since last I blogged . . .

. . . quite a few good things have occurred . . .
O&G's move to Bushey would seem to be going ahead at the beginning of May ~ fingers crossed!
Mothering Sunday was great! O&G, Frankie, Alex, Lucia and I all met up at the Lily Lounge for Afternoon Tea ~ which was lovely!
I went to the Civic Awards and hob-nobbed with the Great and the Good ~ which was exciting!
Today Alex and Malcolm came and put up my new garden gate and Fran and Lucia came to play and Ricky came and cut my grass and tidied up the garden for a couple of hours. Then Alex, Fran, Lucia and I spent an hour or two in the garden chopping up (mainly Alex) and burning (mainly me) the old interior doors (HOORAH!!!). So today was ~ satisfying!

This was on Do's facebook and I thought I would give it a go:

BBC Reading List

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.
2) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
3) Tally your total at the bottom.

x 1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
x 2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
x 3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
x 4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
x 5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
x 6 The Bible
x 7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
x 8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
* 9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
x 10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
x 11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
x 12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
x 13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
x 15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
x 16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
x 17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk ~ x
x 18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
* 19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
* 20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
x 21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
x 22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
x 23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
x 24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
x 25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
x 28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
x 29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
x 30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
x 32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
x 34 Emma - Jane Austen
x 35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
x 37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
x 38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
x 39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
x 40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
x 41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
x 42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
* 43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
* 44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
x 45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
x 47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
* 48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
x 49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
x 50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
x 51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
x 53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
x 54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
x 57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
x 58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
x 59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
* 60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
x 61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
x 64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
x 66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
x 67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
x 68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
* 69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
x 73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
x 74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
x 78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
x 81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
x 85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
x 92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
x 93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
x 94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
x 97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

57 read and 8 that I would like to read!
A triumph of age over 'well-readness' tbh!

it has been another good week . . . .

. . . though very busy!
work continues good and very interesting although 2 evening meetings plus one govs' meet has meant I haven't seen an awful lot of my home this week!
and then on Friday instead of going home and putting my feet up I zipped off up to Yorkshire and spent the week-end with St, Ri and the Pies. Arrived in the evening after a l o o o ng trawl of four and a half hours up the morotorway ~ due to road works and the usual Friday night traffic ~ triffic! The Pies were in bed but not asleep ~ I think they had been waiting up! ~ and then I had supper and sat around talking. To bed very late ~ or very early!!
Saturday was Kpie's Pre-primary Ballet so St and I nipped off there soon after 11. Kpie looked very sweet ~ and she got her certificate so that was good. Back home for lunch and then St did about 2 hours digging in the garden (there is a lot of digging to do!!) and I went with Kpie and Jpie to the little park with their scooters. Quiet evening chatting with St.
Today I played 'Escape from Atlantis' with the Pies and then went with St and Kpie to Dunelm Mill (yay!) and then back for a quick lunch. Just before setting off for home St took me to see 2 new developments of houses. It's hard to believe the prices up there!! About half the cost of similar down here. I'm obviously living in the wrong place!! LOL

I wish I had taken my camera . . .

. . . because my blog looks boring wihout photos I think . . .
This week-end has been good although it started sadly . . .
On Friday I went with my friend F to the funeral of a friend from a long time back. We have known Jim since we were 17 ~ a long time ago now ~ and he had been a very good friend of Boogy's for years before that. The funeral was very sad, but it was good to meet some other old friends and good that quite a number of people were able to stand up and say a few words in tribute. He will be much missed.
F and S had asked me to stay the night at their house and as an anti-dote to the sadness of the funeral we went to a small local theatre/club for an evening of music and poetry (Rhythm and Muse!). It was wonderful! and just what we needed!!
On Saturday, after a leisurely morning and lunch we walked along the tow-path to Kingston for a talk on 'Sculpture between the Wars' mainly featuring Dora Gordine (who I had never heard of before ~ I am making it sound like I am very cultured aren't I?). I enjoyed that too and I certainly learned a lot as I know virtually nothing about the subject!! Back for a quick cuppa and then I came home.
Today has been productive in that I have had a good sorting out of my wardrobe. Lots of things have been 'slung'. They always say you shouldn't keep anything you haven't worn for a year as on that basis you aren't likely to wear it again anyway. I don't actually believe it but I did manage 2 bin bags and the wardrobe looks much better now!
It is still very cold although we have had some lovely sunshine on and off all day . . . and my daffodills are looking very jolly in the garden! I will try to find my camera and get some good shots of them.