Plenty to celebrate today

We are celebrating a 'special' birthday today, as my husband Clive moves into a new decade. There will cake and fine dining.

We had a pre-birthday trip out on Wednesday to Bletchley Park. Have you been? It's fascinating. I thought I knew the story, but there is so much more to it than I'd realised. I didn't know, for instance, that Enigma machines were widely available for commercial use before the war. We were lucky enough to be at Bletchley when they were demonstrating the enormous Bombe machine that clicked and whirred to check the decoders' theories. When we got home we watched The Imitation Game.

Three things struck me: the sheer genius of everyone who worked on this project; how boring it must have been; but mostly what a sad story it is. Poor Alan Turing doing his best for king and country, saving millions of lives and taking years off the war, but charged with indecency and driven to suicide just because he was gay. He was only 41; what a waste.

Sorry - went all gloomy. Back to the celebrating.

Clive: what a cherub.

Yesterday's pre-birthday outing took us to Melton Mowbray to pick up a ridiculous quantity of home brewing kit purchased via eBay. (Purchased, note, not won. It annoys me that you 'win' an auction when actually you could say that because you are the highest bidder you have technically lost, because you are paying more than anyone else thinks the lot is worth.) Naturally, on the way home we had to stop at Ye Olde Pork Pie Shoppe to pick up one of Dickinson & Morris's finest.

It's my baby brother's birthday on Easter Sunday, too, so there's plenty to feel pleased about this weekend, despite the weather. Sorry, nearly went gloomy again!

Have a good weekend, folks. 

To be part of the Celebrate the Small Things blog hop, all you have to do is put your name on the linky list on Lexa's Blog, and then post every Friday about something you're grateful  for that week. 

Pork pie triumph

When my husband does the supermarket shop on his own, two things generally result: it costs more than when I do it, but we get nicer food. On his last trip, however, he came back without his habitual weekend pork pie treat, declaring that all those on the shelves were - well, I can't tell you what he said, but it wasn't very complimentary.

What he did bring home, though, was the wherewithal to make his own. All those years in the bakery trade come in useful in such crisis times. I was banished from the kitchen, while he put on his pinny and wielded his rolling-pin.

Ninety minutes later he revealed a pie of such beauty and majesty that it brought a tear to my eye! It wasn't one of those picnic-size morsels; no, this was a full-on 2lb example, with a hand-crimped crust decorated with pastry leaves.

'Leave it to cool,' I said, 'then I'll take a picture of it for my blog.'

Unfortunately I got distracted and by the time I went back with my camera the teenage hordes had been at. Even so, I think you can see from this picture that it really was a prince of pies. I have decided he can stay for at least another week.