Beach Life

 Hello my lovelies!

It’s fair to say that life’s a beach right now!

I’m spending so much time on the beach, swimming and then drying off in the sun.  Sun-dried Pout!

You must be getting a little bit fed up of my two swimsuits.  But they’re pretty much all I’m wearing.  

The days are scorcheracious.

So if I’m not on the beach wearing them, I’m at home wearing them in the garden and around home, keeping cool as best I can. 

I love that these swimsuits cover me up so well that I can decently wear them from beach to car simply by tugging on a pair of shorts - or in my case longs. 

The décolleté cover makes them wearable like this and it also protects that thin-skinned area from any more sun-ravaged wrinkleness. 

Not so easy to sort out are the wrinkles in the new Blogger update. 

I’m keeping post content simple at the moment whilst I attempt to come to grips with it all.  

As another blogger wrote yesterday, it’s difficult to navigate this update without any hints or tutorial. 

Perhaps this may be the final straw that gets some ladies to leave Blogland. 

Hobby bloggers like me don’t want to spend money on a bought platform like Wordpress.  We don’t earn a penny from blogging and unless you’re a avid blogger with something pertinent to say to the world, it makes no sense to spend money on blogging in addition to the time already spent compiling posts. 

Moan over.  Onwards and upwards my friends.  Meantime, please bear with the weird formatting and sometimes scarily oversized pictures!

Because right now, life’s a beach.

A la perchoine,

Mary x. 

Crime Scene Investigation?

Hello my lovelies!

Before I kick off today, are any of you using the new version of blogger?  If so, do you know how to change photo sizes? And how to centre text and pics?  I’m struggling. 

Now I don’t know if I should be proud of this or very ashamed. 

The seagulls around here are very hungry this summer.  We think it’s a combo of us now recycling food waste and not eating chips on the beach in lockdown.   Not just me, the whole island!

They steal the chips, swooping down to nick them from your finger, and most people offer them what they can’t finish.   We live on a small island and have to make up our own fun 🤪.

I made a big pasta ratatouille bake a few days ago.  With macaroni.  We don’t like macaroni.  So we only ate it once,  I just couldn’t face any more of that slimey textured pasta in the ensuing days and there was a big tray clogging up the fridge. 

We put it out for the gulls this morning.  30-40 of them swooped, ate and attempted to fly off.  I say attempted because they were flying low on take off, barely missing the house, crash landing on the conservatory roof and one even stopped there to pause for a while, summoning up the strength to take off again.  They circled and returned for seconds and thirds ... 

Each take off was just as laboroured and clumsy as the first.

We fear we have loaded their tummies with macaroni and they’re going to be crashing all around the place!

Unfortunately I didn’t film the event, whether it be a display of kindness or a crime scene.

So ladies, should I be proud or very ashamed?

Exhibit A - a kind gift or the potential murder weapon?

I won’t give you the recipe for fear of this dish potentially harming other wildlife 😔. 

A la perchoine,

Mary x. 

Tankini Time

Hello my lovelies!

Following on from my last post on moving to wireless swimsuits SEE HERE , let’s move on to wireless tankinis. 

I have this pretty tankini set below, in a fresh green and navy print on white. 

It’s a lovely cute and fun looking set and always makes me feel a bit ooh la la St Tropez when I wear it, probably because I bought it for a French holiday in the Côte d’Azur some years ago. 

It was featured in my 2016 beachwear roundup Life’s a Beach HERE

I do love this set but similar to the last post, it is underwired and has a deeply plunging neckline. 

Maybe fine for me a few years ago but not now !

So whilst on the hunt for swimsuits I also searched around for a tankini to use with the cute navy striped bottoms. 

And here’s what I found. 

CLICK HERE for the online link, in the summer sale reduced from £25 to £8!!!

A plain navy tankini!  

It goes perfectly with the navy striped bottoms of my original set.

It has a soft ruched bandeau bust detail and ruching from the sides.  All this ruching makes it very flattering. 

It has a little bit of soft underwiring but it’s hardly noticeable.  

I had to play around with the sizing on this one again, this time going up two sizes to get the right decorous fit. 

But the thing is, because the tankini has tummy control it still gives an absolutely perfect shape, even with sizing up twice. 

It’s lightly padded with a pretty pleated bandeau bust area, and there’s no overspill again - I’ve seriously lucked out on containing the girls in miy new swimwear!

And Ooh la la, it looks lovely on!

So much so that I may wear it like this, with shorts or jeans as I did with the original top ...

