Christmas shopping - for us.

For the annual ramblings, please scroll down 

to the post for 2 December

When we furnished the sitootery in 2008, we looked round for furniture dite for conservatories, and finding most offerings shoddy and badly upholstered, opted instead for a couple of sofas from Mr Kamprad's ubiquitous blue and yellow shop.  We went for loose covers in blue denim, piped in the backside of the same, and four years on, they have, predictably, faded.  Well, the winter fuel payment is in the bank, and I just won £25 on the premium bonds, so it was off to the IKEA at Lakeside this morning to get a new set of covers.  We'll think about putting them on tomorrow.  Stand by for a slightly jazzier sitootery.

Needless to say, we returned not only with loose covers, but also paper napkins, a couple of extension leads, a bag of frozen köttbullar, a couple of sachets of gräddsås and a box of pepperkakor.  Regulars will know that I'm a veteran IKEA shopper.  During a Bavarian episode, I went up to the the Eching shop to get some of the predictably missing parts for whatever I'd trekked out there a few days earlier to buy, only to be told that I was 45 minutes down the queue for IKEA's world renowned and spectacularly awful customer service.  Suggestion was that I go and grab a snack in the cafeteria.  Good marketing, eh?  Up I went, and said to the chef, ich hätte gerne die Köttbullarna, last word pronounced à la Suédoise.  I couldn't quite deal with the enthusiastic gush of Swedish that came back at me.  Oh, and the parts I lacked for the bookcase were those little metal studs that you shove into the uprights to support the shelves, which I asked for by describing their function, knowing not the German vocabularly therefor.  Nippel, brauchen Sie?  enquired the nice Bavarian lady, with a straighter and less blushing face than mine.  

Talking of Eching, there are nearby towns called Aching and Attaching, and sundry other perfectly honorable -ings that just happen to look startling to your average anglophone.  Remind me sometime to recite the litany of changes read out over the PA as you come into Stuttgart on the train.

Main impact of today: the amazing skies as we drove up through Kent and into Essex.  From the top of River Hill, the sky was a watercolourist's dream of duck-egg blue, ivory, coral and mauve.  On the way back south, we drove under a leaden sky with an angry orange slash across the horizon.  

The bird life changes constantly with the seasons.  Whereas we were seeing a lot of nuthatches, finches and tits a while ago, we see few small birds now, apart from robins and dunnocks.  A young male blackbird is much in evidence, but the biggest customers at Café Forges-L'Evêque are this year's woodpigeons and a bunch of jays.