To Ipswich To The World's End

There was a change of plans today as our child minding stint in Rochester was postponed. So we found ourselves with time on our hands and, after doing a pile of ironing, we decided to head to Woodbridge and get some of the miniature paintings that we bought at Westhall on Sunday framed. 

It was pouring with rain - ideal for a trip to the cinema - so we looked for something light and decided on The World's End which was showing at Cineworld down the road in Ipswich. It felt like the world's end when we arrived at the multiplex and found it heaving. It seemed that half the parents in Ipswich had, like us, taken the rain as a prompt for a movie trip and it was bedlam in the foyer as they queued with their kids for tickets for Monsters University and Despicable Me . Fortunately buying online (well done Cineworld no booking fee plus discount for members), we bypassed the mayhem and went straight in to the screen.

We like Simon Pegg and Nick Frost and loved Shaun Of The Dead. Hot Fuzz was okay. The cast of The World's End includes Martin Freeman, Paddy Considine, Martin Freeman and Rosamund Pike which is a pretty strong line up by any measure. The screening was full but we were about forty years older than 99% of the crowd which perhaps suggests that we are not quite the target audience Simon Pegg and director Edgar Wright were aiming for. I would love to say that it was hilarious but I'm afraid that it was more "alright" than "great". 

Pegg plays his Peter Pan role as Gary King a forty year old looking to recreate a pub crawl that he and four friends failed to complete in their home town of Newton Haven when they were just eighteen. His friends now have respectable middle class lives but alcoholic King hasn't changed. He just wants to have fun and he persuades them to (reluctantly) join him. Like Shaun Of The Dead there's a lot of chasing and being chased as they discover that the inhabitants of Newton Haven are not quite what they seem. There are plenty of pretty corny jokes and some visual slapstick but I wouldn't go to the world's end to see it.

The weather forecast for tomorrow is good. Perhaps we'll be able to get out on our new bikes for the first time.

Before Midnight Before Teatime

The weather has remained glorious for another week. It hasn't exactly been cinema weather but we tend to get withdrawal symptoms when we go too long without our regular movie fix. There are quite a few films that we want to see on release at the moment  so we opted for the matinee at the shortest drive which is the Riverside in Woodbridge.

With the temperature on the dashboard reading at 29.5 C we left ourselves plenty of time to explore the riverside harbour. The famous tide mill looked fabulous beneath a cloudless sky.

And we walked along the river bank to the quayside cottage that Paul and Josephine rented a few years ago long before we had any plans to relocate here.

We bought a few bits and pieces for the kitchen in a fantastic kitchenware shop  (The Woodbridge Kitchen Company at 7 Thoroughfare) and then enjoyed an ice cream at The Riverside before the film. If you are in Suffolk and serious about cooking you should check the shop out - it had everything that we were looking for and plenty more besides. It's good to see an independent retailer holding its own on a high street.

The film, Before Midnight, is the third so far in Richard Linklater's series of films charting the love affair between Jake (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) who met almost two decades ago in Before Sunrise. In that film the pair roamed the streets of Vienna after meeting on a train. In Before Sunset we met up with them again and now we find them in Greece. Jake is seeing off his son by his failed marriage on the plane home to the USA after six weeks staying with him and Celine at the idyllic home of a famous novelist. 

After leaving the airport the couple chat briefly about a job that Celine has been offered. They are not married but have twin daughters. Celine wants to take the job in Paris; Jake is interested in spending more time with his son in Chicago. 

There are only five real scenes in the film: the airport , the drive back, a garden conversation,  a dinner party and then the scene that makes the film - the couple has been given a night in a swish hotel as a leaving gift. The hosts are to look after the twins and Jake and Celine are alone together for the remainder of the film. It echoes those earlier films as they set off from the dinner party villa and walk together past ancient ruins and via a chapel to the room. It is so well done that it almost feels as if it is one take. We've been together for longer than Jake and Celine and we both found the conversation very real. There's romance - "will you still love me when I'm 97" , and there's conflict - the job versus the son. And it all works beautifully. The couple have real magic together and the dialogue is funny, sometimes sexy, often romantic and always very very sharp. 

Although I felt that the garden and dinner party scenes somewhat padded out the film unnecessarily as perhaps one hors d'oeuvre too many, it is well worth waiting for the main course. It's an excellent finale. Do try and see it.   

By George She's Good!

When we started doing up a house five hundred miles away from where we were living, sorting out the interiors was always going to be something of a challenge. It's difficult enough when you know the area where you are living and have experience of local curtain makers, kitchen designers, flooring experts and decorators but when you are a stranger there's a huge risk of getting things wrong. In addition, whilst we like to think that we're pretty good at interior design ideas, we are not professionals and a good interior designer keeps abreast of all the latest developments and has experience of what will and won't work in a wide array of situations. Coordinating everything by ourselves from five hundred miles away would have been a nightmare.

