Disappointments

This morning, to make up for my sloth of yesterday, Keith and I cut back the bush in the front garden and I swept up tons of leaves that had gathered underneath it. This will then give us more room tomorrow for our table and all the boxes of stuff that we have to sell.

Once we'd finished that we took Mike to Brixworth and then it was home to get ready to go shopping with Sophie to Market Harborough. Our first stop today was a wine tasting at Duncan's shop. He had five Loire wines to show off and the man in charge was a Master of Wine, no less. I was looking forward to meeting a real live MW (they're a rare breed!) and to tasting some lovely French wines. What a disappointment I had, though!

The MW (I won't name him) had about as much charisma as a leaf of limp lettuce and when he introduced the first wine, a Reuilly, he said to us that we wouldn't have heard of this appellation as it wasn't widely drunk in this country. I replied that I'd certainly heard of it as I used to work for Duncan and he wouldn't have been very happy if I'd been ignorant about it! This shut him up a bit, but I was really annoyed that he'd assumed Sophie and I didn't know anything about wine.

Duncan then came over and we indulged in a bit of continental kissing and he told me a hilarious story about his spectacles. The MW looked on with a face as long as a wet weekend and we moved onto the next wine, a Chardonnay from the Auvergne which I didn't think was strictly a Loire wine, but apparently was!

I'm afraid Sophie and I liked none of the wines on offer and I ended up buying a red from Duncan's mate in Languedoc and a white from the same region. I also bought some beers and asked Nick if we could keep them in the back room while we did our shopping.

We wandered off to Costa for lunch and then mooched about our usual haunts. Sophie bought some clothes in New Look and I bought a few bits and pieces in Superdrug. Today was supposed to have been wet but the weather remained dry all day, if a little cloudy and breezy.

We called into Duncan's before leaving and retrieved our wine. The Master of Wine man was having an earnest conversation with a couple so perhaps he just didn't like the look of Sophie and me! We drove home, Sophie tried her new clothes on and we went off to the gym for a swim. However, two lanes had been given over to family swimming and a couple of children were screaming constantly...not the relaxing session we'd hoped for! We wallowed in the jacuzzi for a short while but we both felt like going home to relax after our busy day.

Back home I discovered that Mikey had decided to go to a camp-out that he'd been talking about and wanted us to go to Brixworth, pick up his friend and then drive them both to another friend's house in Boughton where the camp-out was to take place. I wasn't particularly happy about it as I had asked him not to arrange anything this weekend because of the sale on Sunday.

We dropped both boys off and then went home to finally sit and relax with a drink. We had a lovely time watching a baby blackbird in the garden who had obviously been left by his parents to fend for himself. He kept nibbling on some pellets I'd put down and then he would retreat into a pile of logs to just sit and watch the other birds visiting the garden. We did get a little worried about him, but he seemed perfectly happy so we enjoyed a game of cards and a drink and looked forward to dinner.

Then the phone rang. It was Mikey saying that he'd come into contact with some horses and could we go and get him? We'd forgotten about his strange allergy to horses and when we picked him up his eyes were like puff-balls. I managed to buy him some antihistamine tablets in a nearby shop and we dropped his friend off and went home where he dived straight into the shower while Keith and I prepared dinner! So much for our relaxing evening!