Each year we watch our grapes grow from hard little green pellets to plump translucent beads of juicy flesh, but…just before we get round to picking them, boof, they’ve gone. Whether eaten by birds, destroyed by extreme weather or pinched by the neighbours, we’ve never experienced a good ‘vendanges’. One year we did pick a couple of trays of grapes, juiced them and enjoyed a couple of bottles of ‘jus de la vigne’, but after a couple of barren years,…
The day in question being my mum’s birthday. She’d watched me produce cloth after cloth, and so a gift for her birthday had to be a personalised bundle of her own – one traditional style (plain white with coloured edging), a handbag pattern (my mum loves bags) and a cookie jar (she makes a mean bread pudding). Given with the hilarious novel ‘What Would Mary Berry Do?’ (by Claire Sandy), they made the perfect present.
The French drink coffee and the English drink tea – we all know that – and some French friends of ours (neither of whom drink coffee ) love our obsession with tea, so what to give them as a gift was a no-brainer…