A very special treat

Hello all, sincere apologies, and apologies the apologies are becoming more regular than posts at the moment! Rest assured that the posterly irregularity is only temporary and due to unavoidable hecticity which we will try and work through as soon as possible.

We'll have a general round up later in the week, but for now (thanks to a kind and observant reader) we have a little gem which passed us by earlier in the month. It is a piece from the Sunday Telegraph's Seven magazine from November 9, in which Ms Ehle describes - with characteristic loveliness - what her perfect Sunday would consist of. We don't yet have the link but will of course let you know if we locate it. Enjoy!

My Perfect Sunday - Jennifer Ehle (actress)

[...] I’d get up between six and seven, which is when my son George (who's five-and-a-half) normally wakes me. We'd go downstairs together, before anyone else was up. We have seven hens, so we'd go and let the girls out. They have a big run which they can walk around in, but we try to give them complete freedom in the field while we're out there with them. We live in the country, two hours outside Manhattan. New York is a great place, but I couldn't live in a city full-time now. When you find your natural habitat in life it's really hard to leave it.

At the weekend we often have friends and my parents to stay. It's our best way of seeing them all. Generally, people don't seem to rouse themselves until mid-morning, and my friend Martha and I have fallen into a routine where she makes them all breakfast. If it's winter, we have a fire going in the kitchen and one in the living-room, and everyone drinks coffee and chats. I get filled in on what happened the night before, after I went to bed.

I have these fantasies of having a big Sunday lunch, so on an ideal day I'd roast a couple of chickens for us. Usually, though, everyone has eaten breakfast not too long ago and so instead, I try to do a meal on Friday night when they all arrive. This summer we had friends staying in tents on our field, which was really lovely. On 4 July, we all went for an after-lunch walk, down to a river we have below our house. Our friend Pedro had us all swimming in it, which was wonderful because we've lived there for seven years and have never done that before. It was like he'd built us a pool. The day was incredibly hot, so it was heavenly.

In the evening, it's that delicious thing of having the place back to ourselves. I like to go outside with my son and put the chickens to bed and look at the shape of the moon. When he was younger, he used to play what he called 'chicken piano'. He'd stand by the roost and touch each hen in turn, they'd all be sleepy, and each one would make a different sound.

When George is in bed, it's lovely to sit with my husband and watch nonsense on the television, or sit by the fire and play cards and backgammon. I'd probably go up to bed around 9.30. If it really was my ideal Sunday, we would have woken up in the spring, had autumn for the morning (with its crisp air), summer for the afternoon and winter in the evening. [...]