A Scenic Autumn Wander

All images by Michael Coleran.

Shared with permission.

If you start near the river, it's the River Wyre by the way, you will see if you are lucky one of our residents Herons.  They stand proudly on the banks, eagle eyed for looking for fish in the fast moving water.

If you are very very lucky, you might also see one of the few otters that have recently taken up residence.

Wandering along the riverbank will take you to this lovely grassy area, but beware of Labradors and retrievers running happily running up to you after a swim in the river, they have been known to shake and shake and leave the occasional muddy footprints. 

The ruins of Greenhalgh Castle.

If you keep going along the river and step out onto the end of the High Street where I used to live and then walk over the bridge past Sainsbury's you will eventually come to the ruins of the castle.  There's not much left now, but once it was magnificent.  Lots of houses in our town boast a few stones in their walls from the original castle.

You can get as close to it as Michael got here to take photo, but access to the ruins is now not allowed, it's even fenced off from the sheep.

Years ago it was accessible to everyone, but I guess one too many little boys thought that scaling the walls was a good idea.  

We did make sure that Simon was very conscious of causing no damage, and he only posed for the photograph.

Come back into town and walk past Sainsbury's, keep going and you will pass the Royal Mail sorting office, then cross the mini-roundabout and take a left and you will come to the park on your left and Aldi on your right.

But if you keep going along the lane you will come to the canal bridge, and then you can walk down the ancient stone steps for some more nature and glorious Autumn colours.

I love the old bridges that are all along the canal.  It's Lancaster Canal, and is unusual in that it has no locks over it's 42 mile length.  Which we really appreciated when we had our little holiday on a narrowboat on this canal a couple of years ago.  

The colours are magnificent aren't they, this is truly my favourite time of the year.

I hope you enjoyed this little jaunt around my current home town.  

Many thanks to Michael for permission to use his lovely photos.  He's one of our official town photographers, and is there for all the events that go on as well as being out snapping away at the wildlife, nature and changing seasons.

Sue xx

Shrinkflation Strikes again

 

Shrinkflation has struck again.

The lovely vegan Aldi sausage rolls, were miraculously held at the same price of £1.19 for years.  They were tasty, they always cooked up really well, and were enjoyed by meat eaters and non-meat eaters for so long.

Then shock horror, a few months ago they vanished from the freezers.  

I checked every single time we went in there, and while other things disappeared and then came back there was never a sighting of the sausage rolls either on the shelves or on any of the shelf edge labels.

Then on Friday look what I spotted, stacked high  filling a third of the top shelf of the freezer and being introduced as a new product ... sausage rolls.

But in a pack of two!!

Now that is a little bit sneaky if you ask me.  They are still really good value for money as sausage rolls go, and hopefully they will be as tasty as before.  I have opened the box and they do seem a little bit longer than they were previously and I will be trying them for flavour for lunch one day this week. 

At least I guess this shrinkflation is blatantly obvious, there for all to see two instead of four.  But one of my favourite sausage rolls is now 50p instead of it's original 30p, and that is quite a jump.

Although I guess, in the grand scheme of things, it's not the end of the world. 😄

Sue xx

Hardworking Worms, and YouTube

 

Art - Lady of the Garden by Lore Pemberton

Unlike this lovely image my garden is almost done for the year, although amazingly I have some flowers still looking lovely, if a little scruffy around the edges.  But they are providing nourishment for the couple of bees that I have spotted recently, so they will remain as they are until no little lives depend on them.

 I have one more tomato plant to take down and feed to the tiny compost bin.  It really is tiny so I feed it with weeds, trimmings and food scraps slowly, leaving the worms to do their magic for a few days in between ... it's amazing how hard they work.

A lot harder than me if I'm honest!!

I also have to be honest and say that I have not been reading much at all this month, the dark mornings and evenings have seen me snuggled up on my chair with a mug of coffee and the television switched to the YouTube channel.

 While the television itself can be is full of depressing news and mind-numbingly boring quiz shows (not you Only Connect and The Chase), there are so many people filling the screen with lovely positive videos and interesting things to watch.  So that is currently my viewing of choice.

So here are a few YouTube of the channels that I am really enjoying at the moment.

