changing room as I tried to nab some bargains in the sales. Yes in changing rooms where the light is supposed to be flattering & make you feel good & want to buy everything . It was so off-putting I couldn't bear to try any more clothes on (after I'd nabbed a stunning silk shirt & some "drop a size" black jeans. I really hope the XL baggy top grabbed from Episode sale rail fits ... !)

So - the resolutions:

First one is easy & I've started - Dry January; the Dryathlon as it is pretentiously called. With an average of 285 calories in half a bottle of wine, by staying dry for a month & drinking diet coke or water or some other low calorie stuff  I am saving approx. 8,885 cals. Tick.

Second is simply eat less. FSHubby & I do tend to eat out a lot when we are on jolly hols (he had the 2 Christmas /NY weeks off) and the portions in restaurants are crazy and he gets sulky if he doesn't have a starter - even at lunch!! - so I can only imagine the calories I will save getting back to soup for lunch. And not as a first course! Tick.

Third is get my lardy arse back on the XTrainer. I have my final post calf rip physio apt tomorrow & should be given the "go for it girl" all clear so Wednesday will see me huffing & puffing to the Doris Day film I had all lined up on the day of the "rip" - The Thrill of it All. Again Tick.


Fourth is to sign up to the back injury Pilates class that has started 5 mins down the road from me at 9.30 on a Monday morning - which is perfect as I can't do the XTrainer on Mondays as the cleaner is here all AM so taking myself off then to a class specifically designed for people like me with rubbish backs  is ideal! Tick Tick!


And Fifth is a basic MOVE MORE. Whilst trotting downstairs to my home office is a true utter joy and I wouldn't change it for the world, I have days when I really hardly move more than a total of 50 metres in the day and that is NOT good. I will walk to the local shops if I am not getting too much to carry & encourage my neighbour to come with me so I have someone to talk to. And another Tick.

So there we are. Not impossible, not startling but hopefully all good & will see me in much better shape by the middle of the year!!

Merry Christmas!!

Lord only knows what I have been doing for the past 6 moths but clearly I haven't been blogging.

There's been lots going on in the FauxSurreyHousehold, the leaky utility is FINALLY fixed & we are now proud owners of a lovely log burner - so we only have the downstairs loo really to do now & I guess we could say we are finished ...!

My work has hotted up significantly and there just seem to be fewer hours in the day!

But - enough of that - Wishing all a very Merry Christmas and a very happy 2015 - may next year be the best year yet!

Tyger! Tyger!..

... Burning Bright ! I have a tale of a Tyger who burned VERY bright recently.

My little branch of Cats Protection (Epsom, Ewell & District thank you!) has recently opened a shop. We have tried many ways of fundraising in the past but setting up stalls in dodgy weather & hoping people will both find us & give their money to us, not the Children's Trust stall next door or standing outside Tesco holding buckets (not allowed to rattle tins anymore!)  has proven to be less & less lucrative. And as CP is a wholly donation funded & volunteer run charity we kinda need the dosh! And a shop gives us far more security.

So, working with head office we identified brilliant premises, (67 High Street, Banstead) managed to gather a huge amount of top quality donations, got the signage sorted & decided on an opening date. And the committee thought it would be nice to have a local celeb come along on the first Saturday and help us publicise our newest venture... the first idea was for James Bowen & Bob the Street Cat - yeah right, dream on!  So on discussion with the Media dept at NCC we identified 3 local possibles - but I was told I needed to give them way more than the 2 weeks notice I was able to give them!

However I am an optimist & have no shame & so I set about contacting these rather famous people! I emailed & made phone calls & 2 of the possibles declined but the 3rd - amazingly - said yes! Tyger Drew-Honey who played Jake in "Outnumbered" and now plays Dylan in "Cuckoo" is a huge animal lover and was going to be in the area that Saturday. It also helped that I somehow managed to get hold of his mums email address (Linzi Drew - a rather famous ex porn star no less!) and contacted her directly & she was AMAZING & helpful & basically set the whole thing up for me!

So I somehow managed to secure a genuine, on TV right now, real proper celeb to do a PA in our little shop! The big day arrived - and so did the hideous rain. It was hosing down & was freezing. Passing foot traffic was poor ... Then Linzi emailed me to say Tyger had missed his train from Swansea ... he was coming to Banstead from Swansea! - so he would be 30 mins late.. phew - late is better than cancelling!

Despite the weather, people started coming into the shop and there was an over representation of teenage girls (!) and we all started to get a bit excited. And suddenly there was a commotion outside the shop - Tyger had arrived and was already posing with our Big Cat (AKA Sacha!) and getting into the swing of things.

And I have to say Tyger Drew-Honey is one of the kindest, nicest, most generous people I have ever met, let alone famous person I have met. He was self effacing, gracious, funny, full of energy, up for anything - he even packed bags at the till for us for 15 minutes! - and he took selfies with the teenage girls and our volunteer staff.



Before he left he gave us an exclusive interview and posed outside the shop for us.



What a coup, what a guy - our takings were well over £600 that day which for a wet Saturday was incredible.


THANK YOU Tyger! And thank you Linzi for setting it all up for us

Paradise Lost

Ah the great trial that is the FauxSurrey Summer holiday. I really don't know why I bother. Yes I attempted once more - maybe flushed with success after last years' huge triumph - to book 2 weeks away from the joy & comfort of my lovely home (and from the KC). We went slightly off piste and booked one week in a spa hotel (I know - ooer!) and the 2nd week in a holiday let. I did all my due diligence and I called the hotel and requested their best room BUT critically with a firm / hard mattress - spinal surgery & all - and then repeated my request with the owner of the holiday let - which was called Paradise but let me assure you it certainly wasn't Paradise by any stretch of anyone's imagination.

