It's highly likely that we ate a woodlouse

Oh dear. That doesn't look very disabled accessible, does it? Better turn back.

Come back, Littlest Latte!

HA! Only joking! We're off-roaders now, dontcha know. With our Delichon Delta All-Terrain Disabled Buggy we can go anywhere we like. Nothing stands in our way! (Except kissing gates. And stiles.)

Let's say that again. Delichon Delta All-Terrain Disabled Buggy. Because when you're buying disability equipment, googling it only takes you to the company's website, where you can view a tiny picture of it. No 'Read all 84 customer reviews' for us.

We ordered this weeks ago, with no real idea what it would be like. That's a scary way to spend over a grand. But then on holiday we saw a woman pushing one, and we hunted her down. "It's a lifechanger," she said.

Certainly two days after buying it we were blackberrying for the very first time. If that's not worth a grand, I don't know what is.

We took home a plastic bag full of blackberries and a woodlouse. On getting home, the woodlouse was conspicuous by its absence.

Can woodlice just disintegrate?

You've got to hope they can.

Where I try to talk seriously about myths and history, but end up turning into the Wife of Bath

Let's talk about men. I was going to talk about history, but you know me. I'm not much for the facts. (Remember the Gurkhas?)

I do like a good myth however. And there we were in Robin Hood country, having great fun listening to the Robin Hood audio trail in the car. This is a downloadable tourist trail which straddles the hitherto unstraddled divide between historical and literary research and recommendations for where to buy coffee and garden plants.

How the myth has changed over the years is fascinating, and I'd recommend the audio trail to anyone, even if they're not in Nottinghamshire looking for plants. It has left me gripped by a desire to read whatever of the original tales are available, even though their Middle English mentality may mess with my sweet childhood memories of Michael Praed. (Michael Praed was the only Robin Hood in my opinion, in the same way that Connery was the only Bond, no matter what the Americans did to poor Michael in Dynasty.)

At least the original tales get rid of that pesky Maid Marion, who was always in the way of my Praed-centred teenage dreams. Marion turned up only much later in proceedings, and was more or less invented by Morris dancers for Mayday festivities. Oh, and she was played by a man. And she was a bit of a tart.

It's possible she was reassigned from another French story of years before, where she happened to be in love with another bloke called Robin, but she sure as hell wouldn't have known what she was doing larking round an English maypole centuries later. With a beard. And an entirely new Robin, who spoke not a word of French.

There was more history on offer in Newark Castle, where I learned all about the Civil War. My previous knowledge of this period came entirely from Channel 4's The Devil's Whore (and had been slightly overshadowed by the discovery of just how attractive John Simm looks with his face all mangled).

In fact, I got so excited about my ever-expanding hoard of knowledge that I ended up getting inappropriately cross with the Eldest Latte because she refused to stay and watch an actor pretending to be an alchemist near the Sherwood Forest visitor centre. "But this is fascinating!" I told her in my best enthusiastic mother voice, as she tugged at my sleeve and whined about going for a picnic. "Don't you think? What's not to like about a handsome and charismatic man in an open necked shirt a well researched and entertainingly-presented explanation of medieval science?"

There's a serious problem with souvenir tackiness around the myth of Robin Hood. I know souvenirs tend towards the tacky, but still. It's worse than that. I'm willing to forgive some of this, because the myth has origins in medieval times, and I remember from my medieval literature lectures a good deal of chatter about testicles and bare bottoms hanging out of windows, so, you know, it wasn't a particularly classy period. But that doesn't excuse the colouring sheet given to my children at Nottingham Castle.


There were things on offer for adults that couldn't be excused either. They made Errol Flynn look like high art.

In fact, I was becoming concerned that I would have nothing to sum up my stay in the area (apart from, you know, a load of photos of old trees and some lechery). But then the day before we came home, we dropped into Strays bookshop and cafe for a drink. And there it was.

See that? A leaf drawn on the top of my latte.

It's as if Herne the Hunter personally wanted to make me happy.

Now you see us

Now you don't.


