Birthdays, Houses and Photo's

The best picture I have seen in the papers this week is one of our jolly old Queen riding a rather fine looking dapple grey mare in a rather jaunty trot! So what, you may all say. Well this woman is EIGHTY years old this week and still riding out, not on a gentle meander through the grounds of Windsor but in the most taxing on the body gait to ride to (except of course the bronco Billy gait) Good on you Ma'am you will do for me. Happy Birthday to you, not that you will be reading this, but who knows.

We have decided to remove our house from the stagnant housing market for the time being. It has been up for sale for six months and we have had three viewings in that time, so on average one couple every two months. I cannot stand the strain of keeping the place in pristine condition just in case! Anyway every time Simon comes round he knocks a bit of our house down and we have to keep mending it. He is however not random but sticks to pulling the coat pegs off the wall every time he hangs his coat up! We have decided to do away with the said pegs now and put the coats somewhere else, I am not saying where as I don't want Simon to know as he may well reek havoc on the new coat hanging area. Now I would not mind but as a lad I could not get him to hang a coat up for love nor money and once even very sarcastically gave him an in depth lesson into what a coat hanger was and how it worked, but no, coats would be slung on banisters, over chairs, dropped in the porch anywhere but on a peg.

This is the last evening of Barry being away, he is home for the foreseeable future tomorrow (Thursday) and starts his new job on 2nd of May. I am sure it is the right decision and wish him lot's of luck in his new foray into a new kind of industry, he will do just fine, he is one of life's good guys.

I am attempting to go riding next week, feeling a little nervous as I still have some pain in the ribs. I do not want to leave it any longer though as I will have to start afresh. I have been promised Hector my safe steady boy, he is the kind of horse you just have to kiss he is so lovely, a bit like my old Alfie, steady as a rock and hopefully not full of nasty surprises. I am told he can have a tantrum if you tap his bottom with the whip. He has to be tapped on the shoulder! Fair enough!

We did an important photo shoot last week at my Nursery. I had a photographer and all his paraphanalia, the MD of my the Company I work for plus one of the directors and the Nursery Manager all in the room watching while I put the kids through their classes and hopefully got them to pay attention to me and act normal. Well, my little kids where absolute little stars and behaved perfectly. The only problem we had was trying to stop the little girls from displaying to much of the next days laundry.

I had to work my little socks of to keep them looking at what we were doing but it worked and we have some great shots for our promotional brochures. I was really chuffed to get personal praise from my MD.

Comment of the day came from one little girl who announced that she had only got nipples now but one day she would have boobies! I thanked her for sharing that with us all and we all sang a song. What else could I have done?