this is elegance by the mile....

We celebrated my wife's birthday this weekend. Because she doesn't have very much on, she decided to organise a party for 20 people in a humble little place in the Warwickshire countryside.

I arrived home on Friday lunchtime to find her in a state of high stress, fretting about some cooking that she was doing so she could feed her guests for dinner on Friday and lunch on Saturday.  You know, the usual kind of thing: onion tarts, salmon rillette, homemade pate, cakes, brioche....  Luckily, thanks to a lot of help from the neighbours, we left more or less on time and she was able to calm down once we arrived and settled into our weekend residence.

Our room was comfortable.

The en-suite was acceptable.

All in all, everything was quite nice and we had a lovely time.  Even the weather played nice.  We had some friends over from Vienna and from Berne, and they hadn't brought any shorts or suncream... because, you know, they were going to England.  WE SHOWED THEM.

Taxi!

The birthday girl had a fabulous time, and doesn't she look gorgeous in that dress?  She was sure that she wanted it a size bigger when we were in the shop, but the lady and I ganged up on her and we were right.  She looked lovely.

It was a lovely weekend.  One of the best.  We got to share it with some lovely people too.

And as for me, well.....

You know, hanging out like it's Downton Abbey or The Great Gatsby or summit.

Upstairs, obviously.  The butler was lovely, but I'm so clearly upstairs.