Rewilding Jude

https://youtu.be/Em0IQlPWyMc?si=5mE39fcdSy2Qcc2t

Minty and Mortar

https://youtu.be/sBwWFs7FbL0?si=mWhHQhPflKBQJlvs

Rebecca at Railway Cottage

formerly Rationbook Rebecca

https://youtu.be/w0vg8kEQc5Q?si=66-SP2jQWDgy5KOa

thistinylife

https://youtu.be/ru7lvlbPa0c?si=9lRtMpIWwR2nMbAi

These are just a few of my current favourites, if you click over and visit them I hope you enjoy them too.

I hope you have a lovely weekend. 

Sue xx

Here, There and Everywhere ... At the Drop of a Hat

 

Today is Alan's first official day of complete and utter retirement.  He's been getting his state pension since February but we had one last contract to honour for our company.  

Now it's done!!

He went to back to base in Berkshire yesterday and handed in his secure laptop, his security passes and a few documents, and now he is a free man.  Although he had worked for the same establishment for the last seventeen years he was, believe it or not, a contractor working for them through our company.  But, as he has been there for longer than a lot of the full-time regular staff, he was given a lovely send off from his long term colleagues.  

He also got a lovely gift of an engraved decanter commemorating the date, and a bottle of whisky to fill it with.  Now lots of you know that he's an unusual Scottish man, as he really doesn't like whisky at all, so I am going to do my old trick of turning it into Blackberry Whisky and it will be ready to drink in a years time, when we will crack it open to celebrate the one year anniversary of his retirement.

We started our new here, there and everywhere, go at the drop of a hat lifestyle this morning and took ourselves to the coast for a walk along the prom, and then had a cooked breakfast in one of our favourite cafés.  Before leaving for home we called into the Morecambe branch of Aldi to compare it to ours ... it's slightly bigger and has a slightly better range of stock, but it was freezing in there.  They are one of the remaining stores without doors on all the fridges and boy does it make a difference!!

We chatted all the way home, in fact we chatted so much that ... for the first time ever ... we missed our turning off the motorway.   Alan had chosen to overtake a convoy of lorries at the wrong time.  We both burst out laughing and said 'it doesn't matter we're retired', yep, we have all the time in the world to do a thirty extra miles circle to home .

Thank you for all the comments on the last post, I'm glad that so many of us are on the same wavelength.  To waylay any worries about me not posting anymore, after much thought I have decided that it's not the blog that is going to vanish in any way, it's all the restrictions that I have been putting onto myself and blogging about that are now lifted.

Yes, I will still be doing most of the things ... saving money, eating cheaply etc etc, after all I am now retired and with the titchiest of pensions until next May, so there's definitely no extra cash to throw around.  But I am not going to let that change the things that I want to do or the optimistic mindset that comes with the freedom that not having to work brings.

There will be some changes, and hopefully you will enjoy them as much as I have enjoyed thinking about them.  😀

I will live my hobbit life happily ... minus the hairy feet!!

 

Sue xx

I knew who I was this morning ...

 

Quote from Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

Never has this quote been more true for me.  

I fired up the laptop this morning to write a blog post, and made the mistake of reading lots of other peoples posts before I'd even thought about starting to write mine.  After missing a few days due to 'stuff', I scrolled back and read through lots of posts to catch up, as I always do.

I shouldn't have done it.  Apart from a few bright lights it was such a downer.

The world is full of such negativity at the moment, and over the past year or so as well as being shown all over social media, television and newspapers it has silently, insidiously been slipping itself into blogland.  

This space used to be so different.  I understand some of it, but not all of it.

My first thought was to completely discontinue my blog, and delete it all entirely.  

Luckily I had a think, over a coffee and a bowl of chips in Booths café with Alan, and on getting home and sitting at the computer I came to the conclusion that I will alter what I post about, change what I do and hopefully, in doing so, make sure that I am making no contribution to the steady decline in blogland.   

It might just be me, hey it probably is.  

Please don't worry about stuff, but I'm taking time and space to change things up, work things out and do what's right in my mind for me.  If you've noticed this trend towards the negative let me know, if I'm the only one ... let me know that too.

In the meantime I will be here but differently.  

If you don't like the way that I change things up ... and I don't mind at all if you don't ... I'll be leaving all the other blogs on my sidebar for you to hop over to as usual.  I can see from my stats that my blog is used as a jumping off point to lots of other people's and I would hate you to lose the links.

Although it's chilly these days ...  I'll be wearing my slippers.  😄

Sue xx