WE'RE BACK AND WE'RE IN CORNWALL!

Well we're finally here in Cornwall and it is absolutely beautiful, the people are friendly and the weather... well... it's being weather... all kinds of weather!

The move wasn't without hitch, first of all our removals company tried to rip us off. After turning up at 7pm in the evening after being told they would be at our flat at 1pm they loaded half our stuff onto a van and decided that it was overloaded... it wasn't. Anyway, being 10pm by this time and very unhappy they demanded full payment asked for the keys and told us they would have to fetch another van and it would cost more money. We came to an uneasy arrangement with them and with a dreadful feeling in the pit of our stomachs we set off down to Somerset to stay with P's parents overnight and we had to be in Cornwall at 12 noon the next day to pick up the keys. It was a 5 hour drive in the ice, snow and freezing fog which could have been avoided if they removals firm ironically named Move Me Easy turned up at the time they we supposed to. They had already broken something while taking things out to the van, we heard it smash inside one of the boxes so we were less than happy already.

MERRY CHRISTMAS

Hope you're all having a wonderful day or have had a wonderful Yule!

Here at Gaia Cottage, todays menu consists of slow roasted Organic Brisket, Roast Potatoes and Parsnips, Shredded Cabbage and Carrots followed by Hughs Pear and Almond Pudding Cake. Unusual Christmas fare granted but where is the law stating we have to eat turkey every year?

Brunch was a wonderful mixture of Toasted Waffles, Crushed (slighty sweetened) Organic Raspberries and a spot of cream washed down with some Bucks Fizz.

So it's time to break out the Christmas films here and Miracle of 34th Street is the first in the machine as we watched Patrick Stewarts version of A Christmas Carol yesterday. I adore that film in it's many re-makings and have watched the afore mentioned film every Christmas for the last few years! It has become somewhat of a Chrismtas ritual to sit down and watch it, I almost know the script by now but it never seems to lose it's magic for me.

Unfortunately all the snow has gone here in London so it's not quite the white Christmas we thought it was going to be but we're enjoying it all the same as it's our last Christmas in London as we are fast approaching the 8th January where we move into our new cottage in Cornwall!

All that's left is to raise my glass to you all, thankyou for reading my blog this year and I promise it will get better next year and wish you a Happy Christmas and a safe and prosperous 2010.

WELL GOSH...

Where has the month since I last posted gone?

Well, for us it has been a crazy frenzy of packing as we have finally gotten the thumbs up for our cottage in Cornwall. It's a beautiful two bedroomed, stone built cottage circa 1780's in a teeny, tiny place just outside of St Just. To say we are excited would be the understatement of the millennium and so on the 8th January we will be spending our first night in our new home.

We've been tentatively scoping out all the organic butchers and the farmers markets and it looks like we're in luck, there happens to be an organic butchers around 10 minutes away in one direction and our local farmers market is about 10 minutes the other way from us. Of course being so far out of the way brings it's own unique problems but we can fill in the gaps online but that said, it is going to take a bit of getting used to. No more nipping down to Seewoo for Chinese ingredients or Dadoos for Indian ingredients so it's going to take some planning to keep our stocks of spices and things like Dhals up.

That aside, we have been doing some more cooking despite having to rummage through boxes we'd packed because 'hey, when are we going to get time to bake a cake before we leave?'. Oh boy were those famous last words!

A CONCIOUS CHOICE

Today we made our first concious choice to buy Organic Cheese and not just... Cheese. This represented the first foot on a total lifestyle change brought on in part by perhaps watching a little too much River Cottage.

My 'name' is SkyBlue1971 and my fiancé and co-author of this blog is Cyberpaddy66, welcome to our little piece of cyberspace, Gaia Cottage.

In this blog we hope to share the highs and lows, the laughter and tears of two people trying to get back to nature and improving our lives in as many ways as possible.

In around five weeks time we will be moving to an extremely rural part of SW Cornwall and when we close the door for the final time on our first floor flat in the city of London we will be closing the door on cheap Tesco's chickens, chemical laden lotions and potions and a whole myriad of other things.

We will be making concious choices about the big things like the food we eat and will be making sure it is Organic and Free Range right down to the ingredients in simple things like lip balms. We hope to learn to make soaps, shampoos and many other lotions and potions as naturally as possible and looking at every alternative for things that up until now we have taken for granted.

Before you don your tin hats and wait for the onslaught of militancy about our lifestyle and yours and a serious guilt-tripping session, fear not, that is not what this blog is about. We would love for you to follow in our footsteps but if you don't want to, well that's fine with us too, just stick around, pour yourself a nice mug of Fair Trade tea and help yourself to some home-made cake. There, we're quite friendly really!