More than just a shell...

This is the cottage where two of our local heroes live, namely the twins, a pair of mechanics who run our local village service station (village in this context being a nice suburb of a concrete commuter town; rather as if Miss Marple's St Mary Meade was a thousand yards from Croydon). Anyway, as well as running the garage, they live in a cottage next door that has two old petrol pumps for decoration, rather lovely old things that they light up at night. Truly pleasing to the eye.

Other highlights to the day:

Had an incident with a deep fat fryer that produced astonishing quantities of smoke. It was like being in the special effects department at Doctor Who foer a while.

Cooked a rather wonderful aubergine and tofu chilli.

Lovely chat with Big Brother who is starting an arts project in Warwick this week called (appropriately enough given the petrol theme) My Last Car . Good to catch up

Cleaned the daughter's bedroom - she is back tomorrow after five months in Australia and New Zealand. Went out and bought her new bedding. Nothing like a lovely clean bed when you have jet lag ...