Boxes, boxes everywhere

What a mess!

We'd slept the night with the mattress on the bedroom floor but today was bed assembly day. Ahh .. that's better. Had to be rather careful though with the lower ceilings and those long pieces of MDF.

Next big task, after breakfast of course, was to clear enough stuff from the lounge so that we could actually find a place to spread a handkerchief and perhaps, more to the point, assemble the sofabed. I have a Knole sofa which is a little curious but does make you feel very snug with the sides up and here you can see it assembled and with Chris next to it emptying boxes of books onto the bookshelf.

The plan is to sleep on the sofabed when the fire is going at the end of the night rather than sloping off to a chilly bedroom when we've already got snug in the cosy lounge. I'll let you know ...

Later that night it was off for a well earned easy evening with food and fun supplied. In other words, we went to the pub! Our little village, like so many others in England no longer has any of its original shops but does still have a church and two pubs and conveniently our cottage is about halfway between both of them but it was The Chequers to which we went tonight.

I had been to the pub when visiting Chris earlier in the year but now it was my local. It's a pub I'd happily visit even if I had to travel several miles so it's a real bonus having it on our doorstep (Hmmm - is that a bonus?). Tonight it was cosy and inviting, packed with people, a log fire burning in a large metal box fire with folding doors. We settled down with our beers after ordering some food and shortly afterwards joined in the evening's pub quiz which happens every Thursday night. We named our team as "The Two Poppadums" as the barmaid said that she'd charge the cost of the quiz to our tab as two poppadums! If it works for them ...

So, there I was after the first full day in my new home in a great pub with a roaring fire, good beer and food and the most beautiful and gorgeous man at my side. Happy indeed.

The only downer of the evening was not winning the quiz, but there's always next time. We could of course have been knocked off kilter by the jokes of Phil the landlord. I have a couple here taken from the seemingly never ending stream of them from his iPhone (Health warning - this is not Brighton and the Politically Correct approach has not yet taken hold here. Yet):

An Irish man has a new girlfriend and he's in her bedroom looking through her clothes drawers and find a nurse's outfit, a  policewoman's outfit and a school mistress's outfit. Shocked, he goes downstairs and storms out of the house saying to her as he leaves "If you can't hold down a job then I'm not interested!"

Did you hear about the man who put helium in his blow up doll so that it plays hard to get?

On these edifying thoughts I'll leave you for now...