Montpellier

Montpellier is such a gem of a city. I do wonder though, if I'm paying just £1 for my flights, who is paying for the rest?! The flight over was very busy and coming into land the plane suddenly pulled back sharp at the last minute and we went back up into the air. That's not a nice feeling, particularly as the ocean is just at the end of the runway. The pilot did another circuit before we landed safe and sound. It did feel as if he'd never landed a plane before and his excuse was that there was something on the runway - yikes! Anyway, my scary moment was soon forgotton as my bag arrived in double quick time and I went outside to meet my good friend, Rob.
Montpellier is one of France's best kept secrets. it's a cosmopolitan city where the sun shines all day long and the restaurants serve great food long into the night. I had a lot of time to shop and just wander along the narrow streets. We chose a different restaurant every evening, the funniest experience being on the Sunday night. Many of the restaurants are very close together so it was an easy mistake to make to read off the wrong menu. It was on a blackboard between the two restaurants and it's hard enough being entirely in French with all the different menu options. Spookily, I managed to order both my starter and main before the waiter realised those exact dishes weren't on his menu! Thankfully, the couple on the next table talked us through the menu and gave our order to the waiter, who seemed terribly confused. Dinner was delicious, in fact every meal was a culinary adventure. I don't think I've ever ordered anything in France, other than a salad, that hasn't surprised me. It never looks as I imagine it will but it always tastes delicious. My highlight was the lasagne which was absolutely scrummy, enormous too. Thankfully, Rob can hoover up anything I don't eat, which is perfect for a girl who'd rather not have an expanding waistline. I think MP is a place I'll keep coming back to because it has so much to offer but for now, I had a great break from work so it's "Au Revoir MP!"

Cracking good day Gromit!

Today I went on a secret mission to visit Gromit and what did I find.. he was asleep on the job! Shaun the Sheep was more alert than my mate Gromit who was being shadowed by one scary monster rabbit. Oh I love my life.. ! The day started with a budget meeting and ended with me searching for my car. Yes, I looked out of the window and it had gone. Not gone completely, just 5 yards behind where I had left it.. spooky or what?! I had what could only be described as a Wallace sidewards grimace on my face as I stood in the doorway trying to figure out how it got there. I think I know.. tut tut, must have been that perishing penguin and his remote - Obviously!

Me and Walter...

I was in London for a press launch which I thought was at the V&A - wrong! So I had to scoot all across London using my favourite mode of transport, the tube, to get to Baker street. I just about made it half way through the presentation but was glad I did. I think the Quilt Show next year will be phenomenal so it's good to get ahead with some new stories. Then I went to meet Liz and we had a bit of a marathon tour. When the day was done I'd travelled by car, train, tube, bus and boat.. how's that for using public transport. Liz took me to see Walter Raleigh at Greenwich so i stood on the Greenwich Meridian line which divides he earth into the eastern and western hemispheres. WOW! There was also a great view of the Millennium Dome from that side of the river. We had a drink in the pub near J's and then had a quick supper in DimT's before I raced back to Paddington to get the train home. A very long day, as always when I'm in the city, but worth it.

Rainbow over the mill...

I just glanced out of the window and ran to get my camera to capture this beautiful rainbow.

It won't run on fresh air.. !

You know that feeling when you wish you hadn't put something off until tomorrow? I drove back from Helen's BBQ last night and almost stopped for petrol on the way home last night but it was dark and almost 10pm so I decided to skip the filling up and get home. Of course, this morning I heard that the price of petrol had gone up by a couple of pence! I wished I'd stopped to fill up now! But as luck would have it, I drove into Nailsworth instead of chancing my luck along the M46 and hey ho, the shell garage was still selling petrol at the old price of £1.05! When I drove home this evening, it was £1.08... that's one cheap tank I'm going to remember for a long time!

Who's cooking dinner.. ?!

There's nothing like the smell of charcoal to get the juices flowing! I worked all of yesterday and although very tired, I decided to drive over to Ledbury to Helen & Adrian's BBQ, I'm so pleased that I did. Although the weather wasn't brilliant so we ended up inside, Adrian still faced the elements to cook us (well charcoal!) some lamb cutlets, pork and burgers! Although it was difficult to see what we were eating by the time it had been chargrilled to a black crisp, it still proved to be a tasty treat. It was great to catch up with friends and it certainly helped me relax.

Meringue envy...

The good news is - the light fitting is still on the ceiling! The bad news is that I mistakenly declined the offer of pavlova! It wasn't just any pavlova but a beautifully shaped homemade meringue with berries and a big dollop of cream on top. Believe me, I had meringue envy just seeing it arrive at the table next to us.To be honest, they had what I would have done if I hadn't been so stuffed from the night before! They had roast beef with the biggest yorkshires I'd ever seen and I had liver. They had what looked like a delicious bottle of rich red wine and I had water, tap at that. Then to add insult to injury they had dessert and cheese and I had peppermint tea. I must go back sometime when I'm really hungry and take someone to share a bottle of wine with. Meanwhile, someone enjoyed her baked alaska after a gentle walk along the river in Bourton.

