Sarah

I have just made halloween pumpkin faces, however due to a lack of pumpkins for sale on my road on a sunday I made them from oranges. This has the added benefit that you house smells of orange and not burnt pumpkin.

Tom Smith and I went to Weston yesterday. We liked the Omelette bar. Here is a menu selection:

Indian Omelette
Long grain rice, onions and curry

German Omelette
Bacon and Pimentos

Italian Omelette
Corned Beef, Onions and Tomatoes

Meet my new employers. I secretly went for an interview last week. I didn’t hear anything for 24hours after the interview and wrote them off as in my experience if you don’t hear the same afternoon then you haven’t got it. They rang though, and offered me the job and I am really pleased.

I am a Sustrans supporter which means I give them money every month and they send me newsletters etc. However now I will be producing most publications, including the newsletter and obviously also giving £5 back to my employer each month. I’m not quite sure how I deal with that one.

Do you remember when I told you about this:

Tuesday
We visited the Lost Gardens of Heligan today. Highlights included the vegetable garden and the potting shed and the ghost woman who was so frightening Tom Smith and I couldn’t look at her. We think she had been there slowly working away since the gardens had been lost in about 1920 and for a while it was so convincing as no one spoke to her or even acknowledged her being there.

Well I saw her in bloody tescos in Bristol today, buying bloody potatoes! What the hell was she doing in tesco metro? She was as slow as she was then and again no one acknowledged her. She just went up to the spare till in front of me and weighed her potatoes. They were all the same size but it seemed like she had to get two exactly the same weight. Then she put the others back and really stared at me for ages, perhaps because I looked like I had seen a ghost.

Tom and I spend most of our time planning so we were both shocked when I arrived in Brighton and we hadn’t planned anything for the whole weekend. It had just sort of slipped our mind. Maybe there is a maximum amount of plans your brain can hold and after the megabus weekend we just wouldn’t let anymore in. It’s 11am and we haven’t done anything yet…oh except Tom cooked this.

I went for a check up at the eye hospital. All is fine according to the doctor who seemed to be new to the eye world. After a 3 minute consultation he asked if he could give me an eye test as he hadn’t done very many and wanted to practice. I said….um yes ok then. After 3o mins of him saying “can you see better with lense 1 or lense 2″ and me saying “they are both really blurry” the desk was an array of lenses. Opticians usually place then carefully back in the allotted slot but this man hadn’t really thought things through so when I said “well actually I could see better 3 lenses ago” he looked at the pile and sighed.

He then gave me a prescription for more drops (steroids…!!) and said “you have to take 3 drops a day for the first 2 weeks and then 1 drop a day for the 3rd week, but continue to take your exsisting drops 4 times a day and take them 10mins apart”. I asked him to repeat that and he told me something different and then basically said “oh just take them till you feel you don’t need them anymore”. I think I’ll ask the pharmicist for clarification tomorrow.

Our sitting down holiday was fun though Tom and I found aches we never knew we could have after spending roughly 30 hours sitting on a mega bus. I have just realised it was only a 60 hour holiday so yeah you can work out how much time we had in Inverness.

The excitement actually started in London on Friday night when we ran into the Space invaders. We couldn’t work out what they were demonstrating for and I still don’t think I know.

Then to the mega bus and with our expert skills we got the best seat - front, top, right - and started eating picnic. On average, when it wasn’t dark, the view from the megabus looked like this:

You get to stop at Keele service station at 3am so we ate more picnic.

Then we woke up and ate our breakfast picnic.

Then we looked at Inverness for 30 hours and saw:

A spar in a hut with a tin roof.

A bridge, under which are supposed to flow seals and dolphins but we didn’t see any of those.

Then we got on the megabus again so just read the first part of this post backwards, but miss out the bit about the best seats and the Space Invaders.

So I think we are going to do it again but a top tip is to book two seats and an extra cost of £1 so you are able to walk when you get off the coach. I really ached and then I put my contact lenses in when I got back and got a crazy eye thing and ended up at the eye hospital. I don’t think I blame that bit on the megabus though.

The picnic as been made for the megachallenge, although I think we have really overestimated the amount of food needed. We are on the coach for 12 hours = we are going to be eating for 12 hours.

I think the evening picnic will be consumed in the Great hall of the British Museum. I think I know that you can eat your own food in there as I have a picture of my last visit in which some people are eating from tupperware. I hope this is still the case on a Friday evening.

