Just a lovely pre-Christmas Day

 

We are careering ever closer to Christmas which for us will be our fourth Christmas Dinner this year so today I was having the day off cooking and we were going to the Winery to catch up with Jeff and Marianne.  We had to shoot down to pick up our Christmas Sausage Rolls from Donna who lives just beyond the winery and then we parked up and went to find ourselves a table in the sunshine.  The resident dog was waiting.  He knows that John will always have some dog treats in the car for him!

For a while it was absolutely lovely outside, unbelievable really as it was 22nd December.  We stayed outside for as long as we were able and then had to decamp inside if only to keep our food from getting cold.  We had a lovely lunch with Marianne and Jeff.  They were so kind to give us a whole load of wood and that after Jeff encouraged us to pursue the EEC to reinstate the winter fuel allowance.  We might not have persevered had he not taken up the mantle.  Plus Marianne very kindly gave us a bottle of her homemade plum Gin.  I shall look forward to having a snifter of that in due course.

We had a quiet afternoon/evening.  I got carried away having watched Chateau DIY for Christmas and home made decorations so I wanted to make a table centre using pages from an old book - it doesn't work on the silver runner so I am going to dispense with that and change the table cloth from the poinsettia one to a grey one.  Hopefully that will look nice.

We watched some good old Christmas TV last night - we don't actually remember having watched Black Adder Christmas Carol before but enjoyed it.  We were all snuggled up with the fire going and swathed in our Christmas throws.  Tomorrow I am up early to get all the prep done for Christmas Day so I can be organised.

We had a phone call from Argy this evening.  Good to hear that everything seems ok with them and we will try and catch them before Christmas Day.  Shortly afterwards we had another call on the house phone.  We though Argy must have forgotten something but it turned out to be our lovely friend Roger from the UK.  Roger lost his wife, our good friend Joani, to Pancreatic Cancer earlier this year.  I had not sent a Christmas Card because it is so difficult to know what to say so we were thrilled that Roger felt able to give us a call after all he had been through.  We chatted and I have promised to keep in touch via email (providing that he can remember how to get into his computer).  I am not ashamed to admit that both John and I had a tear in our eye afterwards.  Roger is now in his 80s - we attended his 70th birthday party just before we left to live here.