Livin’ the life

I’ve been either a stay at home Mum or working at home for longer now than I ever worked in an office, but I still get a thrill over going out for lunch on a week day as that feels like such a decadent thing to do – definitely livin’ the life!  It certainly helps when it’s a glorious spring day, the sun is shining, the birds are singing, and you’re meeting up with good friends, and I never take these outings for granted!

I’m lucky to have a couple of groups of friends that I can meet up with that represent different interests, and the group of friends that I met up with on this particular day aren’t bloggers or knitters or even remotely related to the yarn industry; they have all kinds of jobs and lives and our connection is a course that we did together a couple of years ago – we might never have met otherwise!  Over that time, we’ve got to know about each other and our families and now we all feel like old friends even though we’ve not actually known each other that long!

We’ve been meeting up in a farm shop cafe for most of the time we’ve been getting together, but part of the farm shop’s appeal is that they have lambs in the spring and the school Easter holidays are their busiest time when children can meet the lambs and as you can imagine, lots of parents like to take their little ones for a day out!  We decided to leave the families to their woolly meet and greets and head out to a country pub instead …

The pub we chose was the Bells of Peover (pronouced Pee-ver), out in the countryside past the town of Knutsford.  Now, anybody from around the same area as me will know that this particular part of Cheshire can be a very pricey part of the world to live (comparatively, of course, we’re not London!); footballers who play for the teams in Manchester live around here as do other people who have the means to live in big houses in the countryside, which naturally pushes the housing prices up and I thoroughly enjoyed the drive past some very expensive-looking residences.  I have no desire at all to swap my house in Winwick for any of them, but I do like to look! 🙂

The pub address is “The Cobbles, Lower Peover”, and the cobbles you can see in front of the building did indeed stretch all the way down the lane that led from the main road up to the pub.  You’d never see it from the main road, you’d have to know it was here, but obviously plenty of people did because as soon as the place opened at 12pm, the car park was full!

The building dates from 1839 and you might be wondering why there are two flags flying from the poles.  Can you see the round blue plaque on the wall next to the US flag?  All will be revealed …

Look at that!  At first, I couldn’t think why two American generals would have been at a pub outside Knutsford for lunch but all kinds of secret things went on across the country during World War II, some of which we will never know about, and there will have been a reason why they were in the area.

It was such a lovely day that we were able to sit outside in the beer garden – the first time I’ve sat outside for a meal this year – but you ordered inside the pub and to get in through the main door, you had to duck your head under this enormous wisteria trunk!

That’s been there a few years, hasn’t it?  I don’t know if it’s still growing.  I don’t have a wisteria so it could be a bit early for the leaves (there are leaves on the photo on the website) or it could have given up producing leaves and just be there because it always has been.  It sounds like an excuse to go back another and check!

Immediately behind me as I took the photo, through another archway in the hedge, was Lower Peover church …

It’s proper chocolate box stuff, isn’t it?  You’ll be pleased to know that I saw a few thatched cottages on my journey to get there too!

Funnily enough, this church is called St Oswald’s which is the same name as our church in Winwick.  The tower looks very similar too, although Winwick’s church has a spire on the top.  This photo is from January 2017 when the roof was being restored – I have lots of photos of the church on the blog but of course when you want a photo from particular angle, can you find a recent one? 🙂

The downside of having a long lunch outside chatting with friends (I had smoked haddock fishcake with a poached egg and some really good chunky chips) is that by the time you’ve driven home again, all you want to do is snooze in the sunshine – well, that was certainly the case for me!  The sun was still shining and I thought that the best thing I could do for my wellbeing at that precise moment was to put my feet up in the sunshine and have 20 minutes with my eyes closed, listening to the birds.  And it was!  I can highly recommend the 20 minute power nap …

Later that evening, I was out with the dog and we watched the sun go down, and the sky was just beautiful.  Photographs can never quite do sunsets justice, I don’t think, and this one was more pink and glowing and I stood and watched it for ages whilst the dog sniffed every blade of grass.

It was a lovely end to a lovely day!