Castles

• Did you know...Northumberland has more castles open to the public than any other county in Britain.

I received the final two LK Flipit Bits from Jayne the other night, so I can get on and finish her model. I'm having a break from St P, mostly because I'm doing back stitch and I hate back stitch. But also because the silk threads are causing the skin to peel off my fingers. They don't look too bad at the moment, but that'll be because I haven't done any stitching on St P for about four days now. I will probably do some more this week, if only to get part 3 finished and out of the way.

Ian isn't having much luck with his job hunting. On Thursday, he had a three hour trial in the kitchen of the South Beach pub, not far from us. He wasn't paid and he wasn't very impressed with quite a few things. First off, he spent two and a half hours at the sink washing up, and the last half hour cutting up turnips and making salads. There were a couple of things about how they ran the kitchen that he wasn't happy with. The turnips he was cutting up were for lunches today (Sunday), which even to me was too far in advance of when they were needed. Also, there was a gateau on the serving hatch that was being defrosted. One of the bar staff knocked it onto the floor. They picked it up, finished defrosting it and put a new topping on it. Gross! I know it probably wasn't cost effective to just bin it, but even so...what about health and hygiene for gods sake!