Last night's village social

Took the children along to this with some trepidation! Unfortunately P was in London so couldn't join us. As it turned out, the evening was a very big success. During the day, we used all the left over gingerbread dough to make more scrummy biscuits, icing them with royal icing, melted chocolate and that squeezy coloured icing you get in tubes. We took a plateful along with us to sit along a long table crammed with nibbles and bites. Stupidly, we'd all just had a proper evening meal, so didn't really fancy anything else to eat - did managed to drink a piping hot toddy of mulled wine (first of the season). Just love that stuff - warms you from inside and tastes so Christmassy.

This is the first community social evening the village has help (as far as I'm aware). I went along to the first of many community meetings recently, all set up to try and get the locals working together. All sounds good, but I can't really see it ending up like the fabulous and jolly community gatherings we witness on the Hugh Fearnley-whatshisname programmes on the telly! But, you never know.

Anyway, the do started at 6.30 and we arrived about 7ish. It was deadly quiet when we got into the hall as everyone was listening to three children singing a Christmas song to the audience - we felt a little uncomfortable bursting in on them! Things livened up a little after this as big "pub" games were put out like Connect 4 and Jenga, so we had a play on those and then started mingling a little. We knew one other couple and one lady from the village so I certainly needed to circulate and make more friends! The council playrangers were there too with crafts for the children to do; Ben did some of that. All the children had a good old bash at the Pinata precariously hung from a washing line! Everyone seemed to liven up after that - I also think the mulled wine helped alittle.

Katie won a £3 voucher to spend at the local sweet shop and we all won an out of date tin of biccies in the raffle! The tin is lovely though and will be used - it's Winnie-the-Pooh, who is one of my favourite children's characters.

The best bit of the evening though was when the lady (that I already knew), to be known now as "M", asked Katie how old she was and what school she goes to, showed much joy to hear she's HE as she'd taken her 7 year old out of school that very afternoon. How fantasic is that?! Not only have I recently met an HE family just outside the village, I now have another family in the village. It turns out she's HEd her other children in the past, up until secondary school, so she's a dab hand at it. The other funny thing is, her son and Ben met at the park in the summer and both were just a little too shy to hook together. Perhaps now Ben will finally make a much needed mate locally.

"M" is also into garden and is going to ask Katie to help her try and set up a new business selling plants. She's got a heap of veggie mags she's going to lend me too - yay.

All this, just from a couple of hours out socialising!