Tempting Fate

I suppose I was tempting fate by gushing about the glorious weather here in St Andrews so much on the blog last week; all good things come to and end and we awoke to a flooded caravan site on Friday morning after a night of constant torrential rain. It was so heavy that a house in a nearby village collapsed after its foundations were washed away by the torrent. Trust me to choose to have the car valeted a few days earlier - what a waste of £65 that was - the car now has a mud rather than wax sheen.

It has dried up a little now although when I went out with the detector in a new field yesterday the mud immediately went up to the top of my wellies and I had to beat a speedy retreat and find an alternative field. Like most detector users I am smiling through gritted teeth at today's news of the novice searcher who found no less than 159 gold Roman coins on his first outing with his new detector - excuse me while I wipe away the tears - as I write about the half dozen buttons that I managed to unearth yesterday. To be honest, good luck to him. He's unlikely to ever find anything like that again while I can still go out with high hopes on every trip. 

We managed a cinema trip to Dundee today. We saw the excellent "Ruby Sparks" an offbeat romantic comedy about a young novelist struggling to live up to the exceptional first novel that has earned him a fortune. Directed by husband and wife Jonathan Drayton and Valerie Faris who sprang to attention with the wonderful "Little Miss Sunshine", this quirky film has plenty of humour and charm. Author Calvin overcomes his writers' block when he conjures up and writes the character of Ruby who comes to life in his mind so much that she does just that - comes to life. Mad, I know, but it somehow works and was a very pleasant bit of escapism for a wet Tuesday afternoon.

Although we gave up on the fasting diet we both still need to lose weight after the lack of gym visits in the three months that we've been living in the caravan. We've been wracking our brains and reading what the Saturday supplements say in an attempt to find a suitable diet and we've come to the conclusion that it's simply a matter of eating healthy food like this delicious butter bean and sweet potato stew and, sadly, cutting out alcohol. A week since we started I've managed to lose quite a bit although I'm not sure how much longer we want to go without a glass of wine.

Our interior designer Jemima's schemes for the two bathrooms and the lounge arrived today. She's an excellent interior designer and everything coordinates beautifully. When we've moved in I hope to be able to write a gushing blog as a testimonial but we better see the end results first. No more tempting fate.