Pictures galore

Back from good old Sussex by the sea; we did see the sea briefly and the rain stayed away. On the way down we had the best pub meal we have ever had and it's perhaps not surprising as it was Heston Blumenthal's pub in Bray. It seems to be where his enterprise cook top dollar proper British food as I had slow roast pork belly with a sort of mush of peas that were nothing like mushy peas and Stewart had oxtail and kidney pudding and oh yes we had his triple cooked chips even though they were £4.50 a shot; they were worth every penny.

Apart from meandering around the beautiful Sussex Weald and eating in more good pubs we visited Charleston Farmhouse where the darlings of the Bloomsbury set fetched up in the first world war to farm instead of fight. It is a delightful place and it seems they spent all of their time painting every single surface, even coal scuttles and the sides of the bath. It's the sort of painting that you think - well I could do that. A load of criss crosses down the panels of a bookcase, circles above the picture rails but then I remember my one attempt at stenciling which left a block of smudged pattern stranded in our kitchen for years and realise it's probably harder than it looks.

The rooms in the house were all in fact quite small and it made me wonder about all of the psycho drama that was going on there and how they didn't end up killing each other. You know she was in love with him but he was gay; his boyfriend lived there too; they had a daughter who didn't know she was his and who married his ex-boyfriend years later but didn't know she had and all the time her (the first her!) husband still lived with them. On top of that they were never without visitors with very famous names, no wonder they had to go off and throw paint at the walls every five minutes.

I'm back now to face the prospect of pictures of my blobs, not so pretty perhaps as the Bloomsbury ones but I have a scan on Monday and an appointment with the oncologist on Friday so we will see if they have changed at all. I hope then to go off to France for as much of the summer as I can get out there; without a menage a trois of course and hopefully as boring as hell.