Secret's out - South of France

If the daily post has been non existent for a few days, the reason is we've just had a little holiday. It took one hour on the internet a week ago last Sunday, and we had flights booked and an apartment in the old town of Antibes in the south of France. Three days later, I'd found all of last year's summer clothes (hardly worn because of the non summer), bought some bog off sun tan lotion and we were off.
It was only a secret because we wanted to slip away and be back before we were missed by our customers. Some discovered the hard way (if you read this Anne, you'll know what I mean), emailing an order at the eleventh hour for a last minute birthday and having to be disappointed. Anne got her own back though, and won't be disappointed.

Anyway, Antibes... we love it. And I'm not going to bore you with holiday stories and endless photos. There were wonderful photo opportunities round every corner of the narrow winding streets, with honey coloured stone walls smothered in bougainvilla and little windows with brightly coloured wooden shutters and old terracotta pots filled with geraniums and glimpses of the azure blue sea through tiny alleyways and distant snow covered mountains as a backdrop.

Despite all that beauty we managed to produce the usual boring bog standard holiday snaps that do nothing to capture the real thing.

One of us went swimming every morning while the other...didn't. Guess who! Well I was going to but I bathed on the beach instead. Not something I normally do on holiday, but it was so good to do NOTHING for a while except read a book and try to turn brown. Unfortunately the bog off sun cream didn't make it into the suitcase ( left sitting on the bathroom shelf by mistake) and I had to invest in some really posh stuff in a chemist's in Nice. That was after I got a bit sunburnt walking to the chemist and the wobbly bits of my arms had turned fiery red.

And a quick tip - don't put sun cream in your eye. Your eyes definitely won't like it and you'll spend the next three days with sunglasses on day and night because your eye turns red and oozes yellow stuff.

It's better now, I'm glad to say.
As usual, when you go on holiday with Bob, you walk about 20 miles a day. Slight, only slight exaggeration. Anyone who's been to Nice before will appreciate the distance we walked on the first day - from the airport at one end of the Promenade des Anglais right to the port at the other end, round the old town a couple of times and back again to the airport, because we were staying at an hotel there for the first night. That got the calf muscles nicely stiffened for the next few days and the corns on the soles of the feet well and truly bedded in.
And I have to say self catering in a lovely old French apartment is just the most chilled out way to have a holiday - down to the boulangerie on the corner for morning croissants and the market for wonderful fresh produce, sitting at the open window late in the evening with a bottle of wine listening to the sounds of the old town settling down for the night. Bliss.

So, home again, home again jiggety jig. It all came to end too quickly and before we could say deux vins rouge s'il vous plait, we were back in Scotland.

The washing machine's going full pelt, the 98 emails have been opened and the 70 of them offering viagra and the like have been trashed, the pile of mail gone through, the phone messages listened to and tomorrow's To Do List is growing at an alarming rate.

Bob came in, took off his summer jacket, put on his thick shirt and woolly jumper and within about 20 minutes had started work. What a guy.
So we're back in business, refreshed and raring to go. Just as well, as the craft fair season kicks off in a couple of weeks and the website needs attention and the shop orders are piling in and Anne wants her cards made and ...when did we have that holiday?