Second Saturday in November

Thanks to everyone who liked my two just-for-fun posts this week and  for leaving lots of comments
Here are some replies to comments from early in the week...........

Shouting BANG! when the snaps in crackers fail, reminds me of The Good Life on TV
I'm glad so many people are going to enjoy the new Ann Cleeves book and to Jenny - yes I've read The Salt Path - and loved it.
To Chris - I think a library waiting list of 658 must be a record!
Re The Gates - There's nothing at the road end of the lane to say it's a dead end but as it's not got a proper road surface it ought to be obvious. From the road end of the lane you can't see my house but now you can see the gates. I only need to have one gate open to get my Fiesta through so just open it in the morning if I go out and shut it in the evening before dark.
The footpath up the lane and down the meadow is hardly used and mainly by local people who can do a 2 mile circular walk, a few dog walkers and sometimes by rambler groups as part of a much longer walk.

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My Round-up of the week............
It certainly turned much colder last week, Wednesday was really chilly and some proper autumnal fog too. Plus rain off and on and it was too wet for boot-sales last weekend, the small local boot-sale was completely water logged and will probably have to stop before the end of November. The big boot-sale  should carry on until mid December - hopefully.

I've had an unsettled week which often happens after a weekend where I've spent time with family. The family last weekend were Col's sister's family because it was her birthday. There were 8 of us for Sunday lunch cooked expertly by my niece who is a Brilliant cook.
Then I go home alone  and days after seem a bit flat and I have to work hard to keep from feeling low. This wasn't helped on Monday by burning the sausage rolls I was making for taking to WI......stupid woman ......expensive mistake.........trying to do too many things at once. I quickly made some fruit slices instead and had already made cheese straws, so with the things the other two people on catering duty had brought there was plenty for everyone.

It was because I was feeling a bit low, flat and pointless that I decided to put my mind to a (sort of) BLOG CHALLENGE! The idea came from two places one of them being this large machine below. It's the sugar beet harvester, working on the field on the other side of the track from my house on Wednesday last week.

You mustn't be in a hurry driving on the lanes at this time of year because around any corner could be a tractor and tipping trailer emptying it's sugar beet load onto a hard standing, or a HUGE lorry taking up the whole road as the sugar beet is loaded from a heap by another machine called "a mouse".

The photo below comes from the web and is actually in Germany but is exactly the situation you could find here. You don't get held up for very long because it takes just 6 minutes to fill the lorry!

One other reason for driving carefully is MUD on the roads. If trailers have carried their load from fields along roads you can be sure there is plenty of mud..........and it can be very slippery. A good farmer will have a tractor and scraper nearby ready to try and clean the roads but they can't get it all up and it will be slippery until there's a good rain to wash the mud away.

The nudge to my challenge is because this beet is taken to either the  Bury St Edmunds factory in Suffolk or Cantley in Norfolk  to be refined into sugar. Silver Spoon sugar is British and local as all sugar beet is grown and processed in East Anglia or the East Midlands (as opposed to Tate and Lyle sugar refined from sugar cane grown on the other side of the world).
So ..............Local Food................that's my sort-of  challenge for sometime next week. More about this when I get organised.


This week I'm grateful for

• Getting through a rough patch unscathed
• People smiling because of my blog posts
• Good books to read
• Bright ideas!

Back Monday as long as I survive our family bonfire and fireworks and food  party! Never done it before so it will be interesting.

Have a good weekend
Sue

P.S. Has Marlene in Cheltenham(?) got a different blog as she re-started The Simple Life one on 2nd Nov but now that's gone too?