We Have Meat and We Can Eat...

Thank you all for your kind birthday wishes. It was a bit of a non-event really, but I did get chocolate cake at teatime from The Husband who had dashed into town to the supermarket at the last minute, I think! And very delicious it was too...

We have a houseful arriving for lunch tomorrow to celebrate the four family birthdays which fall this week. I thought I would do lunch with a vague nod to Burns Night which falls on 25th January, so the menu looks to be Haggis and Pork and Apple Sausages, with Creamy Garlic Mash, Roasted Butternut Squash and Sweet Potato Wedges with a Mango Glaze, Baby Spinach and Fine Beans with Pancetta and Pine Nuts, and a sweet Redcurrant Gravy. For pudding there will be my Lemon and Rhubarb Cheesecake, a Chocolate and Fruit terrine left over from Christmas, Nigella's Whisky Mac Syllabub, and a Red Wine and Raspberry dip with homemade Shortbread. Well, that is the plan, and depending on how the children behave today and how much 'help' they offer, we will see how much actually gets done!

Virginia Woolf wrote that "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is going to write." Sadly, I do not have the first and my study has become the general dumping ground for everything that hasn't found a home anywhere else in the house... The boxes of Christmas decorations are piled in the corner where they were thrown on Twelfth Night because I couldn't face the bother of taking them up to the loft. An assortment of children's toys litter the floor, the Welsh dresser is stacked with piles of newspapers for recycling, and my desk positively groans under cookery books that need to go back to the kitchen and trays of correspondence which One Day I will get around to filing. Today I must sort through everything as I suspect this "Room of My Own" will become a make-shift bedroom tomorrow.

Every time we move house I promise myself that I will become More Organised - that I will develop a proper filing system for all my notes and research, that I will have pots of pens and trays for papers neatly lined up on my desk, that my books will be alphabetically arranged, that this will be the year I Write The Bestseller... No doubt I will make all these promises again when it is time to up-sticks and transfer our chaos into the new house. It looks as if we will be moving around the time that Number Four is due to arrive, so things might get a little complicated! I wouldn't mind knowing exactly where I'll be delivering this one - I hope that we will still be here so the lovely carpets in the new house won't be under threat... But as Rabbie himself said "The best laid schemes o' mice and men Gang aft a-gley". Very a-gley in our case.

The Green Bean admiration was short-lived, with Middle Son announcing yesterday that he thinks they are "S'gusting!", so we had chicken in a creamy parmesan and lemon sauce with linguine for supper, with fresh tomatoes which are also "S'gusting" apparently.