Menopausal misery!

Sorry, sorry rant alert! I have been "experiencing" (suffering!!) menopausal horrors for almost a year now and I am totally & utterly fed up.

I am fed up of turning into a human radiator, drenched in sweat every 3 hours or so.

I am fed up that cutting out all of the "triggers" (alcohol, caffeine, sugar) has made no discernible difference. Sometimes a glass of water can set me off.

I am fed up of sleeping no more than 2 hours at a stretch, waking up soaking wet and having to get up to get dried and changed, then get back into a damp bed & try & get back to sleep.

I am fed up of having all the windows open and a fan on full blast pointed at me at all times. (Actually FSHubby and the KC are also fed up about this)

I am fed up of women's magazine articles telling me to "embrace the change" and suggesting I eat more tofu (happy to do that), drink tomato juice (full of phyto-oestrogens apparently), take sage tablets, black cohosh and evening primrose oil - I did, for 6 months - THEY DON'T WORK!!

I am fed up of gaining 5lbs every time I even sniff a cake let alone eat it (and if I dare eat it I sweat too, it's got sugar in it).


I am fed up that I can't have HRT.

My family doesn't cope well with fake hormones - mum & sister both had oestrogen triggered breast cancers (thank god both survived)


So I am fed up (but not surprised) that genetic screening showed my risk was way too high. Computer said NO.

I am fed up that a very expensive course of (GP recommended) acupuncture didn't stop my sweats it just made me freezing cold when I wasn't boiling hot!

I am also fed up that the one medically proven remedy available to those who can't have HRT (Clonidine, it's typically given to migraine sufferers to modulate blood flow) will likely cause me to faint (and I'd probably fall on concrete and fracture my skull) if I take it as I also suffer from something stupid called vaso depressive syncope which means any medications that affect blood flow knock me for 6.

And I am finally fed up that my buggered Achilles is healing more slowly because of this dammed menopause

Before I reached this "special time of change" I was very sniffy about middle aged men who suddenly upped and left their middle aged wives, women they'd been with for 20 odd years. Now I am going through it I look at the sweaty, irritable, overweight, exhausted, humourless harridan staring back at me and think good God, I completely understand - I'd leave me!

Thank the Lord however that my amazing FSHubby is patience personified and not only puts up with all the rubbish, he reassures me constantly and tells me how much he loves me daily!! Awww....

Living on the edge

We now find ourselves on the edge of a very big decision here in FauxSurreyLand. We have in front of us an opportunity that very very few people get in their lives. The opportunity to STOP and never have to work again. Ever. Honest.

Buying The Mill was all part of a grand plan to start a completely different life at some point. Not retire as such - we're still a bit too young to do that - but to take a step back from horrific commuting, being at the beck & call of clients, bosses and colleagues and running on the endless mortgage treadmill. We have been beavering away at our "spreadsheet" for almost 3 years now and my taking a proper job last summer was all part of that plan. And my wonderful mother in law Joyce made a significant contribution to our spreadsheet after she passed away.

But recently things have accelerated somewhat. The FauxSurreyHomestead was valued at 2 x the price we paid for it (hurrah!) and after much to-ing and fro-ing and sleepless nights and stressful conversations (!!) FauxSurreyHubby took the plunge and resigned from his big job. But of course there's a spanner in the works. The Big Job people were horrified & essentially refused to accept FSHubbys resignation, asking him to give them a chance to make an offer he can't refuse! So we are now in limbo somewhat as we wait to see what they can possibly offer him that will counteract waking up every day to the sound of birds and the river flowing past and not having to do anything more strenuous than a bit of gardening, pottering about, going for a big walk or driving to the coast for the day.

But when pondering the realities of possibly doing nothing, FSHubby started to fret that actually, he may get bored! I have already got a plan to keep myself sane there (it's just a plan right now, not sure if I will be able to pull it off, but hey I have a plan!) but FSHubby hasn't got any thoughts of what he may - or may not  - do and it's paralysing him with fear!!

So here we are perched on the edge of a big decision. When the Big Job people come back with their offer will we take a leap into the unknown or will we scurry back to the devil we know??

