Wednesday afternoon

I’m sorry it’s been so long between posts – life’s really busy along with hospital and doctors appointments. All good news, though, so every cloud really does have a silver lining.

However, it means there’s a few gaps in my record of eating this week ...

WEDNESDAY

We went to Bohemia (one of our all-time favourite places); moderately busy for a Wednesday evening.

We ate:

Corn beef hash with rocket egg & caper salad (Bob)

Peppered mackerel paté, horseradish crème

Chump of lamb

Chicken stuffed with mozzarella & chorizo (Ali)

Chocolate chip Bread & Butter pudding (Bob)

Prune & Almond tart

FRIDAY

The Famous Sausage Sludge (and very fine it was, too).

SATURDAY

We were visiting Ali’s mum in Wales (by the way, the new headlight bulbs I fitted in the Rav were worth every penny for the drive home in the dark).

We ate:

Pork & Sausage Terrine with shallots & garlic(I’ve made a few terrines recently, this was the best so far).

Tarragon Chicken with wild rice & green beans

Chocolate cheesecake (thanks, Mr Tesco).

SUNDAY

Pork & Sausage Terrine, chilli jam, pea-shoot salad

Fillet steak, crushed new potatoes with onion, garlic & parsley, peas, field mushrooms.

(We also drank some very posh Champagne that we’d been given, after all, we had loads of good news to celebrate from last week. Unfortunately, we didn’t like it that much.)

MONDAY

Smoked haddock risotto

Left-over chocolate cheesecake

TUESDAY

Beef stew with mashed potatoes (this was cooked slowly for 4 hours, not bad at all).

WEDNESDAY

We’re going out to eat tonight, and I’ll report back on that later. However, today has been trying.

I was woken just before 06:00 by a repeated ‘beeping’ sound. I thought it was a dead battery in one of the smoke alarms, so staggered round the house in a fairly systematic manner taking all the batteries out in turn. Went back to bed: the beeping started again!

It turned out to be the intruder alarm which had a message saying ‘ALERT! Enter code now’. So I did; the message then changed to read ‘Tel line fail’. It had indeed; we had no landline. It turns out that you can only report this after 08:00 when the Virgin team wakes up. Frankly, I can’t understand why this was the case, since when I called at 08:01 I was soon speaking to ‘Marish’ in India, where it must have been at least 15:99 hrs. I know outsourcing saves money, but it’s really quite pointless when I could barely understand the person I had to interact with.

Anyway, reported the fault which (apparently) is affecting a lot of customers. According to Virgin (who have an out of date web site and even more out of date txt and email updating service) the engineer was on site and the fault would be repaired by 12:15. Then it changed to the engineer being on the way and the estimated repair time changed to 14:15. Currently (15:00 here) the repair time is now 18:15 (well, actually, they say 06:15 pm – work that out) and there are also faults with broadband and TV! Great service when you can only talk to someone half a world away. Updates follow.

In between times, please think good thoughts for my friend Mike who's taking a piano exam this afternoon!