From the Big Apple to little old Brackley

Hello again dear readers. Yes it’s the return of Pasta Paulie now residing in the mighty metropolis of Brackley – where’s that? Exackley! (see what I did there?). Since you ask, Northamptonshire actually.

So after a fabulous 3 months in Manhattan helping to look after our two youngest grandsons Elliott and Noah, we returned to the UK a few months ago, full of love for America and homeless. Undeterred we thought it would be good to now spend some time closer to super daughter Emma and husband Stephen and our fab older two grandsons, Sammy and Georgie who live in Buckingham. Now older readers will probably know that we lived in the town of Buckingham largely bringing up our family there, for over 20 years, before we headed out to Italy. And having lived in a small town for so long we never figured we’d return there to be honest. We’d become megacity people…London, New York, Monteleone di Fermo. Well mostly city slickers. Anyway Emma and the family had re-settled in the town a few years ago after a long spell in and around Brighton.

So we disembarked from our Virgin Atlantic flight to be greeted by Emma, which was lovely, and we spent a couple of cool weeks at their home, which was very decent of the guys, whilst we looked around for a place of our own. Whilst there I did a bit of gardenning work for them which led on to all sorts of things, but that’s for another posting, and also witnessed my eldest grandson Sammy’s first game of the season for his club Luton, which ended with him receiving a pretty serious knee injury (grim), which is also going to be covered more fully in an upcoming posting.

Lots of incident then but we did search hard and found a new place to live – a tiny little new home in a converted old barn in the town of Brackley, about 7.5 miles from Buckingham. So far enough away for us not to be a nuisance but close enough to be on hand. Perfect.

We’d got rid of a lot of stuff before leaving for America so once again we’d found ourselves having to re-furnish a home for the umpeenth time in the last few years. Nothing new. We’d done the IKEA thing the last few times but this time we went back to finding bits in local antique places etc and 3 months in we are just one or two pieces short of being happily re-furnished. Bit of old pine and touch of chateau chic too. Very us.

So here we are in Brackers. What’s it like? Well a small town with two great schools Magdalene College which historically has been a feeder for Oxford Uni (where our girls went and grandson Sammy for a while) plus a spanking public school Winchester House. And with a number of fine old buildings that’s about it but we like it. It’s small and pretty and we have a Waitrose right behind us. Some pics of the lovely stonework in the town’s buildings:

So here we are and enjoying the little place. One of the early week-ends here we had a motorbike festival in the town. I’m not sure what that entailed as we headed out to Italy that w/e (another posting on the way) but it looked fun from the amount of bikes parked up everywhere…

 
Well we’ve never lived in Northamptonshire but so far so good. It feels like the sort of place that can have a bit of fun. We’ve been visited by great friends Mike & Jayne and Lesley & Adrian so far and you’re all welcome except that you’ll be sleeping on the kitchen floor. It’s definitely a one up, one down kind of place. But you’d be very welcome.

pp

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