No sign of rain or snow this morning; instead, we woke up to the sun shining on one of those gorgeous winter days where everything is crisp and clear and clean.

We took a walk to the Castle grounds today - a place which I'm embarrassed to admit we hadn't visited before, even though we've lived here five months and it's only ten minutes walk from our front door.





Seems like a nice spot for a picnic in the summer - lots of soft green grass, and some attractive views of the town from the top of the hill. I was racked with envy when I saw that there are also some beautiful houses tucked away up at the top of the hill. Amazing location; it's completely tranquil and very beautiful, and yet it's only about two minutes walk from the high street. I shudder to think how much those houses would sell for, considering that a really horrid house round here seems to go for upwards of 300k.

There's also a system of caves beneath the castle grounds; there are guided tours every now and then. Next one's towards the end of May, I think; I definitely want to see what's under there.

I'm so glad we got some sunshine this weekend; it would have been tragic if the sun had waited to come out on Monday, when we were all trapped indoors.

Everything is in order for the week to come; the house is clean, our clothes are washed, ironed, and put away, and the week's groceries will be arriving tomorrow evening. We ordered the groceries online last night; just couldn't face the thought of slogging through the grocery store. We've become accustomed, these past years, to my being able to do the shopping early in the morning when the stores are practically empty, so having to shop at peak times, when the aisles are crammed with tired, irritable parents and whiny children, came as something of a shock to the system these last two weeks. We're hoping that the five pound (!!) delivery fee will be cancelled out by the lack of impulse buys.

Online shopping here tends not to be as quick or easy as it is in the states. I usually do my grocery shopping at Tesco's, but their online shopping site was just so infuriatingly slow and unwieldy that I ended up ordering from Sainsbury's, despite their slightly higher delivery fee. It'll be interesting to see how tomorrow's delivery works out.