I’m sorry that I have been so horribly silent on the posting front.  I do have a good excuse though: (sporadic) internet access in rural England and/or Scotland seems to only be possible when holding your laptop above your head whilst balancing on one leg near the bathroom window. Well, almost.

Anyway, after a wonderful weekend with friends in Cheshire we are now ensconced in the Lake District where we are renting the lovely house – above – set in devastatingly beautiful countryside yet still within relatively easy reach of a pavement (it’s about a 15 minute drive to the market towns of Penrith and Keswick…you know what they say: you can take the girl out of Singapore…).  I want to be able to stock up on supplies without an hour’s drive yet I want long country walks to be lying waiting for me as soon as I fling open the back door.

Luckily Ghyllbank House, near Greystoke in Cumbria, manages to satisfy both rather contrary sides of me and is where we are staying for the week.

Cooking is a pleasure rather than a chore in the kitchen here which is about the size of the entire ground floor of my 1960’s house in Mount Sinai (I am yet to get within a foot of the oven but H tells me it’s amazing to cook on, mainly because you are not sweating as you stir. I’ll take his word for it).

Baths are something that I never feel like when I’m in Singapore, probably because a good bath has to be boiling hot and preferably of the roll-top variety.  I’ll have to stock up on them here then (although the hot water seems to run out halfway through filling it which is rather unsatisfactory; I may actually have to put down my copy of UK Vogue – only £2 for the January issue…I almost bought two – and get to grips with something as dull and practical as a boiler manual):

All images are courtesy of Holiday Lettings and taken from tripadvisor.  By the time I had walked through the front door with my overfilled, exploding suitcases, no picture I managed to snap was comparable