This puts me in mind of the Christopher Logue poem:

Come to the edge.
We might fall.
Come to the edge.
It's too high!
COME TO THE EDGE!
And they came,
and he pushed,
And they flew.

Hip Hop?

Oy oy. I am falling apart. My bl**dy back is causing me problems again. I have not been able to walk any great distance without agony since the beginning of March as I have developed Achilles tendinopathy and had to go for an MRI yesterday as, despite 10 weeks of full on physiotherapy, it's not getting better as it should.

Basically because I am so lopsided post my spinal surgery 12 years ago I have suffered two stress fractures in my right foot and now my right Achilles has given up the ghost. The lovely foot & ankle specialist who I went to see - I saw him in 2010 when I suffered my 2nd stress fracture - is muttering about surgery - using phrases like 'gastrocnemius release' and 'paratenon strip'. Both of which sound horrific!! So I am being uber attentive to my new physio routine and have had long chats with the lovely hospital physio who agrees with me that surgery is likely NOT the answer, especially as the stretches the specialist wants me to do hurt my back .. I feel like I am a living bad version of  'The leg bone's connected to the thigh bone' .. once one thing goes, everything else comes tumbling down behind it.

However the biggest shock I got (bigger than looking at the truly scary images that pop up in full colour goriness when you put either of those medical terms into a Google search) was when the MRI technician weighed me. Oh. My. God. The number I saw could NOT be possible. Could it? Apparently I have increased my body weight by 10% since the last time I looked properly ... HELP! So I have decided. I will have to go on the diet to beat all diets! Cut out the booze. Drink water & eat lettuce leaves. As I can't walk for any great distance or use my wonderful life saving (and waistband taming) X-Trainer, what else can I do??

When Doves Cry

OK this is now getting ridiculous. Now Prince is dead. What the ....??? This is clearly NOT a good year to be a celebrity.

Prince was a unique and towering talent, he worked with an amazingly wide range of artists (remember U got the look with Sheena Easton?) and his music was always ahead of the curve. And bloody good to dance to!

Raspberry Beret, Kiss, & Sign O the Times, 1999 .. all classics.

Prince Rogers Nelson, thank you for the music
. And may you rest in peace.

RIP Victoria Wood

2016 has not started well in celeb land - it has been a shocking year for losing talented & much loved people - David Bowie, Alan Rickman, George Martin, Paul Daniels, Ronnie Corbett  - what's going on?

And yesterday we learned about the tragically sad death - at only 62 - of the amazing, talented, fabulous, hilarious, brilliant Lancastrian, Victoria Wood.

She has made me both howl with laughter and cry with emotion. Victoria Wood on TV was brilliant - who can forget the perfectly parodied Acorn Antiques?  And the Ballad of Freda & Barry will live on forever as a truly classic comedy song. To this day I can't look at a copy of Woman's Weekly without smirking!

So goodbye Victoria - I can't believe you've gone.

May you rest in eternal peace, an eternity filled with joy & laughter.

Food glorious Food!

Before taking possession of our amazing new holiday / run away to eventually home, FSHubby and I naturally had to check out 3 VERY important things. One - peace; quiet (i.e. NO swimming pools within 5 miles, no footballing boys - in fact no near neighbours!) - 2/3 tick - we do have neighbours but they are miles away and have horses in their 'gardens'. Two - access to civilisation - tick we are approx. 1 hour from Liverpool, Manchester & Birmingham and even closer to Chester & Shrewsbury. Three - the most important - access to really good restaurants. And this got a HUGE tick.

Literally staggering distance from the new des res we have a decent gastropub and a lovely Indian restaurant. Plus there's a greasy spoon & a chip shop! Hurrah! The basics are covered. However the week we got the keys we started our food quest in earnest. We were told by our neighbours that a short drive (5 mins?) would take us to Plas Yn Dinas a lovely, recently refurbished pub with wonderful food.

So we visited for lunch with 2 very hungry 20 somethings (as you do) and all went swimmingly. I had a veggie onion soup with a huge cheese crouton, others had smoked trout pate, then for mains I had the Mediterranean flatbread & the carnivores had burgers. I give it 8/10 an excellent lunch.



