Latest News from Kirkstead Old Mill Cottage B&B Woodhall Spa

I get to visit my wonderful wild garden again

Please forgive me for not furnishing this page of my diary with photos and feelings, but I will have to leave that task until tomorrow as there are several booking emails that require my attention tonight.  Barbara

Lincolnshire's Annual Tourism Conference 2009

A reply from the past

It is almost twenty-five years since Tony and I decided to join an organisation called the GOONS - The Guild Of One Name Studies, and over fifty years since we actually started researching our surnames of Hodgkinson and Allaker.  There was already a member covering all the Hodgkinsons that have ever lived, but Tony was able to register the name of Allaker, and he also added Ellerker, because knowledgable historians had told us us that there is a connection between the two families.

In December 1984 we posted a letter to all the Allakers that we could find in the UK telephone directories, introducing ourselves and telling them a bit about my ancestors back to those who lived in Southminster, Essex, in the mid 1700's.  We had a remarkable response and I have since met, and grown to love, distant cousins that I didn't even know existed.

Anyway, my reason for mentioning all this is that there has been a buzz of excitment in the house tonight, because just as a new guest arrived from Shrewsbury this afternoon, there was a telephone call from a Brian Allaker who had found my 1984 letter amongst his deceased father's papers.  When I was able to ring him back, I learn that Brian was calling me from Shrewsbury.  What a coincidence!

I hope that tomorrow we will be able to make arrangements to meet Brian who is very interested in historical reaearch, and hopefully he will be able to add to our Allaker family trees.  I say trees, because as yet we do not have any way of connecting our ancestors, other than we know that they both lived in Essex in the 1750's & 60's.  Brian's family were wealthy and mine were agricultuarl labourers.

We introduce a new optional evening meal service

Tonight we shared an excellent meal with our new guests, David and Sheila, who decided to try out our new dinner menu.  Sue Kind from Roughton Village came in with a freshly cooked three course meal to serve to us, and then she washed up while we spent the rest of the evening in the lounge basking in the comfort of a log fire.

The return of the Marsh Tit

This week saw the return of our father and son decorators, Denis and Stuart, which is always a joy, but I didn't expect them to report the reappearance of the Marsh Tit, a bird that they first saw in February 2007 when they were painting the outside of the bay windows, during a beautifully sunny week.  They also tell me that I have a lone Coal Tit, but I haven't spotted either birds yet.

The Dining Room hasn't been repainted for more than five years, but it was still very reasonable apart from some holes in the ceiling plaster where a central light fitting had been changed.  But now it's going to be a perfect setting for the start of our new project:  SERVING EVENING MEALS by arrangement.

We're nearly there!

Tomorrow should see me using the "new" computer that has been waiting for action in Tony's study since May 2008.  For weeks we have been struggling against Tony's tiredness to get my emails backed up and transferred onto this machine.  This morning we saw some success by simply dragging and dropping the messages from the memory stick that Tony gave me for Christmas.  It's disappointing that the large external drive that I purchased with the computer, as a back up medium, has not been as successful or as simple to use as anticipated.  Anyway, my four-year-old computer has served me well, and I shall run them alongside each other until I am sure that all of my data is transferred.

I know it's too early for spring cleaning.

But if we want to use the Dining Room for evening meals, and for breakfasts for groups of six guests, then I think it is time to have the ceiling repainted. When we changed the light fitting a couple of years ago some bits of plaster blistered and they need to be patched. So today our housekeeper Clair dusted down all of the books in my gardening library and stacked them on the table so that we could get the teak units cleaned and oiled tomorrow.

Last night Tony and I enjoyed an evening meal, which was prepared and served by Sue Kind as a rehearsal for our new evening meal service. I had hoped we would have had some guests to partake in a romantic candle lit dinner in front of the log fire on St Valentine's Day, but I didn't even bother to try and tempt anyone to brave our unreliable weather conditions, and some of last Thursday's snow is still visible on the lawn.

What's in a name!

I quite often get called Margaret instead of Barbara, but now I will think of myself as a "Silver Surfer". "Why?" You might ask. Well, over the past two days a Mr Martyn Webster has been helping me to learn how to use an external hard drive to "back up" the valuable information on my computer, ready for me to transfer over to a newer, faster machine. When I rang him up to see if he could help, he told me had other "silver surfers" that he visited, so we were in business.

It's time for some more "GOOD TASTE"

Today it was my pleasure to be able to have a chat with Mary Powell, the editor of this magazine.

AVASTIN : 4

Tony went back into The Park Hospital in Nottingham today for his chemotherapy.