Settling Into Our New Home Town

We had to get up at six this morning. We'd ordered some things from John Lewis and they gave us a time slot of 7am to 12 noon. That's okay of you're living in the house but we had to walk from the cottage hence the early rising. I said that Next were very good the other day and John Lewis' delivery men were equally helpful and obliging - they phoned at 7 to tell us that they would arrive at 7.30 and they arrived bang on time, unwrapped the items and took away the packaging. We ordered a shelf unit for the kitchen diner, a chair for Marion's dressing table and (most importantly) a new telly for the kitchen. We've missed Sky in the last six months and will be glad when it is all connected up. Their engineer Gary phoned this evening to give us a two hour slot - more good customer service.

All on time, and exactly as ordered 

As we've now got almost another week before we can move into the house we decided to go a bit easier on the unpacking and confined ourselves to just the lounge today. After bit more box emptying, window cleaning and floor polishing we now have the lounge actually looking habitable. Only the pictures and mirror to go in now. 

We called it a day at one o'clock and decided to try and get to know the town a bit better. School was cancelled for some so we watched the kids tobogganing down the frozen slopes of the castle moat on a variety of home made sledges including a dust pan, a few trays and I'm sure I saw a roasting tin.

Marion entered the wintry spirit of things with a few well aimed snowballs.

The churchyard looked fabulous under a few inches of snow.

We want to use the town's facilities. There's no in point relocating to a place and then doing all your shopping at Waitrose or Tesco online and we're very keen to put money into the local economy as we want the town to thrive (that makes us sound like some sort of big investors but you know what I mean). We popped into the Lemon Tree Bistro for a quick bite to eat - very good. I made an appointment for a hair cut, we visited Olivia from William H Brown who sold us the house and then picked up some flowers from the florist, light bulbs from the hardware store and fruit from the green grocer - fantastic figs. There's a Co-Op supermarket and we will use it but we want to use the local, newsagent, chemist, butcher, baker (and everything else) as much as possible and will try to only buy from the supermarket what we can't get elsewhere in the town. A well deserved lie in beckons tomorrow.