Bank Holiday Weekends: Home Cooked Meals & Dog Walking

What a pleasure it is on those few Sunday evenings every year when you can actually do something safe in the knowledge that there is no work to be done on the following morning. I sit here at the computer in solitude, a few brief moments in a busy weekend. Music plays in another room and I can hear M and his brother pottering in the kitchen, snatches of conversation drifting along the corridor carried along as a spoken accent on top of Nick Cave's vocals.

I have spent the afternoon cooking, three 'generations' of women in the kitchen. Me, M's mother and M's grandmother. I helped to ice a cake, to make fresh pasta, long elegant strips of tagliatelle which were laid to dry on a teatowel in the afternoon sunshine and then helped bake a tower of profiteroles, from cooking the choux pastry to drizzling the chocolate over the creamed filled buns. I also chopped up a mountain of vegetables, peppers, corguettes, shallots, tomatoes and potatoes, to be roasted to eat alongside a fillet of beef.

This morning we went for a walk. The dog was initially a little bemused; six people do not usually accompany her for her morning walk up a large hillside and back. It was hard work, climbing up through the forest in my borrowed trainers (sandals and ugg boots were not deemed ideal footwear) and skinny jeans more at home in London than the countryside. But what a view. The forest soon gave way to hillside of grass ferns and heather and then opened out by the trig point where we stood and looked out over the Shropshire countryside towards the Welsh hills, momentarily distracted by the hang gliders floating on the thermals. It was busy at the summit though so we didn't pause for long, starting to wind our way down the path which, unsually, seemed rather more steep on the way down. We dropped back down into the forest through a path of waist height ferns and picked our way along a path littered with dry pine needles and small twigs, holding onto the trees for support as we passed, emerging finally at the bottom at the car park where we had left the car two hours previously.