Happy Saturday..

Today was a great day. I picked Liz, Jeremy and his mom up from Kemble station and managed to fit all into my little car. Jean had travelled all the way across the Atlantic so we had a relaxing day, a walk down into town and back up the hill for pie. In the evening we all went to the Bell at Sapperton. That place serves delicious food, I just wish I could share a bottle of wine instead of always being the "I'll have a small glass!" kinda girl. We had a quick photo-moment on the way when I spotted another combine harvester. They are an incredible sight, I think it's just their sheer size and the fact that you only see them this time of the year.

Shake, splinter and 'hole'... !

You know that feeling you get when you realise you've been a total idiot? When you wish you could turn the clock back but you can't and even if you close your eyes and open them again, the problem hasn't gone away! I'd had a great day until I decided to change the spare bed. Oh yes, one minute I'm shaking the freshly laundered quilt and the next minute, I'm standing in a shower of glass. My supa-doopa light fitting is dangling limply from the ceiling with just two shades intact instead of three. I was still holding onto the corners of the quilt and hoping it was just a bad dream. But two minutes later, I'm still standing there and nothing has changed. It's not easy to see glass splinters when your quilt is decorated with tiny sequins! And the taxi driver waiting outside must have thought I was bonkers standing on the wall outside shaking a quilt. I've dysonned my shag-pile to within an inch of its wooly life, removed every bit of glass and replaced all the bed linen so there's just the one problem. The light fitting is still dangling from the ceiling in a very sad way. Then I remember.. I am a top crafter and suddenly I feel a brainwave coming on! Heath Robinson eat your heart out.. ! Three pieces of double-sided sticky foam later, some clear gunge and a few dabs of superglue and it's adhered itself to the ceiling again! I'm hoping it's going to stay there because if not, my daughter's boyfriend's mother, who arrives tomorrow morning all the way from the US of A may well be seeing stars, not sleeping under them!

Festival of Quilts...

13A

Have you ever thought how great it would be to have talking appliances? We have a talking lift at work and, although that's annoying, the idea of talking appliances could be so useful for lots of practical reasons. If my car would say 'I need a service' rather than flashing up 'minus 60' for two seconds when I switch it on, it would be so much more useful. Today I switched my kettle on - nothing. Last night it was ok, this morning it's not. If, when I went to switched it on, it had said 'I need a fuse' I would know exactly what to do. Instead, I have to turn off my girly head, think like a boy (not easy!) and through a process of elimination, start to work out what's wrong. Faced with something that worked one minute but not the next is always baffling to me. I know boys like those kind of challenges but I don't. So here's to talking appliances - but just for girls!

I lost an hour...

How come it's easy to lose an hour yet it's nye on impossible to lose a couple of pounds without starving yourself?! I've just eaten a very delicious vanilla flavoured virtually fat free yoghurt, which is a mouthful in itself. It's got me thinking about 'virtually' - what does that really mean? The dictionary says, 'Almost entirely' but if that's the case, why couldn't they try just a little harder and make my yoghurt absolutely 100% fat free? Did they just decide to give up or is that tiny spec of fat actually good for me? The term 'virtual' actually means 'not real' - tell that to my thighs! Reading packaging is very confusing and you need big specs like bottle bottoms to read the small print. In Anna's world then calories would all be virtual, my stomach would remain the same size always, just like my head does and chocolate would always be 'virtually' good for me!

Simply red.. simply wonderful.. !

A little bit of surfing and me and Lisa end up at Newbury races with a Simply Red concert to follow! We had a fantastic day. Super noodles in a chinese take away box for lunch washed down with a tiny bottle of fizz. Bet £1 on a couple of horses the had an hour an a half concert with Mick. We drove back top down ducking the dark clouds then had a lovely chinese meal in Cirencester to finish off the day.

Blissful wish list of must-have stamp sets...

There are many that just wouldn't understand just how much joy a little plastic cd case of clear stamps can bring. It's a fact, I'm in love with papertrey ink stamp sets! They are beautifully made, stamp so nicely and the fonts are just delightful. Every tiny image has been carefully thought out so it fits inside the circle shapes and those then sit within a border and so it goes on. My favourite must-have now has to be the button clear stamp set. You stamp and the attach buttons in the spaces. I've seen some examples of these cards and the are so clever - I have to have them now!

Blooming bugs..

I was going to spare you the stomach churning queasiness by putting the tiniest picture of my new best friend on here.. but ;-) I decided against it. Here's another blooming critter who, as you can see, wasn't clever enough to keep out of my way! I reckon he has Alexander Beetle for his father and Spiddy Sue for his mother!

Must-have stamps...

Back in July, I looked on the papertrey ink website and did that oooh, ahhh thing! Their stamps and inks were just so gorgeous so it was really hard to choose just a few sets, but I managed it! Seriously, I could buy everything, the stamp sets are just fantastic to use and the ink pads stack beautifully and best of all, the colours are yummy. My good little Ginger fairy picked up these goodies when she was over in the States and brought them all the way home for me. Papertrey ink release new stamp sets every month and there's so much to tempt me which means I will have to make lots more cards. I'll just have to remember to send one or two occasionally too!