So where to start looking? Our architect and builder are both great blokes but don't tend to work with interiors and I get the impression that they think interior design unnecessary so we had to turn to the old fallback of Google. "Interior Design Framlingham" was not going to turn up a wide choice so we searched "Interior Design Woodbridge". Woodbridge is an upmarket little town and a number of designers came up in the results. We checked them all but one stood out head and shoulders above all the rest - "By George Interiors And Lighting Design". The website ( click here) was easy to navigate, the photos of design projects were stunning and we got a good feel for the business.

So we made an appointment to meet the proprietor Jemima Withey. When we turned up at her studio in our filthy Prius piled high to the roof with all our worldly goods and looking like a couple of tramps we felt like turning around and driving away; her property looked to have come straight from a Sunday Supplement  (and indeed featured in a two page spread in one a few weeks later) and our little house was going to be too small a project. Nothing could be further from the truth. Jemima was charming and passed no comment on our heap of a car sullying her driveway. She ran through her services and we told her what we were planning. She sent us a quote and I made a feeble attempt at negotiating a discount which was declined in a very professional and confident manner that cemented our decision to use her business.

The project snowballed. From an initial agreement to design the interior colour scheme downstairs, we added our bedroom and dressing room, the kitchen and dining area and both bathrooms plus the lighting for most of those areas. And what a great choice it turned out to be. 

Jemima is a highly professional interior designer who listens carefully to what you like and steers you in the direction of what will work. She comes up with enough alternatives to make you feel that you have been involved in the design without overburdening you with too many to make a decision. She thinks about costs and works to your budget. She knows all the people you might need to carry out the work and liaises with them to do it. She keeps you in the picture all the time and does things when she says she will and her contractors turn up on time and work to the highest standard and clean up after themselves. And what's more, she has a great sense of humour and a very upbeat personality (the perfect foil for Marion's pessimism). Her ideas for us were simple but classic styles and we think that the results speak for themselves. We could not be more pleased with the job that she did for us and can't recommend her highly enough. 

Here are the mood boards that Jemima came up with as we developed the project.

And here are some of the finished results. The photos were only taken on my phone and don't really do justice to Jemima's work.

Fabulous curtain ideas.

A Kitchen That Both Looks Great And Is Perfectly Lit

Neutral Colours And Perfect Lighting For The Dining Area 

A Lounge That Is Stylish But Homely

More Curtain Ideas 

A Perfect En Suite Shower Room

Making The Very Most Of A Small Master Bedroom

Luxurious Handmade Cushions

If you are planning interior design or lighting design in London or East Anglia you really don't need to look anywhere else.

The Hunt Is On

We're in Suffolk in search of our retirement Shangri La. At the moment we're trying to narrow down our hunt by finding the town/village of our dreams before taking the plunge and going into the nitty gritty of finding an actual property. I feel a bit like Goldilocks at the moment as we drive to a village, park the car, buy something from a local shop and walk along the high street - Debenham 'This one's too small' we both say - Woodbridge 'and this one's too big' before we get to Framlingham (pictured) - ' but this one's just right.'

We did some very thorough research before we set off and we booked a cottage in Framlingham as , to say in that cringe inducing phrase beloved of every house hunter on Location Location, it seemed to "tick all the boxes". There's a small but very pleasant market square, a fabulous castle, three or four nice pubs, good local shops and a few decent cafes. What's more, everyone seems to be extremely friendly (Marion just pointed out that so were the locals in The Wicker Man). Just outside the village we saw a road sign that read "SUPERSTORE". When we were in the small (well maybe medium) CO-OP I asked the cashier where the superstore was. "This is it" she said and added 'Well you are in Suffolk"

Framlingham Castle

Framlingham Castle

Having crossed Debenham, Woodbridge and Wickham Market off our list yesterday, today we travelled down the road to Aldeburgh. It's a beautiful little seaside village and, in today's strong winter sunshine, it dazzled like a gem against a gentle sea`. Despite being mid February, the village was heaving and most car park spaces were full by noon. And it was easy to appreciate the attraction; a glorious shingle beach, plenty of shops and even more places to eat and drink; it reminded us a bit of our other favourite place - St Andrews.

Like much of Suffolk, the place is littered with historic buildings like this fabulous old moot hall which is still in use today as a civil building.

Opposite the moot hall is a fabulous old pub called The Mill. Whereas many of the other watering holes were done up very trendily to attract the weekending London set, this pub, popular with the local fishermen and lifeboat crew is very much a traditional local. We indulged ourselves and threw our customary dieting caution to the wind with an order of fish and chips. The landlord said that if the fish was any fresher it would be swimming and I can honestly say it was the best fish and chips I can ever remember eating. The village is very big on fish and all along the sea front were kiosks selling the weekend's catch. We could easily see ourselves settling in Aldeburgh but there is a huge housing premium to pay for living in a coastal spot that's popular with Londoners and we reckon that's as much as 30%. Is it worth it? We aren't convinced.

Tomorrow the hunt moves about twenty-five miles inland to Lavenham. This vilage is another box ticker. I'll let you know how we get on.