March in one shot

HERE’S March in one fell swoop!

• Begun revising my French for upcoming trip – on an Aussie online course! If my accent doesn’t confuse our Gallic acquaintances I’ll eat my chapeau!
• We buy a new set of saucepans, lightweight aluminium ones, ’cause our old cast iron ones are a bit too heavy for me to lift with confidence (the stroke, you know). Almost the first thing I do is knock over the frying pan with two eggs in it, and they land on the carpet, sunny side down. The new pan is now blessed with a great dint along one side.
• Couple of really lively sessions at the Pub. Rob, the manager/chef, assures me that when I die he’ll name our regular table after me. I tell him that that honour ought to go to PD – who, after all, spends far more money here than I do. “Oh no,” says Rob, “I’ll have him stuffed and mounted!”
• Al, our gardener, makes his first appearance of the season and gives our still sodden lawn a first tentative trim. Meanwhile I take delivery of a new raised bed and some extra large potato planting bags – I’m determined to rediscover my green fingers again this year.
• Discover I don’t really like sea bass – to me it has an excessively tough, scaly skin and virtually no flavour – which is perhaps why it’s so fashionable, something fish haters can eat without the worry of tasting anything.
• Still on food: I do us a couple of interesting slow-cook dishes, a beef stew in a peanut butter sauce (I know, sounds ghastly, but it turns out quite good) and a chicken cooked in Riesling wine.
• I finally manage to lock down a hire car for our French holiday – it’s amazing how difficult it is to find an automatic car in Europe, almost as bad as trying to find a manual one in the States and Canada.
• My Good Lady is beginning to feel the benefits of the longer daylight hours and the milder, sunnier weather – always a relief to me when we put our thick coats and winter woollies away. We’ve survived another winter – hip, hip, hooray!