So – we were meant to be spending 2 nights in the not very glamorous outskirts of Swindon (!) as H had found a 1 day beer making course nearby that he, Fi and Rich all wanted to do. And which I was perfectly happy not to go to and instead hang out with Maddie and Bob dog in the nice little AirBnB that I'd booked. Then it turned out that H had got the course date wrong (dohhhhh) and we instead found ourselves having a Valentine's Day love in at Dora a quatre!
F&R tipped up for lunch, for which H had baked possibly his best sourdough yet (in his view, they all taste good to me and my bread-scoffing palate) and made a nice new soup. Oh we are olllldddddd these days. And then we headed out for a stroll with the dogs – a rather frustrated Maddie on the lead still, post her interaction with the sharp thigh-puncturing log, but at least she walks decently by H's side – for me it's a shoulder-ripping joyless task. Bob dog can only do about 40 mins these days, so then it was back for tea… which swiftly morphed into the three of them 'testing' yet more of the cider that H made with Fi & Rich a few months back. And then a bottle of champagne – not sure that's quite the right way round? With 'the best crisps ever' – some Tesco beef crinkly ones that both the boys rave about.
As it was Valentine's night, we decided to avoid the 'table for 2 x 2' formal restaurant scenario and instead went to try out a night in Tooting Market. Which is great! Various cocktail bars knocking out Happy Hour drinkies till a generous 8pm, and various small eateries we could perch at for starters, then another drink, then some (small!) mains. The others can massively out-drink me (I am a pathetic 3 cocktails only gal these days) so it was a bit of a long night as they caroused onwards.
We did end up at a surprisingly good piano bar in the market! Well, a bloke banging out some top notch tunes on a keyboard, in a grubby passage towards the lovely plastic dangly fronds that keep (some of) the cold out of the market. We must have been 20 years older than anyone else there, but stayed till his set was done at midnight. Somehow they then demolished a bottle of white wine when we got home – and I scuttled off to bed!
Funnily enough, it was a bit of a slow start on Sat morning and the bold ideas of 'going for a dog walk before we have breakfast' were OF COURSE banished in favour of 'let's shovel piles of bacon & sausage, eggy, tomatoey, mushroomy lard in, to soak up the night before'. Who could have seen that coming??!
May well drag H back into Tooting this coming week as we've been saying for years that we must go try out more of the curry houses there – I've found us an Afghan one so hopefully, Thursday night we'll be there x