What A Swell Party That Was

So, after months of planning, the big day has been and gone and now that I qualify for a Senior Rail Card I am officially OLD.

I can't thank Marion enough for all the hard work she put into the party. Arranging accommodation suitable for 12 adult guests plus two toddlers and a baby, sorting out a chef, cakes, wine and everything else was a mammoth task and she did things so well that everything ran like clockwork. I don't have any photos of the actual party as I was too busy sorting out (and drinking) wine and enjoying the event but I know that others took plenty of pictures so I am sure that I will have some to put on the blog in the weeks ahead.

On Friday I made a giant bowl of bolognese sauce and ten of us sat down for a very enjoyable evening which was sort of spread out over three sittings due to the needs of getting toddlers to sleep and guests having long distances to travel to get here. There was just enough for everyone to have enough to eat without overfilling themselves for Saturday.

Saturday morning was a blur of preparations, laying the table and making sure everything was ready for the planned four o'clock start.

The sun shone on us and we were able to venture onto the outside decking to have canapes and prosecco before the meal proper began. Here are Dave and Jane Haworth who have been our very good friends for over thirty years.

Chris Alder is the private chef who Marion arranged to come to the house and cook for us. We had some of my very favourite dishes and started with poached salmon and asparagus with bernaise sauce, followed by rare roast rib of beef with roast potatoes and green vegetables and a final course of panettone bread and butter pudding. Chris did magnificently. He kept exactly to the timetable we planned, cooked everything just as we asked, left the kitchen spotlessly clean and tidy and even helped out serving drinks (which wasn't in the remit). We aren't into bargain hunting but Chris' prices were very extremely fair. If you ever need a good chef you can find Chris on www.chrisalder.com - you won't be disappointed.

I asked for no presents but that didn't stop guests from presenting me with some wonderful champagnes,wines, chocolates and flowers. I hope that I thanked everyone fully for their unexpected generosity and if I didn't I can only apologise ( I was slightly worse for wear by the time I opened the gifts).

Another huge thank you goes out to Whalley Wine Shop. Owned and run by our guests Mark and Nita's son Tom, I've enthused about the shop on here many times but Tom excelled himself in providing an incredible array of prosecco, champagne, deep reds,dry whites plus some delicious dessert wines and fine port. All the wines matched the food beautifully. Thank you Tom - perfect choices. 

More thanks go to the wonderful, kind and generous Jan Harbon who created this highly original and quite spectacular birthday cake themed around my metal detecting hobby. She replicated some of my finds perfectly. If you ever need a special celebration cake I can't recommend Jan highly enough. Just search for The Cake Shed Southport and you will find her.

It seemed like a good idea when the party was in full swing, to invite everyone round to a late breakfast at eleven the following morning. It went extremely well but a breakfast on that scale  wasn't the easiest thing to put together so thanks go to Jane and Dave Haworth in particular for helping with the massive fry up of sausage, bacon, beans, black pudding, haggis and egg.

After the breakfast, we walked up the hill behind the house to clear the cobwebs. Here are Dave and Janet Wareing (left) together with Mark and Nita. Dave gave a very kind speech in toasting my birthday leaving me flattered and quite humbled. 

Most of all, the weekend was about family. Although six of the guests are friends, as I said in my response to Dave, I consider them all family and I was extremely pleased that they made the effort to travel a very long way to join me for the event.

Duncan is Libra too and Rose presented him with another lovely cake made by Jan. It was so nice to be able to share my celebrations with him and we're looking forward to staying four more days in the house with Duncan Sarah, Rose and Melody. Sadly, Paul, Josephine and Catherine had to travel back to Rochester today but having my two children, their partners and my grandchildren at my party meant everything to me. 

They presented me with this absolutely beautiful Swiss watch engraved with all their initials. I will treasure it until the day I die.

I started today's blog by praising the most wonderful woman in the world and I'll finish with the same. Marion is my life and, although she worked too hard over the weekend, I know that having our family and friends around her made this a very special event for her too.

Dr Jekyll & Mrs Hyde

I have pangs of conscience writing about my Alzheimer's suffering mother-in-law on this blog but it's supposed to be a retirement blog and it's something that looms very large in our retirement at the moment and I'm sure that it will loom large in other retiree's lives.  I'm not going to damage her dignity with a photo this time as she isn't looking her best having been (as I wrote earlier in the week) rushed into hospital in the early hours of Sunday . I can't praise Ward 11b in Southport hospital enough for the way that they looked after Flo for the four nights of her stay. She was given constant attention and kept comfortable throughout.


