Bits and pieces by Lois

Summer comes to Somerrset!

I feel quite guilty that I have been so negative about the weather recently when so many people have suffered so badly at every extreme of climatic conditions. I’ve been moaning about our lack of vegetables, but our lives and those of our children don’t depend on our crops coming to harvest or failing. That to one side, I am so […]

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Family Stories by Lois

Uncle Wid

Although we were not particularly well-off, our house was always open to my parents’ friends and acquaintances. My dad, Donald, was born and brought up in Cambridge and his parents lived at the Portland Arms Hotel, so he knew many, many people in the town. Donald had his youth interrupted by seven years of war, but when he […]

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Bits and pieces by Lois

on Weston’s Grand Pier

    The Grand Pier is not just a long promenade out into the sea, at the end there is a funfair, just the thing for rainy days on holiday! Tremendously loud, music, rides, machines, screams… but great if you like that sort of thing, and plenty of kids do!       Time for a cup of coffee, I […]

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Family Stories by Lois

Searching for Emma…

I get these bees in my bonnet. Horace Colgate, né Alfred Dodd, born in London… who was his father, who exactly was his mother? I knew her name was Emma Pither Dodd and that she married Thomas Colgate. Her birth place in the census was stated as Ascot in Berkshire but I just seemed to stumble blindly around the […]

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Food by Lois

Rhubarb… with a raspberry sponge topping!

  I cut all our  rhubarb the other day and needing to make a pudding for tonight’s tea for my daughter’s new boyfriend, I thought I would stew it and put a sponge topping on it. Beat 8oz (200g) caster sugar and butter or margarine (8oz, 200g)  until very pale and creamy  

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