Walnut Cottage

We've recently been to France on holiday and Walnut Cottage was the first place we stayed.

It's in Normandy, but to the east of our previous location, however it is just as pretty and tranquil as we have experienced in the past.

The cottage is set in the grounds of the former mayor's house and has been excellently restored by the two owners, Paul & Chris. They also run a B&B in the main building, but both parts of the business are separated, including each having it's own driveway.

Commuting to London

People on footpaths,
Others on cycles,
Commuters with purpose,
Tourists with none.

Newspaper vendors,
Big issue sellers,
Taxi cab drivers,
Out in the sun.

Pairs of young lovers,
Girls in new heels,
Suited and trainers,
Joining the throng.

Nearly all youngsters,
Very few oldies,
None of then seeing,
What's going on.

Ode to Commuting - Paulw743, July 2010

Today I finished the last day of a week's training course in London. Don't want to bore your with the details of the course, but suffice to say it's a geeky IT thing of which only part will be usable in the office.

World Cup Result

Well, the World Cup is finally over and what a result.

I don't mean the result that game out of the pitch battle in Johannesburg. I mean the result that we got at home.

Between us, we took part in 3 different sweepstakes. One each at our places of work, and another at our local.

Unfortunately I pulled South Africa out of the hat (well box) at work. Trust me to select the first host country not to make it into the last 16.

Lorraine wasn't in the office for her draw so a colleague pulled a name out of the hat for her. She was lucky and Spain was chosen. Considering they were the favourites, we were quite happy.



Then we come to the Windmill. This was a blind sweepstake. All the names were in different envelopes. The idea being that you select one, or more, and then hand them back to Tony, the landlord. Once the quarter finals were out of the way, the envelopes would be opened and we would all find out who we had picked.

After the quarter finals we went down to find out who we had selected. Jokingly we said that 'We'd come to find out when we got kicked out', only to be told 'I think you're still in'. We checked the board, and lo and behold we had pulled Spain out again.

After being abused, we felt extremely happy retuning to the pub after the final and picking up our winnings.

From both the winning sweepstakes, we picked up over £250. For an initial stake of only £12, we did pretty well.

'Summer' Afternoon

Well here we are at the end of June and it looks like the summer weather might now be with us.

A few things have been going on since I last posted on this blog, but I thought I might update you with this weekend.

Yesterday we had to go out and purchase a few more items for our niece who has just turned 5. Tesco in Hookwood is very good for that sort of thing as it has a large clothes/books/present area's so that's where we headed.

After finishing the weekly shop we then headed home. We've got Sky+HD at home so have had a number of programmes that we need to catch up on due to the World Cup being on. We therefore sat through a few of them before heading out to the Theatre Royal in Brighton to see Spamalot.

In the past we've been caught up in all the traffic heading to the cost, so this time we thought we'd take another route via Ditchling Beacon. The views from the hill are amazing but unfortunately I couldn't see anything as there were bikes on the road so I obviously had to be wary of them as they were oblivious to any cars that were around.

Once we got to the theatre we had a wonderful time. We've seen a lot of musicals, and have seen Jodie Prenger in Oliver so it was good to see her in a different production and out of the West End. She is obviously a fun person and the role of the Lady in the Lake was ideally suited to her.

After the theatre, we once again experenced some of the cyclists around Brighton. I might be rather confused, and therefore apologise, but aren't cyclists covered by the same rules of the road as the rest of us. We saw so many of them riding through red lights, having bad lane discipline, ignoring other road users, and probably the worst offence of all, running across pedestrian crossing when people were walking across.

Something needs to be done abou the rules of the road in this country, and more police need to be on the road to enforce them. Someone will be injured or even worse killed by a cyclist soon and that will be too late.

Facebook Games

I know I've made comments about the games on Facebook and the fact that you need 3 million neighbours in order to grow a blade of grass, but you've got to have something to do whilst watching the 32 best football teams in the world playing in the World Cup.

Tonight we're watching the 1st rated team (Brazil) playing the 105th rated team (North Korea). Not really holding much hope of this being the best game of the tournament, so I need to find something to do whilst I wait for ITV to put more adverts on as the goals are scored.

Looking at some of the other games I play, I noticed one called Millionaire City. It's only been available for about a month on Facebook but it appealed.



As those close to me know, I'm a bit of meglamaniac at heart. Many years ago when Civilisation came out for the PC, I used to play it for hours. It was a challenge to myself to improve - either to get a bigger result, or to get to the end result quicker.

Millionaire City looks to be a long the same lines. You have to build up your city working on little missions to build up your money so that you can buy bigger and better buildings. It takes a while for the money to roll in, but that's part of life anyway isn't it.

Oh well, 20 minutes in and my rent is about due so time to sign off for the night to get everything sorted out.