Cheese, Cake and Christmas

23 Replies

We went to Downtown at Grantham today. It’s a shop the size of an aircraft hanger with an attached garden centre. You can buy expensive furniture, expensive tat for Christmas and boring books . Unusually, you can still buy tools and seeds in the Garden Centre. Most local “Garden Centres” are big on giftware and a bit light on the gardening side of things. It attracts old people like a moth to a flame.

It isn’t really my natural habitat. It was OK when it used to do a lot of discounting and the book section was larger, but over the years it became ever more dull and we stopped going. When my sister suggested meeting at a halfway point it seemed a good idea.

We ended up spending four hours there – from elevenses to a late lunch. It started with tea and cake and ended with lasagne and chips. In the middle I bought a cheap diary, a few Christmas presents and sat around as the womenfolk shopped. At one point  a confused elderly gent tried to follow me into the disabled toilet. As I tried to pull the door shut he pulled it open. It was a bad bit of design – as my door opened it covered the door to the Gents and was a bit awkward from a social point of view.  I have checked for the etiquette of such a situation but there appears to be no recommended way of coping, so I merely pointed out his error and pointed him to the correct door.

Cropwell Bishop 

We went home via the creamery at Cropwell Bishop and bought Stilton for Christmas, plus a block of Red Leicester and some Christmas chutney. The picture is from pre-Lockdown days – the last time we went. It’s peculiar that you can’t produce Stilton in Stilton, because of the legal protection of the brand, but the Nottinghamshire based dairy is allowed to produce Red Leicester and Shropshire Blue.

We arrived home just as dark was falling, covered  the car windscreen in case of frost and settled down to watch TV and eat pizza.

We saw a perching buzzard, fieldfares and redwings an even a small flock of geese in a roadside field  (though we couldn’t be sure what species as we only saw them as shapes through a hedge), so it was quite a pleasant run.

Cropwell Bishop Creamery

23 thoughts on “Cheese, Cake and Christmas”

  2. Pingback: The Frozen Nozzle Problem | quercuscommunity

      5. Lavinia Ross

        I know of a friend who once went into a fitting room in a shop to try on a pair of pants. On the back door of the tiny fitting room was a large mirror, which he assumed was a two way mirror where some employee was behind the door observing him to make sure he was not shoplifting. He felt angered by being spied upon, so he thought, and inched closer to the door knob, suddenly flinging it open to catch the voyeur in the act. Instead, he found himself facing the large street level display window, where people were gathering to see why he was standing there in his underwear. To make matters worse, a small child pointed at him and exclaimed to his mother that the man had no pants on.

      1. derrickjknight

        Nor me. You may remember an excellent pub which served gravy and chips with steak and kidney pudding. Unfortunately it was sold to a chain which was supposed to be upmarket.

Leave a Reply