Do you love it? Do you loathe it? Do you care?

Second breakfast is a contradiction. Breakfast is literally break fast, as in the first thing you eat after fasting for a few hours.

It's also a Yorkshire term. You can tell because nobody pronounces it break fast, it's pronounced brekfst.

 

See below:
Hobbit Meal Times

• Breakfast - 7 a.m.
• Second Breakfast - 9 a.m.
• Elevenses - 11 a.m.
• Luncheon - 1 p.m.
• Afternoon Tea - 3 p.m.
• Dinner - 6 p.m.
• Supper - 9 p.m.

If it's okay for Sam Gamgee it's fine for me.

Fully agree about that.

 

The green tag means you are logged into GC. I can't see yours either @Upsydaisy although I can see my own and others. You have the option to display it, or not, by selecting it in your personal information.

 

Thanks @Sheal , it all makes sense now. I just hadn't noticed it before.

 

I can't tolerate constant noise which is part of the reason I live rurally. That may be because I lived amongst farmland in my early years. The usual sounds of town/city living would drive me mad. I have quiet neighbours living one side and horses in a field the other side. The field against the back boundary is home to cattle or sheep from time to time. Most nights I can stand on my back doorstep surrounded by total silence. Or maybe hear the hooting of owls, or the very occasional call of a fox.

During the day I hear the movement of tractors, being surrounded by crofters tending livestock. Or the occasional chainsaw. Even when a 100 strong herd of cattle is moved along our one lane road, they are almost silent. Other than that there is very little traffic on the road. I can hear various birds singing throughout the day, many of which visit my garden. My only objection is being woken up at some ridiculous hour of the morning in summer, by a pheasant squawking.

The view from my garden which I never get tired of....

 

Stunning!

 

Thank you Upsydaisy.

 

What can one say, other than Gorgeous, wonderful, eminently enviable!

And a lot more besides, I bet; you can probably, at dusk, see the constellations gradually making their milky presence felt, until they sparkle bright before fading at dawn.

We are in the Metropolis, with its advantages and drawbacks which I would gladly trade for your situation, or some such, but affixed by various anchors for the time being, we enjoy what we have and dream of what you enjoy.

 

An apt question. It was a complex situation as we were dealing with the uneven partnership of Mr and Mrs Y who could not have been more different from each other; an illustration: we were amused occasionally to meet their nanny between the cool shelves of Sainsbury’s; the week following the installation of the 747 engines, she asked — raising her eyebrows — What do you think? Lab and I made gestures suggesting that we were beyond the realm of words. She said: He (meaning Mr Y) doesn’t like them. When he said to her (Mrs Y): They are rather loud, dear she replied: “Don’t worry, we won’t hear them, I am having the conservatory triple-glazed.

Thanks.

The events I related regarding Mrs T. had happened many years earlier, so Mr Y already gone through some rapids (some had been unfortunate and unfair), but the aircon saga took place when there had just been major (no pun intended) changes in his career, when he switched from government to local government which, at first, he found difficult.

But to return to Mrs Y, another enlightening anecdote: a friend of ours who was an obs and gynae junior doctor had become too closely acquainted with a nurse; this had caused him some marital problems which, for a while proved difficult to solve and this had resulted in his needing a “place to stay”; we offered him our spare room which is adjacent to the Y’s Conservatory. Mrs Y had just acquired a couple of yappy dogs who would get enraged by passing foxes who’d be minding their own business and each other during the night, so we’d get a double whammy of joyful foxes and irate dogs competing with each other for attention.

After such a night as this, our young surgeon had to go to St George’s Hospital and perform an episiotomy (which he was none too enthusiastic about at the best of times); as things got progressively tenser, overtired as well angered by the eventful night, under the watchful eye of a consultant who’d given him the proverbial JFDI, he eventually handed over his Braun Stadler to a colleague who successfully concluded the procedure for him.

These events he related to us. I said that I would have a word with Mrs Y and tactfully remind her that the Environment she so assiduously protects also harbours young surgeons who need to sleep at night so as to bring forth into the world the next generation of Council dwellers.

Her retort, when I had told her of our friend’s plight, was: Well, what do you expect? They are guard dogs!

Well, that, as they say, puts it in the shell of a noisette!

 

Sorry, but it's against the rules (Article 2016 Ref. 5b Psalm 81 oops, wrong book ) to mention small, yappy dogs and noisettes in the same post. I get a migraine

 

Thanks John....and regarding the bullocks. Before we had fencing and gates put up at the end of the drive, there was more than one occasion when they and their many wives had to be extricated from our garden.

 

Thank you. On a clear night, which has been rare so far this year, I can see the constellations. But the place to see stars at night is the Isle of Man. It's a spectacle to behold, they appear in their thousands.

 

Phew! You had me worried there for a second. So, I had to put on my legal hat, look at the transcript, go back to Court and thus counter the rebuff: Your Honour, my distinguished and buff colleague is mistaken, since I never used the word “small”, having, at the time of writing, taken great pains to ensure that I would not be in contravention of “Article 2016 Ref. 5b Psalm 81”, or any part thereof, or 2022 caveats or extensions. May I, however, seize this opportunity to express my deep regret for any misconception, let alone misunderstanding (*) and, furthermore, would like hereby to state unequivocally that Hazelnut has my unbounded sympathy regarding an aversion and antipathy for species, large or small, which one would have thought to have been universal and which yet flourish in space beyond the final frontier of rationality.

(*) the concepts of (mis)understanding have been dealt with elsewhere.

 

Hein? Buff?? More a sort of fetching bronze colour at this time of year