  

But let me start with the Spa - Lake Vyrnwy.

The view from our room was spectacular (see right), the room was a decent size, the bed was properly hard - HOORAH! - so my back held up and the food was amazing - delicious, creative, inventive - truly amazing but  .... the décor in our room wasn't brilliant. They clearly handn't got 'round to refurbishing the room we were in yet. We had black mould in the shower cubicle and mismatched furniture ... Not in a funky boho chic way, but in a charity shop, 80's pine chest way. Seriously what do you have to do to get proper luxury in the UK?? Am back on my campaign for a legal definition of luxury!

 

So we went downstairs to discuss the mould issue. But we decided as we loved the view & the bed, we would complain nicely - I took photos of the mould with me so it wasn't a matter of opinion! And with a smile & hard evidence people can't be difficult. 

 

And what a response - the people at reception were frankly brilliant. The power of good service. The receptionist was absolutely lovely & went & got herself a master key & took me on a tour of the hotel and we tested 10 beds in a variety of lake view rooms & to be fair whilst our room was in no way (no way at all sadly) the nicest - decor & amenities wise - the hotel had delivered what I had insisted on when I booked i.e. the hardest mattress in the building! And that is the most important thing as you well know. Still she agreed the mould was unacceptable and that our room would benefit from a couple of armchairs - as it was bank holiday the maintenance people were not in but she got onto getting armchairs as quickly as possible so all good.

 

The manager then tried to move our mattress to another room but as the bed we had was a huge super king there was only one other room it would fit into and whilst it had the view it didn't have a balcony which we really wanted - so the next day when we were out with our complimentary champagne picnic a handyman stripped out the mastic & redid the whole shower, and when we checked out they took 10% off our bill for "inconvenience" - we did not expect that. 10/10  & a gold star award for Lake Vyrnwy.

 

However the 2nd week was not so good. How did I book such a turkey? I was seduced by other people’s reviews & great photography that's how. The photographer seriously is a genius & deserves a medal. And I would love to know how all the people who left the '5 stars' / 'this is amazing' reviews live normally ... I will leave my honest review on TripAdvisor trust me! We went to a place called Paradise, near the Welsh borders. Or Hell as it has been renamed by us. We arrived at the cottage and I was dumbstruck. It looked nothing like the photos. Hoping the outside was no reflection of the inside we entered - and I burst into tears. It was very small, pokey, dark, stank of damp, had ridiculously low ceilings, old squidgy sofas and ridiculously high risers on the wooden stairs - which I managed to fall down 2x (NB this cottage claims to be child friendly!) and a slightly grubby shower curtain that had seen significantly better days hanging over the bath.  Despite my due diligence & 20 minute chat re: spinal surgery / bad back the bed was not what I would call firm, it was bouncy; as bouncy can be. We didn't even risk one night in it - we broke out the emergency orthopaedic airbed immediately as we had to stay come what may - the reason for booking this place was it was convenient to take FauxSurreyStepDaughter to view her new welsh uni. 

 

Then, 2 days in, FauxSurreyHubby's asthma kicked off as alongside the all-pervading damp were reams & reams of dried hops adorning the walls & shoved artistically into fireplaces - a brilliant trap & release system for impossible dust which created a perfect storm. So coughing, spluttering and staggering in pain we packed up the 4x4 and headed for the comfort of home   mere 4 days after we arrived.

 

That said we managed to eat incredibly well in the 4 short painful days we were there as we left the damp house as soon as physically possible each morning, not returning until we absolutely had to.

 

We discovered an interesting tapas bar in Hay on Wye, had a fab Sunday lunch at the Castle House Hotel in Hereford, and had amazing dinners at The Angel & the Kings Head Hotels in Abergavenny, and a stunning lunch with a view at The Falcondale Hotel in Lampeter (left).

 

But the piece de la résistance, the truly unexpected delight was the amazing Bear pub in Crickhowell. I cannot recommend The Bear highly enough. FSHubby had faggots (ugh for me but he waxed lyrical about how divine they were) and I had squid ink spaghetti with oak roasted salmon in a dill cream. Sublime. I could live in Crickhowell .... Maybe we should just buy our own holiday cottage there & be done with it?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Happy Days!

Happy Days are here in the FauxSurreyHousehold. And a bit of over achieving thrown in for good measure!

FSHubby was promoted to a big job at his big company recently & is very happy indeed about it and an FSTeen has just aced her A Levels (she got an A star don't you know! That IS impressive!) meaning she is heading off to Uni as planned in September - will be hard to say goodbye I know & so odd not having her here but absolutely brilliant for her to go & get on with the next chapter in her life.

I vividly remember - 32 years ago (yikes) packing up my stuff & the mix of fear & excitement & wondering what life at uni would be like. To be fair I had older boyfriend chaperoning me so I wasn't really alone but it was still an adventure. And one I am so grateful & happy I had!


 
Back in the real world, FSHubby & I have 10 days till we go off on our annual jaunt - think I have sorted all necessities but this time we are starting out with a week in a spa hotel (hurrah) so I will no doubt feedback spa fiascos later in September!