In my blog entry on the first day of this year, I said that all I wanted out of 2013
was for it to be uneventful. No deaths,
major illnesses, job changes, property sales, house moves or any other
significant life events. I'm delighted to report success. We just
settled in to our home, enjoyed our friends and had some lovely holidays.
The biggest life news was
the arrival of baby Bruno.
Official Kennel Club name Captain Brunelleschi. An adorable, very smart but very
energetic cavalier King Charles spaniel who’s chewed a lot of things he should
not have. We love him anyway. Brother Datchet tolerates him, though
insists on stealing any chew toy he’s given. (Exacerbating the tendency to chew illicit items.)
On the job front, my employer and role hasn’t changed but my boss has, making things more fun and relevant than they’ve been in a while. I try never to write about anything so mundane as work on this blog, but I do have every intent of doing more blogging on marketing topics in the New Year. Those of you who are interested can follow me at
Even an uneventful year
for us is filled with travel, of course.
We discovered Malta for a long weekend around Valentine’s Day, where
I got a much-needed shot of sun and sea. Easter brought our Franco-Italian road trip, with wine
tasting through Burgundy and my husband’s introduction to Tuscany.
Summer holiday saw Piers suffering a
family-, baseball-, country music-, bbq-drenched July 4th in St.
Louis before recovering with sophisticated culture in Chicago. (Where I got to catch up with my Northwestern University friends and introduce them to Piers.) My annual girls’ trip with Lisa and Hillary found us exploring Iceland. In November,
Piers joined me at the end of a business trip in Barcelona for fine food and
fantastic architecture. All trips
covered, as ever, in earlier entries on this blog.
Banishing the adjective
“new” from our home has been a priority of the year. My proudest accomplishment
is transforming the garden from a featureless strip of new-laid turf to a
terraced space with cascading water feature, herbaceous borders, raised brick
herb beds and latticed pergolas in just one season. Now, the plants just need to grow. Inside, picture framing, wallpaper and curtains are making
certain rooms … particularly our bedroom, the dining room and my office …
feel “finished”.
Life in England continues
to offer a moving feast of culture.
Our opera schedule took in The
Mikado at the ENO; Parsifal
broadcast from the Met; Don Carlo and
Carmen live at the Royal Opera House
and The Sicilian Vespers broadcast
from there; and La Boheme at
Longborough Festival Opera (where we became patrons this year). I went a bit more populist with The Book of Mormon and Wicked in London’s West End. The V&A’s blockbuster movie costume
exhibition wasn’t as good as expected and the Manet show at the Royal Academy
left me cold, but the National Portrait Gallery’s show on Prince Henry
Stuart impressed and the British Museum’s Pompeii exhibit was the show of the
year. The Highclere battle proms and
Chelsea Flower Show were English summer classics made better by our unusually
warm and sunny summer. Again, you can read all about these in past entries.
And when it comes to
proper feasting … we cooked up a storm this year, giving seven formal dinner
parties, a handful of casual summer barbecues and one large holiday blow-out. We were endlessly inspired by dining
out, of course. In addition to all
those lovely meals while travelling, highlights at home included the
Michelin-starred glories of The Ledbury, Gordon Ramsay’s Hospital Road
Restaurant and L’Ortolan. But
we’re almost as excited about the fact that our local, the Four Horseshoes, has
a new chef who's showing some magnificent potential.
All the culture, travel,
socialising and fine dining is great, but it’s all icing atop the simple cake
of cooking dinner in our own kitchen and then settling onto our couch with the
dogs for a quiet night of TV. And,
of course, the fact that we have no health news worth reporting. We are blessed.
We hope you are,
too. Best wishes for the holiday
season and for the year ahead. I hope you'll continue to drop by the blog in 2014, when I'll be introducing a few changes to liven things up.
No comments:
Post a Comment