A Bargain.

There was no frost this morning and it felt relatively warm. Later in the day when I was in town the temperature plummeted as an icy wind blew. Not nice at all.

When I got to the stables this morning having negotiated yet more pot holes in the track and a large heap of stones that forced me to drive partially on the grass verge, I found that there were only three of us in the lesson. Today I was riding Meg, one of the new horses. She's big, 16.1hh and very broad but getting fitter. As we trotted around the corner of the school the wind blew in the trees outside and she spooked. I stayed on but it took quite a few more times past that corner for her to stop reacting. I even had to ride the corner behind another pony and then with Katie who was teaching us, walking beside us and giving Meg lots of praise. It was while we were doing all this that somebody noticed that beyond the tree there was a large area of black plastic on the ground that was billowing up in the wind which was probably making Meg react. I had a couple of canters on Meg and it was so funny. She's like a galumphing warhorse with her legs thumping down into the ground.

I had a large bag of stuff for the charity shop so course I had my usual quick look around several of the other charity shops. It was in the Oxfam shop that I found my bargain. While I don't bother much with the clothes in charity shops since I have more than enough at home a recent reel on FB had reminded me that it is possible to find top quality men's jumpers if you take time to look at the labels. I had recently tried and failed to find a cashmere jumper for Peter in M&S (they have them on-line but not in the store) as with his arthritis he really feels the cold. And yes, you've guessed correctly I found him a cashmere jumper. A brand new, still with the original label, navy blue crew neck cashmere jumper from Jaeger. At £50 it was still very pricey but at least the money will be going to help others and the original price was..... £175. I can't show a photo because Peter put it on straight away, declared it perfect and disappeared into his study.

My one job at home was to eliminate all signs of the silver sequins which included hoovering the whole place. The remaining sequinned offcuts are safely ensconced in a zip lock bag, not that there was much left over. I'll wait a while before I do anything with the gold sequinned top.