A Huge Holiday Surprise For Nigel!

Monkey and I have been planning for a little while to give Nigel a real treat and take him on a Sun £9.50 holiday, but we kept it Top Secret as we didn’t want him to get over excited.  So when Nigel and I got in the car last night  I just pretended we were going for a short drive, knowing that within 5 minutes Nigel would be fast asleep …… oblivious of the fact that we were really heading for Brixham!

It was almost dark when we arrived, but first impressions were very favourable, our chalet is lovely, in fact it’s quite boutiquey in style.

The wallpaper is very posh!

And the kitchen impressively equipped.

Especially with egg cups

Our bedroom is very big, with two twin beds and crispy white sheets ….. but as we prepared for our first night

I thought how tiny Nigel looked in his bed

And when he looked over to me I knew exactly what he was thinking …..

So I said he could come and share with me.  A strange bed, and being on your first Sun £9.50 holiday can be a little daunting, even for Nigel,  who embraces everything……

We snuggled down together, each thinking about the adventures that lay ahead of us in Devon in  a Michael Palin type way! Happy Days!

Everyone’s A Winner, That’s No Lie!

So…..  how did our horses fair yesterday?  It was all very exciting ….

We very much enjoyed all the pre race coverage and listening for our horses to be mentioned, when they were, we all cheered.

Part of us wished we had a few real pennies on the race, a bit of extra money would be nice, but, if we lost everything, we would be totally gutted, thinking of the things we could have bought with the money we had frittered away, so betting with Red Nose Day chocolate coins seemed to be the most sensible option.

We sat on the settee clutching the names of our horses. The tension was palpable.

We shouted and then sighed when Darrell and Nigel’s horses fell by the wayside …..

But when we saw that my horse Oscar Time was left and in with a chance,  we went bananas, jumping up and down and shouting him on. It’s a good job we have lovely neighbours who don’t mind our occasional bouts of exceptional excitement ….. which reminds me, I must warn them that the Eurovision Song Contest is coming up soon!

Oscar Time came in second, how brilliant was that? And I won a big pile of chocolate coins ….. which I shared equally with Darrell and Nigel, so it was a it was happy situation of a win win type nature!

Grand National 2011 – The Runners and Riders – A Derek Acorah Trilogy ……

It’s Grand National Day and we downloaded a sweepstake sheet earlier in the week with the runners and riders for our perusal.  There seems to be a very spooky theme going through our selections, talk about a Derek Acorah moment ….we’ve had a trilogy of them .............!!

When we first looked at the sheet  Nigel was adamant that he wanted Irish Raptor, no hivering or hovering for him, he loves dinosaurs, even if they do give him nightmares, but when we checked the runners again this morning, it seems that Irish Raptor has been withdrawn … so Nigel has had to chose again! As 2 and 8 are his favourite numbers, for reasons we haven’t quite got to the bottom of, he is now backing number 28 on our sheet which is West End Rocker …. nothing apparently spooky there, yet ……..

 

After Nigel’s impromptu re-selection, it was left to Darrell and I to choose our horses. We decided to go for a rather slightly more scientific approach…… We closed our eyes, circled our hands round a bit and then plonked them on the sheet, the horse nearest our hand was to be our Grand National Horse of Choice (Mr. D, our serial commenter, will no doubt have a very scientific name and explanation, with  a many numbered and bracketed formula for this method of selection). Darrell landed  near a horse called “Backstage”.  That’s when we started getting the willies up us ….. the chills were multiplying! Darrell proffered the following notion, he said " Oooowwweer.... we appear to be  being drawn by a compelling prophetic force ...  these names are all connected to our friend Hugh, he who lives in Notting Hill and lives and breathes the showbiz life!"  ………. and when I landed on Oscar Time …… we all totally freaked out ……and had to suck on a Werthers for a while to calm down!

..... Only time will tell if we have been guided to our horses in an unseen hand type nature  ........ However, we won't be putting any actual money on our horses,  but we will be shouting them on with all the vim, vigour and excitement as if we had “bunged a score on” on them!

Confectionary Review – Chocolate With Funny Drops.

Nigel can’t believe his luck with all this confectionary reviewing!  He doesn’t say much, but his reactions and facial expressions say more than words ….. therefore he is a most excellent reviewer.

Today we thought we would review a bar of White Chocolate with Funny Drops.

Hmmmm, the first thing we noticed was that there weren’t many funny drops in the chocolate and if we are being honest, if we didn’t know they were funny drops we might have sent the chocolate back to the manufactures as they did rather look like foreign objects…. especially the green ones, they looked like someone had accidently dropped some Birds Eye petite pois in the chocolate vat.

We think the “funny” in drops is not intended to be “funny” as in ha ha, but "funny” as in strange or peculiar. Still Nigel was most impressed 5 NOMS from him and 2 NOMS each from me and Darrell.

Have You Returned Your Census Form?

Have you returned your census form? 

Make sure you do …… because Aunty Jan could be knocking on your door at anytime. She has undergone intense training of a Censorial Collection type nature and is now  fully functional. She has got lots of pens in her bag ….. so there is no excuse!

