Sunday 6 May 2012

Diamond Visits

By Wednesday 2nd May we are ready for our first ever house guest, Diamond, Mum's best buddy from Faversham. She flies into Knock Airport and Mum and Dad are delighted to do the airport run. In the UK these were always fairly arduous and involved the M25 motorway and other busy roads, plus every airport was at least an hour and a bit away, so you seemed to be tied up for at least 3 hours to do a run. The Roscommon house is a mere 22 minutes from Knock Airport along a beautiful twisty turny country road from the bridge just north of Lisacul, till it comes out on the N17 just by the airport itself. The airport is so tiny there are no problems parking, finding your way around or, if you're the flyer, no problems with queues, baggage reclaim etc. You can be out, person collected and dropped and back indoors within the hour. Diamond is an easy guest to 'entertain' and she seems delighted with the house we've "built", impressed by the warm, dry and light rooms. She's been following the build story on this blog and on Face Book anyway, so she's familiar with the horror stories we inherited and knows how much hard work we've put in. She says that the spare room bed in comfortable and she sleeps well, generally waking and descending the stairs as she hears Dad wrangling the fire in the stove into life. She is happy to be shown the delights of Castlerea including the Cattle Market. Mum and Dad take her in there out of curiosity themselves, wondering if there are any goats to be had, and we're all happy that no-one catches the auctioneer's eye and accidentally bids on any of the calves. The Auctioneer is one of those fast speaking ones as well as speaking in the Roscommon accent so that none of Mum, Dad or Diamond come out with any kind of clue as to how much the little calves were going for. Diamond, like 'our lot' is a dyed-in-the-wool carnivore but was mildly upset by the sight of tiny calves being hustled in and out of the ring, bought and sold in what seemed a rather clinical, cool manner. Castlerea was the Thursday. On the Friday the mission was to look round Ballaghaderreen, our 'other local town', smaller but just as interesting. From Balla-D they took a scenic drive out beyond Boyle up to Lough Key and Lough Arrow to see if they could find the location of Mum and Dad's Goat Keeping course for next Saturday. Forgetting the helpfully printed map, they got close but did not actually find "Harmony farm". The visit is a nice chance for Mum to explore the capabilities of the new kitchen, cooking up some good food for everyone, like the pork bellies and pears in perry (pear-cider) sauce shown here. She also bangs out a full Irish fried breakfast on Saturday, Diamond's last morning. We are delighted to find that the kitchen, which we'd been calling a 'morning kitchen' as the early morning sunlight floods in through the back door, as seen in the picture here of Coco sunbathing. However, as we got round to evening, it turns out that the sun sinks below the horizon also lined up with the 'back' windows of the kitchen, so that we get another flood of evening sunlight too! A kitchen for both ends of the day! Deefs.

No comments: