Settling in......

We had spent the first night in our Canadian home in Parksville, but please permit me to backtrack a little. Albie-Jack’s third birthday was the 3rd October and we were receiving our keys for our home on the very same date. This posed a not inconsiderable family programming dilemma. How were we supposed to move our family into a new house and celebrate Albie-Jack’s birthday in the shape of a veritable kid-fest? A real problem I hear you say, not so, I retort.

We did the only honourable thing we could……. we lied to a small child about when his birthday was (I can almost hear the booing and hissing).  His birthday was cunningly & temporarily ‘moved’ to Saturday October the 7th, where our nearest and Canadian dearest would besiege Perkins towers and enjoy barbeque and veritable kid mayhem. So, if memory serves me correctly, we had 14 adults and 11 children, tearing about the house like a bunch of hysterical bohemians, however the children behaved splendidly. The day ended without any form of serious injury or hospitalization, which is an enormous boon and to quote the great Mr. Stephen Fry, ‘we’re always on the lookout for enormous boons’.

To add to our scheduling mayhem, it was Thanksgiving weekend and we were the hosts for this yearly wassailing and turkey gobbling, pardon the pun. My wife’s brother and his family, Sholto, Berit & their son Finn were with us, as was my mother-in-law Judith. We purchased the bird & fixings and with some trepidation, entered the kitchen replete with all manner of borrowed culinary apparatus. We spoke very sweetly to the decrepit looking stove and it staggered into action. There would be turkey ……hurrah!

Anyhoo, to get to the nub of my gist and to condense what was a splendid evening into a few words. Turkey was consumed, as were pumpkin & pecan pie with lashings of cream and washed down with some excellent white wine from the Okanagan. The next part of the evening was to publicly state what we would like to give thanks for and being British, I’m not predisposed to being openly and publicly thankful for anything. That said I made a good-ish fist of it and the evening was soon drawing to a rather weary but indeed thankful close.  

Before happily drifting off to sleep, I thought we now have a home that we are comfortable in, it is time to devote more energy into thinking about all things coffee and turning this small profit bereft enterprise into something that might resemble a specialty coffee business.