Hartwell House

Last weekend was the tenth anniversary of when Mike and I met, so to celebrate we went away for one whole day together...without Luke! We saved all our birthday money (and then some) and went to Hartwell House, a historic hotel now owned by the National Trust but still run as a luxury hotel. It's only 45 minutes from where we live but it feels like another world...

Our room was amazing. We got upgraded as part of the deal for National Trust members. The room we had is called the 'Tapestry Room', for obvious reasons (look at the picture). It had enormous mullioned windows overlooking the main entrance to the house. And then on the other side of the room, what looks like a window in the second picture is actually a trompe de l'oeil painting. Apparently there was an original window there when the house was first built, when it was only one room wide. The painting depicts how the view would have appeared at that time.

The best part of the house, architecturally speaking, was the staircase. It is all carved with figures each a couple of feet high. And each individual balustrade is a different carved figure too.

It's all terribly civilized. You go down for dinner and sit in the lounge (or the library, or the morning room, all with lovely furniture, ornate carvings, oil paintings etc etc), and while you're having your pre-dinner drinks they bring you the dinner menu and you can choose what you want. You get (very politely) taken through to the dining room later. We decided to be really decadent and have the tasting menu for dinner - all six courses of it! Actually we thought there were more like nine courses, especially if you counted the nibbles at the start and the sweetmeats that came with the coffee at the end, but they paced it well and the courses were all very small so we didn't end up feeling too full. Here's the menu:

• asparagus with hollandaise sauce
• beef carpaccio with horseradish icecream - I was deeply sceptical of this but actually it was brilliant, smooth and tangy and a great complement to the beef
• scallops with bacon
• rhubarb sorbet with champagne - the sorbet was put in one of those old-fashioned cone-shaped champagne glasses and the champagned poured around it: superb
• duck confit
• pan fried goats cheese terrine with shallots, rhubarb and rocket salad - I was pretty sure I wouldn't like this, especially as I normally don't like goats cheese, but even this was great
• a selection (basically just a couple of bites) of four different deserts, a pannacotta and something peach flavoured neither of which we liked much, a hot chocolate pudding that was good, and a pistachio and vanilla icecream in marzipan which sounds bizarre but was fabulous

The next morning we took advantage of the opportunity to laze around and read the newspaper, without having a small boy demanding breakfast and someone to play with him at 7.30! Eventually we did have breakfast (also brilliant) and then went for a walk around the lake in the grounds before leaving. There were quite a few birds on the lake including this family of coots and four herons.

Now we'll just have to spend the next decade saving up so we can do it all over again!

Before going home (trying to squeeze every last minute out of our babysitting time) we went for a walk around the village of Ickford. The weather was utterly gorgeous - poor old Mum and Dad had wintry temperatures the whole time they were here and then four days later we get 25 degrees! The walk was nice - we saw foals and cygnets and fields of buttercups, and then followed it up with lunch at the local pub.