Here's the good news... raspberries are fat burners!

The bad news is... it's because they have greedy, creepy crawlies inside them! I just spotted one crawling over my fresh fruit, healthy breakfast. Just the one, which leads me to wonder how many little critters have I just swallowed for my breakfast! Next time, I'm sticking to melon, you don't find those little things with lots of legs crawling about inside those, do you?! Curiously though, scientists in Japan have found a chemical, or something similar to one called capsaicin, a substance found in red peppar that dissolves fat, in the dear old raspberry. So the message is, every story has a silver lining (and I don't mean the trail left behind the phantom slug!) and one way or another I should be a few miligrams slimmer tomorrow, hurrah! Munch away boys...

Ginger Girl has come to stay...

I did say she could have the spare room but seems to prefer the window sill! There's a whole lot of scrapping going on and I don't mean the physical contact kind - oh no!

Prescott Vintage race day

The sun shone for the first time for ages and the rain stayed away - hurrah! Myself, Liz and Jeremy met Dom at the Vintage races at Prescott and we all had a fab day. We sat and had a picnic with Andrea and Tim, Dom's godparents and they're always great at entertaining us with a good bottle of something white and alcoholic! Dom, as always, brought enough picnic to feed the entire field but it was gratefully received and all washed down with a flask of hot coffee. It's becoming a bit of an annual event now so I'm putting it in my diary again for 2010!

Thursday night is music night... !

Lisa and I went to our 'new best pub' which is our little secret. The food is reasonable and it's a great place to chill and enjoy listening to whatever the local group is this week. The guy who runs the pub described this week's act as 'A guy who sings to Karaoke' - sounds hideous - but actually, he was so much better than that. He could have passed for an Eagles cover band all by himself! Me and Lisa had fun and she got chatted up - woo hoo! We did think 'Dave the upside down teeshirt man' (you had to be there!) who I'd have to say was completely in awe of Lisa, either through nervousness or maybe he's like that all the time, might lose her number as it was scribbled on a paper napkin. We both thought he'd either leave it on the bar or he'd put his jeans in the washer and forget it was in his pocket. How little faith we have in the male population, mmm! 'Dave the daring' has exceeded even our expectations, got in touch with Lisa and I'm now on tender hooks waiting to see what happens next!

What to know who Nick Nairn is?

I'm just about to find out! I bought a cook book today, nick nairn cook school. A really impulsive buy because I'm not doing enough cooking at the moment so I decided I needed some inspiration. You know when you flick through a cook book and all the recipes are for things you'd never eat? Well this book wasn't like that. There are pages of delicious looking food. You know the kind that you'd be proud to bring out of the oven! Yummy recipes such as chicken in red wine casserole, cherry and almond tart, john's spanish chicken and lots more mouth watering recipes which actually look appetising! I'm going to sit down with my book and a cup of coffee and choose something to tickle my tastebuds.. mmm...

Mamma Mia!

I'm having big Mamma Mia moments this year and tonight was yet another one! A group of us girls went to the open air Bacon theatre in Cheltenham to watch Mamma Mia Tuesday evening. The skies were a bit grey but the rain held off and it was a fabulous night. We took fold out chairs, Lisa took Pimms and popcorn and we watched this great movie on the big screen under the stars. Well, I'm sure the stars were there somewhere above the clouds. There's something very lovely about this film. It has a great feel-good factor about it and you can't help singing along to the brilliant lyrics. Julie Walters is my all time favourite, with Meryl Streep doing a brilliant job of the lead role of Donna. Her three suitors, one of which is Pierce Brosnan, managed to sound much more in tune with his lyrics this time, which made the film even more enjoyable. Yes I know, it's a film so the tuning was the same as first time but somehow, strangely better. Maybe it's because my expectations were different and there were little things I'd missed first time around which just added so much this time around - as you can tell, I loved it! Pierce or Colin Firth... now, that would be a tough choice!

I'm having insignifcant dilemmas

Anna's Newcastle diary... After a wonderful night's sleep I'm pondering which gallery to visit first, whether to have breakfast here or whether to paint one of my rooms this colour - quelle conumdrumo!?! Being away from home is like having a massive shot of adrenalin. There's no agenda, no deadlines, just free falling, mind enlightening pleasure! I love going away because I love returning home ;-) Just as I love working, when I can easily get time off. I do need to recharge my batteries, particularly at the moment when work is so manic. At times, I need to do this alone where I have no one to please but myself.

I've just come down to breakfast and am listening to Ave Maria, sitting on my own with my fresh fruit salad, my fresh orange juice and the sun is streaming through the window. Although the chair opposite me is empty, i know that in a funny way, I wouldn't notice how sunny the day is, or any of the tiny details, if I had a distraction. Example being the couple behind me who have by design, or just by fault, built up a wall of newspapers between them. Neither of them can see the other. They are not talking, there's no eye contact - maybe that's how people who are together 24/7 decide to behave so they can get their own 'me time'.. I don't have the luxury of knowing the answer to that one!

Newcastle highlights...