Jennieworld Today

Well, I’m not exactly a bandit, but (hopefully!) just for this weekend I am one armed! I pulled a muscle in my shoulder on Friday, so I’m trying to restrict it’s movement as much as possible. Isn’t it funny how much we rely on every part of our bodies, and yet until something goes wrong we take everything so blissfully for granted! I had big plans for sorting out my back border and clearing out my bedroom today which have had to be put on hold. Oh well, not to worry.

We went to the Riverside market in Cardiff today for the first time. It was so much more varied than we expected, and we’ll definitely go back again soon. It’s on every Sunday from 10 until 2, so no need to get up disgustingly early! We bought a nice loaf, sun-dried tomato foccacia, cheese scones, lemon curd tarts, two small pieces of cheese and two spicy vegetable calzone, the latter we ate for lunch. The plan is, I think, to have a high tea style meal instead of our normal Sunday dinner, at which we’ll enjoy bits of all the other things we bought.

The weather has been glorious today, after we were promised storms and lightning. Maybe that will come later. Hopefully I’ll manage to clear my border first so that in the next dry spell I can plant it up. I’ll trust to luck that the last frost has been, as I really want to plant the sweet peas I bought last week. We also have sunflower seeds for my younger son to plant, which he’s looking forward to doing.

This post has taken about twice as long as usual, with far more typing errors than I would normally make. I’m really looking forward to normal shoulder use returning next week!

On Wednesday evening my husband and I had a rare night out together to go to a recital by Catrin Finch, fast becoming the most famous harpist of her generation. Actually, I couldn’t name that many harpists, so for all I know she could be already there! Although I’m biased (she went to the same school as me) a lot of people whole-heartedly agree with me about her talent.

The concert was fantastic. It featured a jazzier programme than you might expect from a harpist, but I think that this regeneration of the harp’s image is a large part of what she is hoping to achieve with her career. I love Jazz and swing music, so the concert was right up my street. She had a couple of co-performers with her, including a fantastic clarinettist called Rhys Taylor whose performance I also thoroughly enjoyed. All in all I had a really good evening, and it has even inspired me to dig out my old trumpet once more and search for some new music on the internet!

I don’t expect that anyone I went to school with would stumble across my blog accidentally, especially as I was known to schoolfriends by my maiden name of Jennie Williams and so therefore my name now would only be known by a couple of them. However, I’m going to set up another page on the website so that if anyone who went to Aberaeron Comprehensive School (or Ysgol Gyfun Aberaeron) at roughly the same time as me does stop by, they can leave me (polite!) messages. I’m not expecting any responses, as my blog doesn’t generate the volume of traffic needed, but I might just get lucky!

p.s. You can find out more about Catrin Finch by visiting her website at www.catrinfinch.com. There’s also lots of news stories on the BBC website, and at www.icwales.co.uk. I really would recommend a visit to one of her concerts if you get the chance. She also has cds for sale, one of which I own, although I’m hoping that someone will take the hint and get me the one with her big band, CF47, for my birthday!

I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned before, but my boys have their birthdays 17 days apart (very bad timing) and so this month has been my cake creating month! Firstly, my older son chose this pirate treasure chest cake.

He went through my Jane Asher book and decided that this was the perfect cake for him. I had to travel a fair distance to get all the bits and pieces to make it, but the look on his face when he got up on his birthday morning and saw the cake made it all worth while.

As I have said, seventeen days later and it was his brother’s turn. Between the pirate birthday cake and the chocolate easter cake which we made, I had had enough of cake by this point! However, our littlest couldn’t be left out, so I did him a ’surprise’ cake. He had been dithering between a superman cake, a spiderman or a tardis (Dr Who) cake, but in the end I managed to persuade him that a surprise would be nicer! I really couldn’t face the thought of trying to draw spiderman or the superman logo in icing this year!

So this is how the surprise for the second birthday worked out. A candy cottage, with a chocolate fudge cake hidden under all the chocolate finger biscuits and other sweeties. I used matchmakers for the roof, and stacked up chocolate drops for the chimney. I wasn’t quite so happy with this cake as I was with the treasure chest, maybe because I had no picture to copy and was working from my own imagination. However, my boy was more than happy with it, and once my family heard that I was a little disappointed with how it had turned out, they very obligingly helped to make it disappear extraordinarily quickly!

Of course, all this cake has done my diet no good. There were sweets left, of which I took two boxes to my good friend’s house as her whole family are very slim and really do enjoy their chocolate biscuits. At least this is now all over for another year. There’s another good reason to stop at two children - there would definitely be more shop bought cakes if I had any more birthdays to cater!

On Sunday night I watched a programme on Channel 4 about two journalists trying to get down to a UK size 2. It was quite terrifying to watch the lengths to which they had to go to achieve this, and in fact one of the journalists was stopped a week before the end of the experiment as it appeared that she was developing an eating disorder. The other journalist however managed to fit into a pair of size 2 jeans, which is apparently the size of the average six year old girl. I really was disturbed while watching this, especially as, although the “successful” journalist appeared to be displeased with the experiment while it was in progress, at the end she seemed quite happy to me to be fitting into these ridiculously tiny jeans.

Now I’ve been on diets on and off since the birth of my second child, seom with better results than others, and I can genuinely say that I’d never want to get down to a size 2. However, while I think I can claim to be quite a sensible young lady, I have to admit that some of the extreme diets which the two journalists followed did appeal to some less sensible part of my brain. Now if I can be tempted, however marginally, after watching this programme, I’m damn sure that other people will be too. And that’s the worrying thing. I haven’t been able to get the programme out of my mind since watching it. I felt guilty each time that I ate anything yesterday - how daft is that? It’s almost like an eating disorder by association! Anyway, don’t worry as I’ll be sticking to my healthy eating and regular exercise routine. I’m far too lazy and not disciplined enough to do any of these extreme diets anyway, although I can really see why people would do them.