h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

This is the final theme for NaJoPoMo, so you'll only have three threads to keep up with .

We live on an estate in the Lothians, that's South East Scotland. I grew up on a certain sort of estate, a housing estate where the children hung around outside and sometimes burnt things. Cars. That sort of thing.

This is an entirely different sort of estate. It's a country estate. There's a large house (The Big House) owned by The LandLord, the landlord is an actual Lord. The house is a large stately home and we live in one of the cottages in the grounds. Originally it would be an estate workers cottage. We have one neighbour, and then it's the Big House which is about a mile away. A lot of our neighbours are still estate workers, and one of them who is in her 90s has lived on the estate all her life and worked there since she was 14. I am a bit socialist, so I have to think of it as a reserve for aristocrats to practice their ancient customs for the benefit of tourists.

I never want to go back to the City, and I find the idea of living with so many people around me quite intimidating. Though living someone a bit more remote means less privacy, not more. Although we only have one neighbour we are always aware of whether she is out or in, and if she wasn't around for a few days we'd wonder why. We tell each other if we are going away. We take care of each others pets, and have keys to each others houses.

Tonight was the firework party at The Big House. As tenants of The Estate we got free tickets, though most people had to pay to come in. It's quiet an event. Our house is behind the cordon so we had to take our residents pass to get out at lunchtime. It's quite an event with a bonfire, some rides for the children and a DJ playing bad pop music. We'd invited a friend to come over and join us for a meal after the fireworks. It was a big enough event to be worth the drive over from Glasgow.

J is a consultant now. She has been for a few years. I find the idea of having friends who are consultants a bit intimidating. To me consultants are god-like creatures with higher powers. Although I only have four more years of training before I am one myself. If I hadn't ed about doing research I would have been one in 2014. Now it's going to be 2017, which seems far further away. Thankfully. Having a chat with a human who not only is a consultant, but refers to other consultants as girls ("Yeah there's this girl who does our interventional cardiology, she's very good, does aortic valve replacements without surgery!") We met her outside The House and watched the fireworks. They were excellent! Ooh Purple, Ooh pink, and so on. Some which seemed to send Catherine wheels into the sky, some of them exploded into smiley faces in the sky. I love fireworks, I always have done.

Afterwards she came back to ours for a meal and a long gossip about who was doing what, with whom, and who knows about it. The usual sort of conversation. I had made some scones and Ben had made baked potato and veg chilli.

Now to polish table 1 of my paper from hell a bit...

[Amy P]

The estate sounds lovely.
You have such a full life.

Have you always run at this speed?
Does it come naturally or is this the big push for a decade or two?

Thank you!

The estate is lovely. In a way it's wrong that one man owns so much. But we couldn't afford to buy our cottage, so actually it makes country living affordable. I get bored easily so I tend to over comit myself.

It really is a lovely cottage!

reddit. biggrin>

We made our Christmas Pudding this weekend. It's become a little tradition. We spent our first married Christmas in this house, and we decided to make a pudding. Ben has made one every year, but this is the first time I've made one. THe first one we made we did properly round in pudding clothes, the second time we used basins, and this year we're using basin again.

We have been planning it for weeks. We found a vegan recipe off the internet, carefully planned everything. Spent a small fortune on the right sorts of dried fruit and nutes and laced it with Brady. We mixed it together in our biggest pudding basin. Tomorrow we will boil it for 8 hours, and by Christmas it will be pudding.

All for something we could have brought at a store for less than £5. I love it, it reminds me we are a family in ourselves, although there is only two of us. Although we are spending Christmas at my brothers, we have our own little traditions, and we always make pudding. We also both love Christmas Pudding....

Awww - that's a nice tradition.

[Amy P]

That is warming. Mr Vip and I don't, but that's because neither of us like Christmas pudding. On the plus side Luke appears to like Brussels sprouts, so he can eat then with my dad, the only other sprout eater in my family!

I guess I'll now have to read the Entry about Christmas Pudding. I don't really know what it is.

By the way, you could help us: as one of todays announcements says we need illustrations for old Entries and as far as I remember one of them was about christmas pudding.

It was the Annual Christmas Fair at the Big House this weekend. The house was given over to stall holders from independent local businesses selling their wares.

We arranged to take S, our friend who is American and hadn't been in a stately home before. She found the idea of having a Landlord who was actually a Lord totally amazing, but was rather stunned that he had a vote in the House of Lords until just a few years ago. She loved the stalls but also kept looking at the tapestries hidden by the stalls, and the clocks just peeping through and wondering how old they were. Ben is sick to death of stately homes and I'll admit to being a bit of a geek, so the idea of having a buddy to drag around stately homes is a good idea.

The stalls were much the same as last year, expensive handmade products that the country-life readers of Edinburgh enjoy buying. Lots of handmade soaps, things hand crafted from driftwood, hand printed cards, a stall selling alpaca wool products (does anyone make a profit from alpacas or is it just hobby farmers making wool for hobby crafters to sell in hobby shops), the hand crafted whisky people, and those nice people that sell Rhubarb Rum on the Royal mile, and lots of preserves. Ben brought a hat from the millianer, we brought a Llama wool hoody for the nephew to be (it's so cute), S brought a Yak Wool Scarf, and chocolate.

Aferwards we meet a friend from the Humanist society and her mother who we invited around for tea and scones. I quickly whizzed up some Christmas scones, using the left over dried fruit from the pudding and allspice. Both ladies of Edinburgh made approving noises.

Rhubarb rum? Sounds intriguing!

People make money from Alpaca in Peru, Z.

They sell the wool to tourists in the form of jumpers, and eat the bit underneath the wool. Not sure about the milk.

sprout

Alpaca wool is very popular with knitters either alone or blended with other fibers. Lots of people make a living producing wool which is used by knitters, crocheters, weavers and other fiber artists.

Oo, when Flat Abby (eventually) gets there, maybe you could give her a tour of the Stately Home?