We're back. Honestly, it's like we never went away. Unless you look into the kitchen, of course, where you'll find all the clothes we own stacked in bags waiting to go into the washing machine.

You know you're middle aged when you get back from a holiday and the first thing you think to blog about is how much laundry you have to do.

But it's been a hard week for feeling elderly. We kicked off the week with my half-brother's wedding (I have two half-brothers. Does that make a whole one?) where everyone was ten years younger than me. Also they were pink, and healthy, and outdoorsy, which I never was, and partied till the early hours, which I never did. So that was even worse.

And then there was the hobbling. You remember that bad knee? The one that was just beginning to feel normal again? What kind of sane woman would hire bikes and cycle further in one morning than she had in the last twenty years with a knee like that? Dragging along an eight-year-old, a picnic and a set of crutches in a sturdy little trailer?

No sane woman. No sane woman. Only the kind of idiot woman who wants a knee the size of a balloon all over again. Only the kind of idiot woman who likes limping, and wants to do it for weeks on end.

But just for those few hours, it was worth it. See how fast I was! Too fast to even photograph, that's how fast!


Anyway, it was a good week, and Nottinghamshire is a good place to go. Stressful (we have kids, remember?) but good. But who knows what will stand the test of time - will the Little Lattes remember eating fresh yellow plums, picked from the orchard where we were camping?

Or their weary and increasingly irate parents, hissing 'JUST GO TO SLEEP' (that's the abridged version) at them through a dark tent flap?

See this tree? That's the Major Oak, Sherwood Forest, that is.


I learned loads about Robin Hood. I must tell you all about it.

But not now. Now I need to hobble up and down the stairs with my piles of laundry.

So I'll leave you with our favourite in-car holiday song.

Just for a while

I'm off.

Too much to do. Holidays to pack for. Work to get done before holidays start.

No time to blog. No time to read other people's blogs. No time for ANYTHING NICE AT ALL BECAUSE WE ARE GETTING READY TO HAVE A NICE TIME.

Even if it kills us. Which it might. It really might.

My new thing for today is... something we never saw coming

So. Things have been happening.

For a start, I'm five pounds lighter than when we last spoke. And I've made a change - not one of those little, piddling little changes that you read about in the self-help magazine articles, but the kind of massive, seismic life change that throws everything up in the air and leaves you wondering if you are still the kind of person you believed yourself to be.

We're talking about not taking milk in coffee.

Because I came to a realisation on day one of my diet (I only cheated once, by the way, in five days, when I decided I really didn't want a cooked chicken breast as my mid-morning snack and substituted a glass of wine in the cinema instead) that I was never going to lose any weight with the amount of milk fat swishing around inside me.

I love milk. I love playing with my milk frother. I love a latte when I'm out. And I don't like skimmed milk, before you suggest it. All around me there are beautiful things like this in the world. You lot all might enjoy looking at blue skies or piles of knitting yarn, but this is my porn of choice.

But I'm not called The Milk Lady, after all. And I'm not getting any thinner. And I can't give up wine. So I gave black coffee a try and you know, it won't kill me. It's actually kind of nice.

It's amazing the places life takes you.

Calendar for August

I know, I know. August is nearly over. Don't start.

Since this August will mark 10 years since Mr Coffee and I wandered down the aisle to promise all kinds of stuff to one another (none of them being the important things, like not letting the lawn grow too high or checking people's pockets for vital notes before flinging stuff in the washer), what better way to celebrate than with a picture of our wedding venue taken by our lovely colleague Beanphoto.

Is there nothing this woman won't steal?

We thought we would go camping in the rain. We thought this would be a good idea.

Faced with the prospect of Being Responsible for all the things we needed to take, we turned once again to Blog Theft. Enter The List Writer's camping list. Well, if you will put things on the interwebs, you've got to expect unscrupulous idlers coming and nicking your hard work.

This is what it looked like a bit later.


And this is what the Littlest Latte looked like, most of the time.


And do you know what? It seems that two nights on a wobbly airbed, under canvas, in a constant downpour, is just what my dodgy knee needed to start getting on the mend. I can put weight on it now, and even bend it a little. Happy times.