Counting Slugs with Chugs Saturday 23/6/12

Wake after a fairly sleepless night at six thirty, Louis is wide awake and wants a special "Grandad Breakfast", by this he means full English. Alice, has slept like a log on the futon and she keeps Louis amused with the dinosaur DVD on my laptop whilst I fry sausage, black pudding, bacon and eggs for breakfast with fried tomatoes, baked beans and toast on the side. This takes us until eight, then I shower and dress and then run Louis a bath and then bathe and dress him. Outside it has stopped raining but everywhere is still wet, nevertheless we put Norman on his lead and Louis and I take him for a walk whilst Alice has a shower and gets dressed. We head down Green Lane, through the snickett onto Carr Lane and walk down to the farm to see the baby Alpacca. He is snow white and quite inquisitive and comes to the front of the little herd to look at us. Afterwards we make our way down the. Lane to the little wooden bridge over the drain and I am surprised to see the water level within a foot of flooding the fields. We turn right and walk down the path alongside "Almost straight wood, as it's far too boggy to walk through there. Louis spots a slug and asks what it is and I tell him, we then have a competition to see who can spot the next one, but the game is too easy as there are slugs everywhere and after we get to twenty we call it a day. The morning is not cold but it remains cloudy, swallows are hunting insects above the water in the drain and they swoop and pirouette around us. At the end of the wood we turn right and follow the path over another bridge into the Churchfield estate and then turn right again through another snickett onto the Village Playing fields that Louis knows well. He is delighted that he now knows another way to my house and when we get back home he tells Alice he has had an "adventure". After we have loaded all their overnight gear into the car we drive back to Sarah's house and offload the gear and put Norman back in his basket, before walking through town to the library. It is Louis' first visit and whilst I enroll him, Alice takes him in the children's library to look for a book. Not surprisingly, he finds a book on dinosaurs and we spend half an hour or so there before he asks to be taken to the cafe upstairs. This cafe serves the library, art gallery and the council offices so is usually quite busy. Today is no exception but a party leave as we enter and we take their table. Louis and Alice choose chocolate cake from the menu to accompany their drinks, apple juice for Louis, hot chocolate for Alice and I settle for just tea as breakfast is still recent. Afterwards we make our way back through town, stopping to buy strawberries on the market, which Louis samples on our way home. I drop them off at noon, drive home and sleep for a couple of hours. When I get up I put on a wash load of towels and then make some bechamel sauce for my cannelloni al forno. Whilst this cools I stuff the pasta tubes with the lamb mice tomato sauce from the slow cooker and then layer bechamel sauce, pasta, mozzarella in a red iron ware dish and top it off with nutmeg and fresh Parmesan. I leave the dish to stand for half an hour whilst I read the Guardian on my iPad, and then put it in the oven to cook for half an hour. It starts to rain heavily and I bring in the towels and dry them on the radiator and what seems like only a few minutes later the oven pings to tell me the cannelloni are cooked. When I take the dish out of the oven it looks beautiful, browned on the top with the cheese sauce still spitting and bubbling. It gives off a lovely aroma as I set it to cool for ten minutes whilst pouring myself a glass of Cabernet Sauvignon. I think it will probably do me for two meals, but it tastes too good and the wine and pasta chase each other down my throat and into my stomach. By the time the last cannelloni has been eaten, I find I have seen off almost three quarters of a bottle of wine. The impact, on someone who doesn't drink much, doesn't take long and by half past eight I am so tired and sleepy that I call it a day and hit the sack.