Week 3 - Do I really drink that much?

So, I’m a bit behind with writing my update this week, as I went down south to visit my Mum and help her with wedding decisions, including the all-important dress (she’s getting married in April next year.)

It was again a busy week for the challenge, although I can feel some of the initial enthusiasm wearing off with some of the more difficult items.
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The last week started with Matt’s parent’s coming to visit for the weekend. Despite the fact that neither of them drink, this seems to coincide with a marked intake in my alcohol consumption! Either that, or I have a belief that I don’t really drink that much and I’m only realising since I’ve been tracking it on the 30 things for 30 spreadsheet. This week I’ve had: winter Pimms (blackberry and elderflower flavour with lemonade); some rosé wine (white zinfandel); prosecco with strawberry syrup (Zizzi’s version of a strawberry Bellini I think); Baileys (on ice); mulled wine (well, its rude not to at an outdoor light show at the Royal Botanic Gardens) and finally some summer Pimms (in an Indian restaurant and they didn’t have anything else I fancied.) Before you become worried that maybe I have a problem, may I just clarify that each of these was on a different day of the week, was only one (sometimes two….) glasses and is partly fuelled by my enthusiasm on this particular challenge item! This brings my total ‘different alcoholic drinks tried’ to 7 out of 30. The challenge will now get harder as I have already had my most commonly consumed alcoholic beverages, so will need to start getting more adventurous with a wider range!

I also visited a couple of restaurants as mentioned above; Zizzi’s with Matt’s parents, where I had a spectacular personal cheese fondue and also a delicious chocolate bread pudding dessert and also my Mum’s local Indian restaurant in Ely, near Cambridge called Basmati Rice. Here, we learnt 2 different ways of folding napkins after my Mum was caught staring intently at the waiter as he laid the table next to us, and also learnt about the history of relations between India, Bangladesh and Pakistan.
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As well as going out for a meal, I also put my culinary skills to good use for Matt’s parents, making a new soup (Nigella’s Butternut Squash and Sweet Potato) and also a new recipe: Nigella’s mushroom and potato gratin. I also baked my first cake of the challenge, Nigella’s Gluten Free Brownie. Its only when you make cakes from scratch that you realise just quite how fattening they are as the only ingredients of this brownie were chocolate, butter, sugar, eggs and nuts! I had already bought the ingredients for all of these before I fell out with her Rapid Ragu recipe last week. The soup was ok, nothing special, the mushroom and potato gratin would have benefited from including cheese in the recipe, but I did enjoy the brownies, warm from the oven with a hot chocolate sauce. 

​The weekend with Matt’s parents was rather chilled, and we spent a lot of time sat around on the sofa, drinking tea and chatting. This also gave me the opportunity to complete 2 colouring pictures in my new ‘Adult Colouring Book’, (I had to double check inside for the nature of the pictures…..) I have come to discover that colouring these pictures is an incredibly time consuming business, although quite satisfying and extremely addictive (on both nights that his parents were here, I was last to bed by at least an hour after staying up ‘just to finish this section.’) It’s a far more worthwhile thing to do than simply vegging in front of the telly though. 

I also did my first random act of kindness. I have been finding it hard to do these, or at least work out what counts, as I find I’m a generally helpful person in terms of holding doors open and helping out ladies cross the street. So I’ve decided that qualifying acts will be conscious decisions to do an act, something I would normally walk on past or ignore, and something that not your normal, polite, well-meaning person would do as a matter of course. The first one was when I was walking home from town under a huge black cloud and saw a bike chained up to a lamppost with one of those tarpaulin bike covers flapping around in the wind. I clocked it, walked about 5 metres past it before deciding that actually the nice thing to do would be to reattach it properly to the bike to stop it getting soaked in the inevitably downpour that happened shortly afterwards. Hopefully the owner had a dry backside the next time they came to cycle somewhere! I was only on the receiving end of not one, but two, random acts of kindness on the train to my mums. Firstly, I really wanted a sausage sandwich and asked the lady in the restaurant if they had anything other than the advertised bacon. She initially said no, but then disappeared for a minute, and came back from first class with their left-over sausages from their breakfast service and cooked me one especially. Secondly, the man sat opposite me gave me a chocolate bar and a little Lindt bunny because ‘chocolate makes people smile.’ He was right.
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By way of update from last week, I received a letter back from my Gran saying how much she’d enjoyed receiving a non-birthday card and with 3 pages of updated from the happenings in Crickhowell.

Finally this week saw another new film: The Lady in the Van – basically an excuse to watch Maggie Smith being short with people now that Downtown Abbey has finished! And finally I said ‘yes’ to another opportunity when my Mum invited me to a Cribbage night at her local golf club. I learnt to play Cribbage with my Grandma when I was young but haven’t really played it since, and a cards evening with a bunch of retired strangers is not normally my idea of fun, but after a quick refresher lesson, I was speaking the lingo (“fifteen two, fifteen four and one for his knob”) and thoroughly enjoying myself!
That’s about it for this week. My tips from this week are:

1. Keep track of how much alcohol you drink, it’s probably more than you think! (although keeping track of it, in this instance, is probably making me drink more!)
2. Random acts of kindness come around. Don’t do them just for this reason but enjoy it as a nice consequence.
3. Playing cards with a bunch of seniors is more exciting than you think.