The next day we headed (this time a deux) just 15 mins in the other direction to Townhouse in Oswestry, a Michael Caines outpost which we had high hopes for. And we were NOT disappointed! The meal was exquisite. We started with a  stunning 'amuse bouche' of haricot bean & truffle oil soup. I had a mixed salmon starter (2nd to bottom left image!) followed by stunning ravioli with duck egg & feta and spring veg (right) and then the best pudding I have ever had in my life - EVER - Red apple and salt caramel cremeux, confit apple with a doughnut - had to be eaten to be believed. FSHubby had a chicken & ham hock starter, then rock bass with a lobster & squid Bolognese and a whisky ice cream & crème brulee! Fab - u - lous. 10/10.

Then we stumbled upon The Sticky Walnut. Another wow! It was in a place called Hoole just outside Chester, so about 45 mins away. Yes a long way to go for a meal but honestly it was truly worth it. We had been searching for discount furniture warehouses and ended up on the outskirts of Chester (where we scored a bargain big dining table and a pair of beds that clip together to make a super king or split to become 2 singles - you know the type). Anyway we needed lunch after our retail therapy and were recommended the Sticky Walnut. And we were hugely impressed! Funky interior, lovely staff & fab food - I had blue cheese arancini with poached pears, spinach & walnuts - amazing (above right - I am rubbish at setting the images in this blog!!) FSHubby had braised Jacobs ladder (to the left, beef apparently) which he said was melt in the mouth.

So with all that amazing food on our doorstep the next thing is to find is a gym! Or a walking book so we don't turn into human versions of Jabba The Hut (well when my b*ggered Achilles mends that is!)

Birthday fun!

I have just celebrated another birthday, all good fun and they seem to come around faster & faster ..! I thought as last years was so low key I'd try & get out & about & DO something for this one.

And I sort of succeeded..

The lovely FSTeens took me out for lunch on the actual day - to the café at our local garden centre, The Olive Tree. They have recently improved and expanded and now offer wood fired pizzas and waitress service so I was looking forward to it. Luckily we had booked as it was a Friday & rammed and we were pleased to be given a lovely table by the window. But sadly that was the best bit!  Waitress service only works if the waitress / waiter pays attention and puts the correct order in! We ordered 3 pizzas as there were 3 of us. And one pizza, we even pointed to directly on the menu and spelled it out. So imagine our surprise when only 2 pizzas turned up! And the one missing was the one we spelled out ...! We waited about 5 minutes trying to catch someone's eye then I went up to the till to be told "it wasn't on the order". No apology just a pointing out of the "facts". Eventually the pizza arrived (to be fair the boy who brought it did apologise) and then we (foolishly) ordered puds & coffee.

The puds arrived - 3 of them this time - but no sign of any coffee despite the fact I saw the waitress write it down on her order pad. FS-Stepdaughter decided enough already & she went to ask for the manager. Now FS-Stepdaughter is 20, blonde and gorgeous and the way she was treated by the manager was APPALLING! He was beyond patronising - she explained the situation and he offered her a pathetic £3 discount on a £50+ bill then - the best bit - gave her 3 small wrapped biscuits - the type you would get with a coffee!! She was flabbergasted as was I. We will NOT be going back there again in a hurry!!

The next day we all headed out to The Brooklands Hotel near Mercedes Benz world in Weybridge  for "posh" afternoon tea. And learned a salutary lesson in going online for discount vouchers / deals. We were the ONLY people in the whole restaurant paying the full whack (£25pp) for our tower of cakes & sandwiches! Virtually everyone around us had some sort of voucher which got them exactly what we were having PLUS  a glass of prosecco for only £9.50pp! That will teach us. The internet is a wonderful thing. That said the tea itself was delicious and beautifully presented and came with an AMAZING ginger milkshake that was YUM. And I had Happy Birthday written in chocolate on my plate! Plus it was FS-Stepdaughters first experience of an afternoon tea so all was good in the end,

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.