I miss my cottage in Corwall.

I miss going to the beach before breakfast and looking for seals and popstars. Rachel was the only one to spot a seal but we all saw Thom Yorke wearing wellies on the beach.

Saturday
We went for lots of beachy walks and I bought some Smash hits pop stars top trumps in Bude. We decided to take the scenic route to Bude along the coast road but the map didn’t really say there was a 30% hill round a hairpin bend which was like driving up a corkscrew. The map also didn’t tell us it was raining so when the car started going crazy up the hill and there was a horrible burning smell we decided to turn round.

In the evening after a lovely meal by John, plus a big coal fire we played a few rounds of the trumps. By the end of the evening we had adapted it to so each person had to ask for advice from all the others and we had to decide who would give the best advice. Questions ranged from something to do with a sausage dog (I can’t remember it exactly) to “I am thinking of getting into cross-dressing. Can you advise me?”. I scored the topest of top trump cards ever in that round by having Marylin manson.

Sunday
It was gales and rain today so we lit a big fire and got the papers. I cooked roast beef and an apple and blackberry crumble using berries we had picked the day before.

Monday
We went to Padstow which is totally Rick Steined. We caught the little boat to Rock and walked on the amazing sandy beach. Some of the sand was so deep so we spent a good while papping ourselves. Tom Smith papped himself so hard he went up to his knees in sand and then he lost a shoe.

We then decided to embrace the Stein and had fish and chips in his shop back in Padstow. They were delicious and apparently cooked in beef dripping.

Food was vegetable soup, fresh bread and cheese and a really nice sunset.

Tuesday
We visited the Lost Gardens of Heligan today. Highlights included the vegetable garden and the potting shed and the ghost woman who was so frigtening Tom Smith and I couldn’t look at her. We think she had been there slowly working away since the gardens had been lost in about 1920 and for a while it was so convincing as no one spoke to her or even acknowledged her being there.

Tom Smith made Cottage pie, followed by loads of alcohol. The night ended with him leaving the pub suddenly and Paul and I coming back to the cottage and dancing which made us think his major back surgery he had had two weeks earlier had been successful. I then went to bed to find Tom Smith snoring like a lion growling and it made me have hysterics.

Wednesday
My parents visited us for lunch. They arrived when the others were off in bude buying more top trumps and I was cooking in the kitchen. I really felt like I lived there that day. We went to Trebarwith Strand in the afternoon and visited the Mill House Inn for dinner. I had potted cornish crab for starter and Sea bass with braized chickpeas and chorizo for main and it was all so good I think I had a little scream.

Thursday
I want to stay in this cottage we found in Port Quin. I don’t really want to stay in Port Isaac as they use the beach as a car park, though it does sell very nice fish with which Rachel made a delicious fish pie.

Friday
I made a Coffee and Walnut cake and we took it on a walk along the coastal path which goes next to our cottage. It was very steep and slippy in places which wasn’t so good for a very pregnant person and a post surgery person but it was all good in the end. Trifle was the food highlight of the day from Paul. The game hightlight of the day was semiotic guess who. You have two teams and pick your character in the traditional way then you take it in turns to ask questions about the character without using traditional questions such as male or female or are they ginger? So we were asking questions such as “is your character secretly gay?”, “Does your character ride a bike?” or “Does your character have a picture of Margaret Thatcher in their bathroom?”. The most unsucessful question was from Rachel “does your character listen to electronic music?”. The answer to that is that None of the people in Guess who listen to electronic music except for Robert who we think is the person who goes to all the electronic music gigs in bristol and dances in a really scary way.

Saturday
Tom, Paul and I decided to go on a bus so we went to Wadebridge. It took over one hour to get there. We had 2 hours there and then we had to get the last bus back to Crackington haven at 3pm.

So I really miss it all. I miss the Crackington rock formation which is so unique it has been named the Crackington formation.

I don’t miss Tom Smith’s creaky bed or getting up really early to wash before they have to switch the water off for the morning because everything needs to be fixed after the floods.

I will move onwards and particularly upwards however as next weekend I am going to the other end of the country. Tom can give you the finer details.

whoop in 15 minutes I am going on holiday for 10 days to a cottage in Cornwall with no reception at all. By that I mean TV, mobile and …um that’s it. I am rushed. Goodbye.