Time for a Pedicure.

Things go at their own pace in Ireland, normally slowly, last year we had asked one of our neighbours who keeps horses if he could recommend a farrier to us, 'no problem' he said, 'my horses and donkeys need their feet doing, I'll get him to do yours at the same time, maybe next week'. That was last November, we asked him several times when could we expect a visit, the reply was the standard 'probaly next week'.

This week our neighbour arrived to help get our donkeys secured in their stable, 'the farrier is due tomorrow' he says, and sure enough, the next day a charming Belgian guy turned up, he turned out to be a bit of a horse whisperer. Poppy and Pippa behaved beautifully even allowing Paddy, (strange name for someone from Belgium) to put on their head collars, once confined they allowed us to pet them and even took carrots from our hands, up until now they have been very standoffish with us, we thought that maybe now we could become friends with them., but no, once released, again they are back to being standoffish, they now know that we will not harm them, in fact humans are good but they still will not come close enough to be petted.

 We now have the phone number of 'Paddy the Farrier' so will be able to make direct contact with him, I'm sure if he says 'next week' that is when it will be, not sometime in the far distant future.





This week we had a nice surprise when we popped into Lidl, they had Organic lemons for sale, these are something we had never seen before in Ireland, neither had we seen them for sale in Spain, even though they are Spanish lemons. We bought a bag of them, four to a bag and had pancakes for our desert that evening. The taste was so different, a much sweeter and fresher flavour. Delicious.

We decided to go back the next day and buy more to make some lemon curd, clearly we were not the only people who had bought them, there was just one bag left, which was a pity as I had planned to make quite a bit of lemon curd being so swamped with eggs. I managed to get five jars out of the seven lemons and use ten of our eggs, organic butter from Tesco and fair trade sugar. This curd will stay fresh for a least a month, if we don't eat it all before hand, all that was needed to sample the curd was a fresh loaf of bread.

Spiders, love them or hate them they are quite fascinating things, at least I think so. this week we had a beauty turn up in the sunroom, I think it is a wolf spider although it was not the normal colour, it was black. Simon did not take too close a look at it, he is one of the hate them brigade.