An introduction to "Alphabet Weekends"

We went on a trip today to the Fairhaven Water Garden with the dogs. It's a lovely place to stroll around and was going so well until Safi fell into a stagnant river just before we got into the car. Attempts to hose her down at the plant shop did produce some improvement but not totally successful so my fleece was sacrificed in a good cause. Here's a picture of her looking most disgruntled - she wouldn't even look me in the eye!

Aaanyway - during our walk, Mr B and I decided to start up "Alphabet Weekends". This is inspired by the book Alphabet Weekends by Elizabeth Noble which he read on holiday. His excuse was that he'd run out of books to read so had to choose one from the bookshelf in our room. A likely story. In the book, a couple learn "love lessons from A – Z" by using the alphabet to plan weekends activities in turn.

We felt that we really don't take advantage of the attractions and experiences that are on our doorstep and that it would be nice to try to do so this year. Somehow this idle conversation led onto the agreement that we'll start doing our own Alphabet weekends. Starting next week!

The rules are:

• Using letters of the alphabet in turn, we have to arrange an outing or activity over the weekend starting with that letter.
• We have responsibility for alternate weekends so he will do A, I will do B, etc.
• Most activities should be based near home so that we can also explore more of Norfolk.
• It's OK to do an activity that we know we'll really love but the other one might not.
  
• If it's a hard letter we can cheat a bit with what it might stand for. e.g. X is for Xtreme Sport. As I have the letter X this is very unlikely to be what it ends up standing for...

I'm really looking forward to the next 26 weekends - I've done a bit of research on "my" letters and am astounded by how much there is to see and do around here if you just look for it.

To close this post, here's a picture of Mr B reading this guilty pleasure book on "our" veranda in Kenya. Looks like he's enjoying it a bit too much, I think....