Fieldfare Lodge

There is (obviously) a strangeness to life just now.  Here in the Dales we’ve been in a kind of bubble – we know a couple of people who have had the dreaded virus, but they both got better.  We watch the television, we know the facts, and then we go up town and it’s like nothing has happened.  Except we all wear masks, and complain about our glasses getting steamed up.

But the Lodge has been fully occupied since July and everyone seems to have had a good time in the hills and valleys.  The weather has been mixed – I think summer changed its mind in May and went back to bed.  

Cleaning the Lodge takes slightly longer these days, but only because I double and triple check everything.  Better safe than sorry…  I also changed some of the bedding so that it can all be boiled.  And anyway – EasyIron just isn’t.  It’s a nightmare.

The builders are back in our house, making dust and noise.  What I thought would be a simple opening up of a fireplace has turned into a rebuilding of the chimneys.  

They are the world’s loveliest guys and the living room will be super when it’s finished.  (But their sole aim really does seem to be making dust and noise). 

It would be good to think that we could get some teaching going soon, but I don’t think it’s going to happen.  Crafting or cooking, if it’s going to be enjoyable, does mean less than a metre distancing.  And I think we’re still not supposed to visit each other’s houses.  It’s a shame, and I do miss the fun and laughter.  But if it keeps us all healthy then I’m fine about it.  I hope we all keep our sanity going until we can meet up again.

I’m on the vaccine trial program, and Andrew is on the antibody program.  We feel good to be doing something (anything!!) that might help someone to help someone else.  We are so lucky to live where we do, and we don’t forget it.

The guests who arrived at the Lodge at the end of November, thinking they would be with us for 5 days while their new house became habitable, left yesterday for their home up the hill in Leyburn.  It’s now really odd that the Lodge is empty – it was just like having proper neighbours rather than guests.  They’re only a mile away so we’ll see them all the time, and it’s really lovely to think that we have met and made new friends entirely by accident.

Of course, the downside in all this is that I have completely got out of the habit of changeover days – all I’ve been doing is the washing and ironing.  I’m sure we’ll get back into it…

Christmas brought us our new kitchen, finally.  We love it.  I’ll start running bread and cake courses at the end of February, so that will be fun.  The sourdough starters have seen the outside of the fridge for the first time in months and are bubbling away nicely.  Lionel – at Crakehall Water Mill where he mills all our stoneground flour – has delivered enough flour to feed an army, so I’m hoping for some hungry bakers!!  There are lots of open days at the Mill during 2020, it’s well worth a visit.  

I’ve been experimenting with dehydrating eggs.  Don’t ask.  The mess has been extraordinary.

… and there is a tiny tree in the Lodge.  With fairy lights.  In our house we have brick dust and banter.  The builders do stuff and we stay out of the way.  It will be finished for Christmas.  We keep the faith.

The Lodge is home at present to a couple who are between houses.  Their old house is sold, the new house has no kitchen.  The same builder is doing our kitchen and theirs – you couldn’t make this up.

Anyway, living in the Lodge seems to be going OK…  When I put measuring spoons and electronic scales in the kitchenette I didn’t really think anyone would be doing actual baking while on holiday, but there is real cooking going on.  

So our guests have become neighbours, too, and it’s been lovely.  The same day laundry service we provide has been more like first thing tomorrow laundry (the builders keep turning the water off), but it’s good to know we’re helping fellow travellers on the journey to kitchen perfection!

So – it’s been a few weeks since the I wrote any news.  The last guests were lovely (they’ve all been lovely) and I’m feeling like I’ve got into the groove.

The news in the house (our house, the one we’re still trying to do up – the project that we both said we wanted…) is mixed.  It’s always mixed.  The kitchen saga continues…

Anyway, we’re ready to go, I have dismantled most of the old kitchen, and the new kitchen we ordered October 7th from IKEA got delivered yesterday.  So far so good.

The worktops we also ordered October 7th from IKEA for delivery yesterday (allowing lead time for cutting) DIDN’T come.  I rang and was told the paperwork said delivery December 2nd.  The phone calls that followed got increasingly frustrating…

So it’s all a bit of a nightmare.  I try not to get angry, but then just end up getting tearful, which makes me look like a flakey female with hormonal issues.   So when the poor chap who has been given the job of sorting this out calls back today I’ll try and remain my normal kind, understanding self.  

