Seventeen

Note: This post has nothing to do with Janis Ian.

We have now been in the UK for 17 years and one day. We had our annual celebration dinner tonight. We went to the Four Seasons restaurant. But more of that later…

Our garden is a right, proper mess. It has been for a year, since the builders started. And now the tulips have started emerging, threatening to give a little colour to the desolation.

Each year, I forget about the ones near the banana tree. Each year they suddenly appear, delightfully surprising me. This year is no different. Apparently they didn’t mind the builders and their antics.

The area they live in has been christened The Jungle, for obvious reasons. The only one of us brave enough to venture in there is Emma and that’s more ignorance than bravery.

At some stage late last year, I laid out a curving line of bricks to delineate where the bed would end. Some of those bricks were leftover Staffies from the terrace and they have three holes in them. And this is what I discovered this morning:

It’s going to look increasingly odd as the tulip grows so I’m going to leave the brick where it is.

Apart from admiring the natural order of things in the garden, Mirinda spent the morning working on her DBA while I printed seemingly endless documents for her. Then, after lunch, we went to Thursley for a walk.

The last time we went, the bogs were very boggy and the boardwalk very slippery but today the mud had been replaced with gallons of clear, still water. This was very fortunate as Emma decided it would be great fun to throw herself off the boardwalk and into it with annoying regularity. Day-z, of course, stuck to the boardwalk except when forced off by a cyclist who I cursed as I stepped down into the reeds to retrieve her.

The light is nearly always wonderful at Thursley. The horizon is wide, spreading over the flat reserve, allowing the light to spread over everything as it peeks from behind clouds. I always like the long line of the boardwalks, with trees poking up in between the slats.

We had a lovely, air-filled wander then discovered that Emma rather enjoys rubbing herself in the sand. She runs around then rolls around then rubs her face into the sand. I guess she’s exfoliating. Combined with the copious amounts of water she manages to store in her hair, the sand takes on a dark colour making her appear as if her legs have been dipped in chocolate. Day-z, of course, ignores it all, preferring dignity over exuberance.

Back at home, the little monster was immediately dumped into the laundry sink for a long round of flora removal and sand rinsing before we left for the restaurant.

I have to say that the food at the Four Seasons is lovely as is the wine. We celebrated our 17 years in delicious style. For entree I had one of the loveliest, silkiest soups I’ve ever had the pleasure to taste and my main (beef fillet) was superb. My dessert was a bit rich for me but I just had to see what a chocolate sphere filled with salted caramel ice cream looked like, particularly sitting on a trail of crunchy biscuit crumbs. Also memorable was Mirinda’s apple shaped fois gras with apple.

No, the food and the wine were terrific. The only thing wrong was the speed with which we were despatched.

Okay, it was an early booking because I didn’t book it until the beginning of this week and I can only assume they’d squeezed us in with the intention of getting the next lot in as soon as possible after we’d finished but we don’t really see that as an excuse to rush our meal. When indulging in fine dining, one expects to be able to sit for a few minutes, savouring the course just completed rather than have the plates immediately removed and replaced by the next course. We found this quite annoying.

I’ll be giving them a less than favourable review on Trip Advisor today!

Still, we toasted our 17 years and discussed the possibilities of retiring in Farnham and enjoying our extension for as long as we live…so we get our moneys worth.