See my post the-shorts-affair-continues HERE

I did a bit of editing to hide the cleavage in the pic above .. too much information up top!

 Maybe I can brave up and show you a pic of me in my new tankini ... or maybe not!

So that’s enough from me on beach wear, I’m off to wear this tankini on the beach.

What are YOU wearing on the beach in 2020?

Do you mix and match tankini sets?  Or bikinis if you’re braver than me?!

A la perchoine,

Mary x 

Fig and Feta Salad

Hello my lovelies!

My plate’s story. 

The figs were freshly picked from my garden. 

The salad’s beefsteak tomato and French beans came from a grower’s hedge stall around the corner, which I walked ten minutes to buy.

The rest of the ingredients were bought from a local firm who deliver to my door. 

I’m definitely doing my bit to save the planet, eh. 

Well, apart from the buying Greek feta cheese, but the rest was locally sourced. 

Oops, who’s going to be the first to point out the bad grammar?!

This is yet another dish that is so simple that I feel a rather embarrassed about sharing a recipe and even daring to call it a recipe, but I’m doing it anyway if for no other reason than to explain what this plated mush is!!

Fig and Feta Salad

Figs, 2 of and grown by me,  quartered and given a light drizzling with a little honey. 

Crumbled feta.

Salad of little gem shredded lettuce, beefsteak tomatoes, cut French beans. 

finely sliced red onion and radish and tossed in some homemade red wine vinaigrette. 

Done!

And here, after an insta foodie friend has come to my rescue with a quick tutorial on food photography.

I apparently needed a plain plate and a pop of bright red or green on top the feta to get it to “lift “ the plate.  And I agree that it looked a bit more foodie immediately by switching to a white plate.

For my lifting I added a shredding of basil.  I switched in baby plum tomatoes.  Both of which were home grown by moi. 

Yes, the dish itself is hardly foodie but I do think in summer especially, food is best kept simple to fit in with our busy schedules and our lighter appetites. One has to save room in the tum for ice cream eh!

I do love fruit in a salad.  Quartered figs, chopped apple, strawberries. peaches or mango, halved grapes, slices of orange or banana, all of these do their own flavoursome lifting to a salad.

And most fruits complement a variety of cheeses, one just needs to work out the right pairings to suit our own individual palates. 

IMHO. 

Do you add fruit to a salad or cheese, and if so. which?

Bon appetit!

A la perchoine,

Mary x 

Swimsuits

Hello my lovelies!

Ooh I’ve just got to tell you about my little shopping bonanza. 

The weather is fabulous and I’ve been beaching it and swimming it whilst the good weather window is open. 

Following the theme of my recent bra post about replacing under wired bras, SEE UNDERPINNINGS HERE,  I’ve now discovered practically all of my swimsuits and tankinis are underwired too.  And one in particular gives great uplift but is so darned uncomfortable. 

So again I headed to the M& website. 

And I found these.

OMG what a find!

A lovely fresh pattern and oh what a fit!

I sized up as I’m big on top and that worked perfectly. 

I also got its sister, and this was another OMG moment.  

Great colour and pretty soft and feminine colourways. 

And I actually look passable in them. 

The important thing for me is they give good uplift without the wires and give a lovely shape. And because they’re high necked I don’t have all that fuss trying to contain the boobs in cups.  This type of  neckline sends out a message of elegant and sophisticatedly Mature Lady on the Beach, IMHO. 

They stand up well to the swimming and dry reasonably quickly considering they’re lightly lined throughout. 

But oh how charming they are to wear because boob overspill is absolutely zero. 

And here’s the thing ... they’re post surgery swimsuits.   Yes, you read correctly!   But I thought, just how different can they be to ordinary swimsuits?  And the answer is not a lot  They have a soft inner lining and little pockets for a prosthetic inserts.  But none of this is visible to the onlooker. 

Why oh why aren’t there more of these high necked swimsuits on the market?  They hide all the wrinkly décolleté, no overspill as I’ve said countless times already - yes, they are quite simply the perfect swimsuit for a pensioner. 

And they were in the sale, reduced from £30 to £14.50.  Win win. 

If you are looking for a decorously high necked swimsuit then pop over to the website NOW!

And I took my swimsuits here. 

I swim.  A lot of beachgoers stand around cooling in the sea.  I think that’s quite British eh?

Beach life. 

And no it’s not Daniel Craig emerging from the sea, after a swim, it’s our old mate TP!

A fabulous tankini coming up soon!

Now, over to you ...

So where do you stand on swimsuits?

Wired or wireless?

Low necked high necked?

A la perchoine, 

Mary x.