Just us girls

Tonight is a ground breaking moment for me – it has only taken a year but I have finally lit the most amazing fire.

Yes, home alone again as the boys are at the coast with their Pa for the Easter holidays. We travelled down last weekend with the express aim of the lads staying there until I have some time off from work, and me travelling back up on the Sunday night – but – it was so gorgeous and sunny there and the beach so beautiful that my heart ruled my head and instead I have spent the last week commuting to and fro from the Van to London everyday. In total 5.5 hours a day journeying but worth it!

I may have slightly overdone it though as I have spent Friday and Saturday morning without a voice and it was only brought back through the excitement of a girls’ weekend. The boys and men were dismissed from the caravans on Saturday morning and trouble arrived! 2 x Claires, Paula and me (oh and the dogs) spent all weekend laughing. My legs and bum hurt from peddling backwards and forwards from the pub and my tum muscles are still in shock from laughing so hard all weekend.
Some highlights (sorry if you had to be there for these to be quite so amusing – but these are going down for posterity)

1. Claire cycling in pitch black along the road after a rather boozy day – peddling in a straight line arse over tit into a bush
2. Getting stopped by WPC Smith of Chichester as we rode along the road at midnight. She suggested we might need to invest in some lights and some reflective jackets and could we please walk back to the caravan park for our own safety.
3. Jenny (my caravan neighbour who had been recruited at 6pm as part of our gang) deciding to ride so slowly in an attempt to make the police woman think she was walking and then very silently falling off the bike into a ditch
4. P peddling like fury on a shopper bike with a flat tyre singing hits from the Sound of Music
5. Telling some 23 year old beautiful girl that she could do so much better than the 43 year old tattooed bloke she was with and then wondering if maybe we had gone too far!
6. My bicycle bag of bling

Anyway, it was a ball and I felt like I was in my twenties again as today we sat stuffing our faces with pizza in the sun with friends...

Alfie could not understand why girls like girl company especially me as surely I have enough female companionship with Dottie the dog...mmm....

So how goes the shed. As you now know I haven’t been here for a week and it was glorious to come home tonight in the last light of a very sunny day. All of the hawthorns are in blossom and so the left hand side of the garden is white with their little flowers. It looks like it has snowed in the sun. The primroses are out in the woods and the wood floor is covered in the rich green of the bluebells leaves – ready to burst soon into their blue carpet. The river is low and the water lilies are under the surface and the fruit trees have their blossom – this really is the best time of the year here – everything looks so full of spring.

Building work has stopped while we have our Easter although the last act was to pour more concrete into a flat area outside the back of the house – this will become a patio. It is to give us somewhere to soak up the sun in the summer. The only weird thing here is we have to always do things on an industrial scale and I forget this. The patio (or what will one day become one) took another 2 loads of concrete and we haven’t even got anywhere near buying any paving slabs to go over the top. It does look good though in a weird way (promise!).

Just checked the fire...still going strong!

Happy, spring springing and warm