Brrrr. I’ve pretty much hibernated this weekend just gone and it’s been lovely, work has been pretty full on again and it was nice to just potter about for a bit on Saturday. MOH's work is also full on and he was back at work on Saturday, which is never good, but that said it meant my pottering was pretty much uninterrupted.

By the time he arrived home I was already preparing dinner, a slow cooked lamb shank with cannellini beans. It’s funny how things turn out, all week I’d been saying I’d a few tins of cannellini beans and what could we have. Then I spied lamb shanks in the butchers, after popping in for a haggis for Friday evening, and so one of our favourite dinners was on the menu. I planned to put them in the freezer, but, those cannellini beans were nagging at me…

For a change MOH wasn’t out on his bike Sunday, although there was some time spent cleaning it, so just as it sleeted here we set out to the farmers market in Blackheath village. Our aim was to leave with cakes and it was mission well accomplished with a giant size millionaire shortbread and equally large bakewell slice. In the shock of it all, there were no photos, but they were both very nice.

While there some goats cheese, sourdough, squash and apples also made their way into our shopping bag, and as I’m sure Nigel Slater would agree, they had the making of some very nice meals. In fact the goats cheese and sourdough provided an impromptu lunch, and the squash went very well with a butter bean curry. Although I’ll apologise to anyone who knows MOH in real life, as not only has there been two lots of beans, there’s been hummus and grains in the past week for lunches. I think our fibre consumption must be way above the average, but of course I’m way too lazy to work it out for real.

In other news I’m on the seventh packet (of twelve) of that vitamin D boost, so I’m definitely on the home straight. Do I have more energy? I guess so, I’m definitely less exhausted, although as you’ll know I do like to pack it all in. My hips are generally aching less, so that’s good too, so I’m hopefully that by the time my next blood test comes around my body will have remembered how to hang onto its vitamin D. I’ve also made some diet changes in the past few weeks, not just the pulses, there’s been more nuts (to eat, although I’ve encountered a fair few too) and the kefir yogurt, which I actually quite like, and will keep on with.

Having finally completed my tax return - yay! - my other task for the weekend was to complete one of the three photo books I’d promised myself I would, to bring my year books up to date. That was organised me, but organised me failed to realise that I still have unedited photos from 2016, 2017 and 2018 - oops.

I had fewest photos to edit from 2017, or so I thought - I discovered a batch of unedited photos outside of iPhoto, which I’d clearly moved out at one point to free up space on my hard drive (please tell me it’s not just me that is constantly striving to find space on my laptop).

I’d also forgotten that 2017 was quite a big year for us, and that meant many more photos than usual. As well as our big birthdays and getting our garden ready for our big party, there was also a week in Dorset with MOH’s family, a week in Suffolk and a trip to Porto and the Douro Valley and much more besides. I almost made the deadline for completing my creation, but I realised that as I was halfway through the year with less than ten pages left, it was either going to need many more pages or some refinement. Actually I think the answer is a bit of both - it was a big year after all - and so I accepted defeat and bought an extension to my credit, and so my quest - and the race against the new deadline - to capture our 2017 in our year book continues.

But along the way I’ve rediscovered some great pictures, and some memories too. Unusually this has been a photo-free post up until now, but as I’ve been reliving 2017, here’s some of the photos I’ve uncovered this weekend, which may or may not have appeared on the blog before:

A SQUASH THAT DOESN’T LOOK AS IF IT DESERVES TO BE THIS BIG

THERE HAD TO BE SOME TILES, WHICH ARE EVERYWHERE

LOOK OUT FOR THESE IN A FUTURE LOO SERIES

AND FINALLY DECREPIT, BEAUTIFUL AND FULL OF CHARACTER!

That last caption is quite apt and made me smile when I realised its significance. It feels a bit like me at the moment, somewhere along the way of not doing anything very active at all I’ve tweaked my lower back. Having remembered it’s entirely possible to get a massage in Greenwich in my lunch hour, guess what I’m up to tomorrow?!