New Clothes Bought From Ebay

Darrell has been buying some new clothes from Ebay, at the moment his clothes of choice are smart shirts and waistcoats.  He is very sensible and has set a limit at £1.99 per item,  but always starts at 99p, hoping that no one bids against him.

When his parcel arrives he gets very excited, and rushes upstairs to see if they fit.

I have to admit  he looks so different, all smartly dressed up, quite mature in a boyish sort of way.

Looking like this how could Stacey Solomon resist his charms?

Confectionary Review – The Comparing and Contrasting of British and Czech Smarties.

Today, we are presenting you with two tubes of chocolate beans, Smarties and Lentilky, similar packaging …. but let us examine them further ….

The Smarties a slightly bigger and thicker but the Lentilky are more colourful, and we very much liked the cheerfulness of the yellow beans.

And the taste Nigel?  What his facial expressions and little jibber jabberings conveyed was as follows ……

 

The Smarties have it.  The shell of the Lentilky is much thicker and crunchier which leads to you loosing the  chocolate a little  while you are masticating, the shell on the Smarties however is less dense allowing the chocolate to come to the fore. Smarties 7 NOMS, Lentilky 4 NOMS. Thank you Nigel, as succinct as ever!

Our Royal Wedding Outfits

We were wondering what we should wear for the impending Royal Wedding, we were going to wear our England shirts, but then we got a parcel from our best friend Hugh who lives in Notting Hill and dreams of a showbiz life and look what he sent us ……….

How perfect ……  t-shirts with printed waistcoats and dickie bows! Hugh suggested that we might embelish them with sequins, and Swarovski crystals, but we think that is more his style than ours, he is so outrageously flamboyant! We prefer to be a little understated, especially when it comes to matters of a Royal nature, one Queen is enough at any wedding ….. (though we think London will be teaming with them as William and Kate are bound to have invited them from all over the world)

As for our England shirts ……. we’ve decided to wear them for the Eurovision Song Contest on 14th May …. how exciting,  more flag waving!

A Present From Our Friend Max

Sometimes parcels come right out of the blue, and imagine our surprise when we found a parcel from our friend Max waiting for us in the porch yesterday

He had put so many things in it, like lots of photographs of him in the gardening pottering and  tending to his seedlings …..

…… and knitting!

He had knit us all mug hugs ….how kind and brilliant is that?

He had even sewn little alphabet beads with our initial on, on  each of our mug hugs, so we wouldn’t get them mixed up.  Nigel wanted to wear his mug hug,! what is he like? But we told him, that really, it would look much better on his mug.

We are so blessed in a Hello magazine type way to have such lovely, lovely friends,

THANK YOU MAX FROM THE BOTTOM OF OUR MUGS!

Czech Confectionary Review – 2 Banana Bars and a Czech Bounty

Because I bought quite a bit of Czech confectionary back from my trip, we have decided that it might be better to  review them  in several parts over the next week or so …. If Nigel had his way they’d all have been woofed down with gay abandon, where Darrell and I prefer to savour the experience of exotic and romantic foreign confectionary with a little less debauched haste.

Wrapped, both banana bars, “Banany" and “Monky”, looked tempting …

Unwrapped ……… erm … they were not so tempting …..

Dark chocolate is not really our chocolate of choice… and though the bars had different names, they were surprisingly similar.

We have to be honest and say we were a tadge disappointed, the chocolate had a crunchy sugary texture, which was in contrast to the rubbery banana filling … a little bit odd and perhaps a smidge too exotic for our taste. 

We must applaud Nigel though for his wholehearted enthusiasm throughout this review. 2 NOMS.

The Bounty Bar - “Kokosino” faired a little better, as it was coated in milk chocolate, and was quite palatable …. 4 NOMS.

You will notice that Nigel was very taken with his Czech penny mix candy necklace …

Cruelly Hoaxed

We fell for it, it seemed so plausible, and we didn’t sleep a wink last night worrying about the consequences of our selfish and wanton stockpiling of Marmite …..

…… only to find out that it was a cruel April Fool ……

We are so gullible!

Marmite Shortage Results In Stock Piling

We’re very concerned because we’ve heard that there is a national shortage of Marmite! It’s something to do with it being a knock on effect from the breweries not producing as much beer, because of increasing pub closures…..  which in turn has resulted in there not being enough yeast by-products left over to make Marmite ……. We are bereft, as it really is our savoury spread of choice and something we enjoy and partake in  every single day, including Christmas Day, Birthdays, High Days, Low Days, Away Days and Holy Days ………. 

What will we do if we can’t enjoy our daily Dairy Lea spread and Marmite sandwiches?  And poor Nigel? He has it on his toast, under his beans …. this is a disaster, the implications incalculatable ….  ….

Darrell went down to the SPAR and did the unthinkable …..he bought their entire stock, (both in glass jars and the new squeezable variety).  We are not proud. We are deeply ashamed, as we put our own needs before those of others.  Believe us, we won’t sleep easy in our beds tonight, for we have left a small village community on the borders of Wolverhampton without Marmite!

Marmite will be spread very thinly from now on …..