LizzieM

We’ve still got EKO 694 sitting in the garage on ‘Little Mo’. Didn’t realise til now that we’ve got 6 personalised number plates in the family, some were fairly cheap too, the most expensive was probably £600 and that’s on retention. One actually spells our son’s name without moving letters and spaces to make it illegal. The beauty of a personalised plate is that the age of the car isn’t obvious.

Having been away for most of February I went out on Saturday for a very big shop as there was little in the fridge, other than a few bits of cheese left over from Christmas. I needed, but couldn’t buy, everything. No eggs and no salad stuff. However this morning I went to Arnold Sainsburys and they were well stocked with all I wanted. Delighted to say I don’t need to shop again for at least a week and the chef has a choice of what to cook us for dinner tonight.

We had one a few years ago but it was badly damaged when stored in our underground garage in S of France which was then flooded during a particularly bad storm. I now rely on a free app called Skyview Lite, it was that app that told me which planets I was seeing last week. On the second pic that CT posted for me it showed Jupiter, Venus and Moon from top to bottom. It was all change the next night (left hand pic) If I point the phone to the floor it shows the stars in Oz!

We were very sorry to hear of old Motty passing away. Twenty years ago he nearly bought our house in Hertfordshire. He turned up to view one afternoon on his own and seemed very impressed with it and came back the following day with his wife and son Fred. Obviously it wasn’t what his wife was after but they were a lovely family and of course we had a discussions about his work, and about his famous sheepskin coat while he was with us. I believe he then decided to build an ‘eco-house’ in the next village, complete with a turf roof. As we’ve been away on holiday one of our sons sent me

Is that the road that’s like a big-dipper? Been along it loads of times when test-driving cars, the car showrooms always use the same route to put performance cars through their paces!

He certainly did visit Nottingham a few years ago. A friend of ours had a gift shop on Friar Lane near The Castle and one day Burt Bacharach wandered into his shop, had a chat, told my friend he was working on a show in Nottingham and bought a set of mugs.

Messy game but a win is a win. The Fulham game will be interesting, they’ve always been my husband’s team, let’s hope our new Navas man is up to Metrovich’s goal-scoring abilities.

It’s great how other peoples memories stir one’s own memories on this site. I’ve just thought of a time years ago when Sarah Ferguson arrived in our village to officially open an annexe to the local Macintyre Special Needs School. She was flown in on a Queen’s Flight helicopter that landed in a field opposite our house. A couple of neighbours and I went to the school to get a closer look and when the royal party went indoors we thought we’d go and look at the helicopter, walked a few yards across the field and as nobody was about we sat on the steps of the bright red shiny ‘copter. We didn

I’ve only been in a helicopter once and that was a flight over Victoria Falls which was a great experience looking down on all the wild animals grazing on the banks of the Zambezi. My son’s schoolfriend went to Agricultural College to learn the ropes so he could take over the family farm and then decided to fly an Air Ambulance instead. He worked with Prince William for a long time in the East of England.

A good friend of mine is an experienced microlight pilot, he also flies a 2 seater plane from somewhere in north Notts.

Even ‘up north’ here in Nottingham we have a small clump of daffodils flowering near the house. They brave the wintery weather every year and brighten up dark days at the end of January.

Well since we’ve deviated from the wonderful Jumbo to little single-engine planes, I’m reminded of a trip we made from Boca Raton to Destin in Florida, a flying distance of 500-600 miles I think. A chap we know wanted us to invest in his pecan nut farm up in the Panhandle and said he’d fly down to Miami to collect us. We parked the car and spotted ‘Doug’ putting fuel in his plane so went over to him. We all climbed aboard and it wouldn’t start so he asked my husband to fetch our car across to jump-start it! That was a successful exercise and we took off, heading north, but I admit I was a

My Dad had 2 Shredded Wheat every single day of his working life for breakfast. I’ve never been keen on it.