She's back at her care home now and on medication to help with a chest infection (possibly pneumonia) that resulted in an irregular heartbeat and breathlessness. Her colour has returned and her breathing is back to normal; the problem lies in her mental state. Whenever we visited the hospital we could hear Flo (she has a loud and distinctive London accent) long before we reached the ward entrance. Invariably she was laughing and in good spirits. The second that Marion and I were in view this changed and she would slump onto the bed crying and claiming a myriad of aches and pains - perhaps we just have this effect on some people. So our visits would pass with Flo in abject misery for the full hour and us lost for anything positive to say. The ward staff expressed surprise at the changes that came over her and they told us that she had been walking around freely for hours on end. When we came to collect her at four p.m yesterday she insisted that she couldn't walk and we had to get a wheelchair. In the past she has always been good on her feet.


This Jekyll and Hyde behavior continued as we left the ward - big smiles and huge hugs and kisses for the nursing staff together with 'You take care' at the top of her voice - followed by a constant litany of complaints en route to the car, during the drive and again when we walked her back to her room. On arrival in the room a carer welcomed her and the mask was switched again to huge hugs, laughter and smiles only to disappear the second that the carer left and the miserable mask returned.


I know that Alzheimer's is a terrible disease and it must be horrendous for Flo and every one else who suffers from it but there is certainly still something there in her brain that allows these huge changes in mood between the one that we get and the one that's on show to others. Perhaps the bad mood is the real Flo and she feels comfortable enough with us to show her true colours or perhaps we are being punished and seen as responsible for confining her to a home after other family members told her she would never be put in one. Whichever it is, it's extremely dispiriting as our frequent visits are tinged with a foreboding gloom that is difficult to feel positive about.

We do feel positive however about this evening when our friends Mark and Nita Jones from Workhouse Marketing in Ribchester are visiting and we're off to The Vincent in Southport for a bite to eat. That's the place where Wayne Rooney's meal at Christmas ended up costing him £250k. I hope it's a bit cheaper for us. Mark and Nita have cause to celebrate as their son Tom's The Whalley Wine Shop won the prestigious Independent Drinks Retailer Of The Year at the Off Licence News awards in London earlier this week - and well deserved it was too. It's a super little shop with a wonderful selection of fine wines, beers and spirits coupled with excellent advice and great service.


I'm busy preparing a talk on metal detecting for a local history society in the Yorkshire Dales on Wednesday. I hope that the snow holds off. One of the themes of my talk is how the public sees detector users and I think this advert just about sums it up.

No Time To Blog

This retirement lark is not all sitting around in carpet slippers twiddling your thumbs and waiting for the grim reaper you know. In fact this last couple of days has been so hectic I haven't had time to write this  blog and keep up my writing practice. It started with Fathers' Day on Sunday (great cards thanks kids) when we had a trip with friends to Hoghton Tower for the monthly Farmers' Market. Though billed as the largest in the North West it was not exactly enormous although what it lacked in quantity was more than made up for in quality with some outstanding local produce on display. Despite our healthy food regime the temptation of fine organic cheeses and home made macaroons was too much and we left with a bag full of goodies. 

We then went on to the super Freemasons at Wiswell and enjoyed a very fine lunch before driving to the excellent Whalley Wine Shop in Whalley (where else) and stocking up with a couple of super wines. It's great to see an independent specialist retailer thriving like this against stiff competition but you can't beat top quality and expertise.

Before we left home on Sunday I opened the fridge to find these. Oops. Marion had been to a party on Saturday night and she promised to provide some cakes and pastries which she duly did. Unfortunately these were hidden behind some eggs and got left behind so I hope the guests didn't think she'd been a bit stingy with just three boxes. We aren't eating too many calories at the moment so we returned to the hosts and, as they still had a full house, they were happy to take them off our hands.

It's farewell to Paul's season ticket today. Mine has already gone out on loan to a friend and another friend has put me in touch with someone who wants to take this one for the season. So no more trips to Anfield. No traffic jams. No worrying if the car will be in one piece when I get back to it. No standing up throughout the game. No crappy sausage rolls. No overpriced programmes. No having my ears bludgeoned with foul mouthed abuse. No kick offs at 5.15 p.m on Saturday for the benefit of TV. No sulky players who don't give a toss. God I'll really miss it.

Bit of a disaster on the metal detecting front this week. I went on Monday with a really nice bloke that I met on the internet (don't get the wrong idea). We drove an hour or so and got out of the car in the middle of nowhere with all the gear only for Fred (not his real name) to discover that he had forgotten the battery for his detector. Groan. However he did have with him an emergency battery pack. Hooray. But the batteries in it were flat. Groan again. Oh well there was a garage about five miles down the road so we were able to pack the car back up and go and buy some. Unfortunately to no avail as, apart from a few nice buttons and the usual shotgun cartridge cases and bits of junk, this coin was the only find of any interest. It's a Roman sestertius from around the first century but in such lousy condition that there's little hope of identifying it. It means that I can't write up the day's detecting and blog on it which is a real pity as I've increased the blog readership by hundreds when I've had something of interest to report. Oh well there's always next week.


Went to FACT in Liverpool yesterday but I've written enough today and I'll blog on the films (Point Blank and Potiche) tomorrow.

Here's a taster.