As you will be aware, we have had a very large extension and refurbishment of our cottage which was completed at the beginning of the year. One huge benefit of being retired is to be able do some work on the cottage every day, whether it be garden landscaping, creating Christine’s ‘outside rooms’ or simply decorating inside.


The builders finished in January and after a trip to see the family in The Bahamas, we started work on putting everything back together at the beginning of April. Well we are now nearly there, all the new building is completely decorated and parts of the old are done. But we still have three or four rooms to finish but they are perfectly useable so it’s not too bad.





We decided that next week-end is the right time for the official Opening of the West Wing. This now needs to be planned and organised, menus have to be prepared, timings need to be arranged and booze needs to be bought. This sort of thing of course falls into Christine’s domain and she is probably best doing it herself without me trying to help, this feels like an ‘I’ thing for Christine.


All I need to do is to convince her that she needs more than salads and fresh fruit on the food menus, definitely no wall paper paste and we should be OK. I will naturally organise the beer, lots of bottles, cans, plenty of wine as well as a couple of bottles of sherry for the ladies should do it.


So my surprise when the other day at lunchtime we are sat at the breakfast room table when Christine gets out a sheet of paper and asks my opinion on what the food menus should be. Seeing as we have never agreed on what to eat since I retired I don’t think asking my opinion is going to help but I give it a go.

"Sausage rolls of course, pork pies, scotch eggs, flans, pizzas, fresh home baked bread and pate and cheese" I suggest "followed by hot apple pie with ice cream and sticky toffee pudding."

Christine, to my further surprise, is writing this down on her list and putting down which days to collect from the shops and how many of each we want. The list is becoming very complicated and seeing as I have got the grandkids using Black Books and seeing as I seem to be on a roll I suggest that I get the Black Book and make a plan. "OK" says Christine.
I am amazed!

I quickly retrieve the book from under the computer table where it had been hidden by someone and start to make plans.


We have to break things down into afternoon nibbles, early evening cold buffet and later evening hot dishes. This is no problem to me, I set out the book with a heading for each course and list the required food under it’s own heading. This is easy, it’s like project management, I used to do this every day. I then produce a complete shopping list of all the requirements listed by which shop they come from and when they need to be bought. I also produce a schedule of when things need to go in the oven, for how long and at what temperature.


Three hours from start to finish and the project's organised, all Christine needs to do now is follow the black book. Christine takes the book and wanders through to the Garden Room to study the plan. The book hasn’t gone in the bin, she has taken it with her. What can I say, I am feeling very satisfied - first the grandkids and now Christine using Black Books.


The next day I notice a couple of cookery books, Mary Berry and Jamie Oliver, on the coffee table with pieces of paper sticking out of the pages at various points. I open the book and the tag is at how to prepare Fresh Salmon, the next at Gammon on the Bone with Honey and Marmalade Glaze, the next at a turkey dish followed by salads, pasta salads, rice salads, green salads, tomatoes and cucumber. Not a sausage roll or pork pie in site to say nothing of a scotch egg. I go off on a hunt for the Black Book.


It’s there on the settee where Chrisine sits so I open it to the project plan for the 'Opening of the West Wing' and there is my plan exactly as I wrote it but in between the pages is a very confusing sheet of handwritten notes that Christine has done for the food menus. This bears no relation to anything we discussed or anything I put in the book. But I can just decipher salmon on the top line with gammon below it. Obviously what Christine was writing down during our discussion was nothing to do with what we were talking about.


I'm now looking for Christine. When I ask her what's going on with the Black Book and her own list, she simply says

“It seemed easier somehow just to agree and let you do the book, while I get on with arranging the do”

How she has managed to arrange anything from such an unorganised piece of paper I have no idea, but she seems to have done so and she is happy with her menus.


All I have to do now is find a way to smuggle in two dozen sausage rolls, a pile of scotch eggs and some pork pies as well as plan my next attempte to get Christine to use the Black Book