And then I’ll get on to the more difficult job of rearranging artisans.  But this is Yorkshire – more than that, this is NORTH Yorkshire, where everybody tries to help if they can.  So I’m confident that I’ll be cooking my kitchen dinner in my new kitchen – and if we have a little dust with our turkey dinner again, I’m sure we’ll cope.

An emergency meant I had to shove the ready-to-bake dough in the fridge.  When I got back the Dutch Oven was still red hot in the Aga, and I was in a (different) hurry, so I just turned the loaf out of the banneton and baked it.  Could have been worse.  (It tastes great, which is, I suppose, the main thing).  Fortunately, I’d made the cake and bread for this week’s guests earlier, before the day began unravelling…😊

…from our last guests.  I waved them off and went to start the cleaning (unnecessary – the place is spotless), and found they had left us the most gorgeous orchid and thank you card.  I got a bit tearful, but how nice to know that we’ve made a stay as good as we can.  Thank you to Di and Richard for making my day.

Gosh, today we welcomed our fourth guests, so I think we should just stop counting and get on with it.  We have three lovely entries in the guest book (the lemon cake seems to go down really well!) and a booking for next April, so we must be doing something right.

I’ve been remiss in bringing the news – I’ve been stripping the old (very old) ghastly wallpaper, filling the big (very big) holes and painting the uneven (very uneven) walls.

We are getting ready for the builders.  Our kitchen is a shambles.   It seems we need a new doorway and door because the old one is holding the house up without a lintel…

It transpires we also need a new window – the one over the sink is ten centimetres too low.  Whoever put the last kitchen in cut the legs off the units to make them fit under the window, so the new units won’t fit!!  Don’t ask why I hadn’t clocked that (we have been here for three years, after all).  The budget has gone out of the window, but I’ll just keep saying “it will be lovely when it’s finished”.   The builders say it will be finished in time for Christmas.  Watch this space.

We won.  No one more surprised than us.  And the beer was gorgeous.  Obviously.

Well, it was nowhere near as stressful as I had imagined, made much easier, no doubt, by the fact that our first guest was lovely.  I hadn’t put a page in the Welcome Pack about managing the Sky or Netflix bits of the TV – this is where you need someone to tell you that things you never think about aren’t necessarily second nature to others.  So I did that.  Then we had thunderstorms, which knocked the Sky about a bit, but only for a few minutes.

The week was the hottest since the planet cooled, so the fact that the instructions for the heating were also missing at the beginning of the week didn’t cause a problem.

The bread and cake in the Welcome pack got eaten, but we hadn’t considered, when filling the tea and coffee jars, that some guests prefer decaffeinated.  So we’ve added those to the back of the cupboard just in case.  The Prosecco remained unopened – so I need to think of something equally welcoming but non-alcoholic for guests who don’t indulge. 

My husband had “borrowed” the squeezy mayonnaise from the Lodge before the grand opening.  There were words.  That’s all I’m saying.

The cleaning went well, too.  Turning the Lodge round in 5 hours won’t be a problem, which means that we can probably be even more flexible with arrival times if we need to. 

The thank you card and bottle of wine when our guest left were lovely surprises, leaving us thinking that we might just get the hang of this eventually.

Well, I suppose this is what first days and first guests are for – to find out what we haven’t thought through.

So yesterday Andrew discovered that the pans which (almost) definitely said “induction” on the label most definitely didn’t induce anything.  New pans, hastily, but nicer, which is a plus.

Then our first guest arrived, and it transpired that even though I had been at pains to include instructions for using every last little bit of equipment, I had failed signally to explain the heating controls or the dustbin days.  Just quite important…

That page is now written and will get handed to guests on arrival – or be somewhere prominent if we aren’t here to welcome.  There is, in our experience, nothing worse than arriving at your holiday let to find you’ve no idea how to heat the place up.  Quickly.  And lighting a fire is not quick.