Good weather for ducks and antics in the restaurant

We saw a couple of fun nights going on in the restaurant last week.. the first was a ‘Mission Morogoro’ Ladies’ Evening, held last Friday, 16^th November. This involved a glass of wine followed by a talk from Jane Brook of ‘The House of Colour’ -- she gave an overview (to the 50 or so ladies that were listening) on how best to buy the right colours in clothes for your skin type, as well as how to accessorize!  (We have never seen this many ladies all be this quite - not at all normal in the Jinney Ring restaurant!)  After this the Centre's own Jenny Muschner of Blue Lemon gave a short presentation about their soaps -- then everyone chatted as normal and had a good look at the stalls.  The event was to raise money for the African charity supported by Bowbrook group of churches and happily it raised £570, the cheque is displayed above!

The winner!

The second evening witnessed was much "sweeter" - the Christmas themed "Pudding" Night had some delicious puds on show (not that there was anything except corn for us!).  Chef Shirley had made a gingerbread house as a raffle prize for everyone that came - this was fantastic and was won by the youngest "pudding eater".  Shirley is making another one which will be raffled for charity over the Christmas period.

Just one of the lovely puds.

We also had an unwelcome visitor in the restaurant last week - at 4 am in the morning we were forced awake by the Centre alarms going off, a window had been forced and a young man entered the building.  Fortunately, as the owners live on site they were very quick to react to the alarms and the intruder left empty handed - we are not used to having this sort of rude awakening in the gardens. (The police visited but did not ask us ducks for descriptions, oddly.....). It is a sad state of affairs when you have to have CCTV and alarms everywhere (they even watch us in the gardens) but we can see why when this sort of thing happens.

Aside from this excitement, out here in the garden - well, it has been "a bit wet!" hasn't it? and windy too? The ponds have overflowed once and the garden is extremely "squishy" -- just how we like it, with plenty of worms around.  The wild mallards seem to have flown off though - probably to get some richer pickings in the flood zones locally, yum yum! 

We are now getting excited about the lights going on in the gardens on Saturday.......