The fact that Guinea Fowl roost in trees is the reason we got them, with no need to lock them away from foxes every night. When we fetched them home, in cages in the back of the car, we let them out and the first night they decided to sleep in a willow tree right next to our bedroom window and as dawn broke they made such a racket and obviously woke us up. So we struggled to catch them using a huge fishing net, this took several hours, and put them all down the bottom of the garden, in the boys treehouse, on the edge of the wood. When we released them a few days later they realised the surr

We had a dozen Guinea Fowl that wandered around, laying eggs in flower beds (so we never knew how long they’d been lying there so never risked cooking any and we occasionally had to buy a few more birds when Mr Fox came visiting. They were very good security guards and made a lot of noise when visitors turned up. But your photo has reminded me @plantfitthat occasionally a Peacock popped over for a day long visit, he never stayed overnight. A chimney sweep came one day and asked me if I realised I had a lot of peacocks in the garden, he thought the Guinea Fowl were peacocks!

A recently deceased friend has a Gertrude Jekyll beautiful climbing specimen in her garden. Would it be wrong for me to nab it when nobody’s looking?! My Dad was an avid Rose grower and did his own budding, usually pinching them from Wheatcroft or Gregory’s fields. Our garden was absolutely full of rose bushes. I’ve still got all his Rose Annuals on our bookshelves, going back to the 50s and 60s. Unfortunately roses don’t grow very well in the soil where we live. However, we’ve got a few brave little daffodils blooming already, the same clump that flower every January.

Loving our newly installed wood-burning fire. It’s not yer traditional type, we went for a ‘cassette’ type that sits inside a hole in the wall and it’s just gorgeous to look at and sit beside.

A schoolfriend of our son has been on fishing trips with Paul Whitehouse several times, their fathers were close friends, (maybe still are, if they’re alive). This was in the days that Whitehouse was mostly on TV with Harry Enfield. I love Mortimer and Whitehouse, they come across as real genuine decent blokes and the programme is so funny.

I like Bradley Walsh, I accept he’s on TV a lot but for me he’s a good all round entertainer. In fact I’m watching ‘Breaking Dad’ as I browse Nottstalgia at the mo.

We’ve had a busy time since NY. We took the Christmas decs down early and drove down to London on 3rd January, had 2 nights in the Goring Hotel, went to see Les Miserables, then dinner in a private dining room in the hotel with 16 good friends from our previous stomping ground down south. Then we drove over to Dorset and spent 8 days looking out at the wind and rain, we even had thunder and lightning on Thursday night. Yesterday morning (Friday) we drove up to a golf course near Heathrow Airport to join around 70 family members celebrating my husband’s aunt’s 100th birthday. And I must sa

O ye of little faith Oz!

My son, who spends most of the year working in Tanzania, today sent me the entire 471 pages of Prince Harry’s book, on WhatsApp! I never had any intention of buying the book and probably won’t be reading what’s arrived via the internet. From what I’ve seen and heard so far on TV he’s put all our military, Royal Family and the entire British population in danger of retaliation from the Taliban. What a sad, mixed-up young man Harry has turned out to be, I won’t comment on the woman pulling his strings!

We’ve never been successful growing lupins, they seem to attract greenfly, wherever we’ve lived. Despite that I do love to see them growing in the borders, and persevere every year.

Not under a bridge, but many many years ago I crinkled the roof of my Land Rover Discovery by driving into a too low area of a multi-story car park, breaking the roof windows at the same time. Then I had to drive nearly 100 miles home on a wet February night. It was a real bad-luck car actually, because a few months after having a new roof an old lady reversed at great speed into the near-side, while I was sitting in the driving seat, and wrecked the whole side of the car. I soon got rid of it once it was fixed up again!

Has anybody seen ‘Without Sin’ on ITVX? It’s taken us a month to fathom out how to get that channel, but it was worth it in the end. We binged on 3 episodes last night and left the finale til tonight. It’s all filmed around Nottingham, the Square, Vic Centre, Clifton, Bestwood, Daybrook, Clipstone, Nottm Prison. I spotted The Major Oak pub in Arnold, where I spent a few evenings 50 odd years ago pulling pints, and the house where Stella’s (Vicky McClure) ex husband lives is a few yards from our house in Mapperley Park. The film crew parked their portaloo outside our gate, cheeky sods! T