Chocolate or not - that is the question...

What a glorious morning. The sun is shining after a grey misty start following last night's much needed rain. Everywhere is damp with the smell of autumn in the air. The picture to the left is of the magnificent chestnut tree in the grounds of Stow Hall in Norfolk and it doesn't do it justice. Pictured last week on our visit, it was huge and certainly centuries old. I wonder what scenes it has witnessed over the years? Click the picture to enlarge it.

I finally got through to Citibank on Friday morning and spoke to a nervous young woman who finally activated my account so now I can actually deposit a couple of quid to kick it off. No more hanging about on the phone waiting for paint to dry.

An interesting fact on BBC News Online Magazine site today - always good for a leisurely read - about our consumption of chocolate. Apparently, as a nation, we consume £57 worth of chocolate each through the year which I found shocking at first until I thought about it. The Swiss however, those hardy mountain dwelling lederhosen wearing lot each spent £111 each per year on chocolate. I suppose the cost of chocolate these days, a bar a week at a quid doesn't seem unreasonable. I remember a news item saying that if you eat chocolate with red wine it does you good.

Sounds okay to me except I am not a chocolate lover at all, it's never really appealed to me. I don't mind the dark plain chocolate. When I was a kid, my mother's treat was to have a small thin bar of Bourneville which if I recollect correctly was very expensive at the time. She also liked plain Bounty bars with the coconut inside . The ultimate was to have a plain Walnut Whip; bite the walnut off the top with the top half inch of chocolate then get your tongue inside and lick out the white marshmallowy stuff, mmmmmmmmmm. Disgustingly decadent.

A seed catalogue from Suttons has arrived this morning (the post arrived at 9.30 am - unheard of in recent years, it's never here before 11.30 am) and it's a veritable delight of colour, new plants, vegetables to die for and very nicely presented. I shall pore over that this weekend and try not to spend a fortune bearing in mind my idea is not to have flowers next year apart from the odd basket, rather concentrate on showy shrubs that the squirrels can neither eat or dig up.

Despite my knee which has been playing up these last few weeks, I am going to do some gentle walking (no hills today) on the treadmill, make some phone calls and catch up with friends and settle down to a leisurely Saturday afternoon and perhaps read a book.

I play golf rarely and badly, but as it's the weekend, a golf story is in order.

St Peter and God were playing golf. St Peter teed off on the first hole and played a beautiful drive 300 yards right down the centre of the fairway. Then it was God's turn. He hit a terrible shot off the tee, sliced over towards the trees and the rough. Amazingly, his ball bounced off a tree into the hands of a waiting squirrel who raced across the rough grass until it was picked up by a falcon in its talons who flew off with it until it was over the green and the squirrel dropped the ball directly into the hole for a hole in one.
St Peter turned to God and said, "Okay, are we gonna play golf or piss about?"

Chat soon

Ta-ra!