Ballymaloe House

Highlight of my week - a card from my husband and I think for the purposes of this blog, he'll be known as "your man" - well I am in Ireland and they say this all the time and I love it, anyway it was the cutest card and completely made my week, YAY.

Lazy morning because it really was so muck outside, grey and howling a gale but thankfully at least not raining, so I spent most of the morning with my book and then a group of us decided to go up to Ballymaloe House, the hotel which is about 2 miles from the school, for a bit of a squizz - such a pretty old building, covered in ivy and surrounded by gorgeous fields and gardens - you could smell wood fires inside and a group of distinguished elderly gentleman were "taking tea" in what could only be described as a drawing room.

Ballymaloe House

Being girls we of course were drawn like magnets into the Ballymaloe Shop where I could have done serious credit card damage, they've so many specialised kitchen gadgets and the most fabulous Christmas decorations - thankfully the memory of my significant contribution to SAA's profit margin has not yet dimmed and so instead of buying a teapot, which is what I normally buy everywhere I go, I settled for a tea cosy instead - it's a pig, don't you just love it!



Cosy pig



A group of us, all girls again, went into Midleton last night to watch "Eat Pray Love", not a movie that I thought your man would enjoy so a good one to watch here and it was pretty cool - Julia Roberts was fab, it was a bit confusing at the beginning and if you hadn't read the book I reckon you'd have been a bit lost but still good - the parts in Italy were by far my best, very reminiscent of what we're doing here at the moment, i.e. the "eat" part, mind you we might be moving onto praying quite soon at the rate we're going............