Wedding Anniversary at the Winter Palace!

Yes, it has been our wedding anniversary today, the 8th of January. How I wonder what some of the guests back then would think, to know that we celebrated our 39th by having "High Tea" at the Old Winter Palace in Luxor Egypt? I'm thinking about people like Freda's Mam and Dad, or little Jackie Buckley, who took the photographs, or John Graham the coalman, who lent his car to transport the bride! I think they would be flabbergasted! But, sadly, they're all gone now, so we'll not find out.
If you've not had the High Tea at the OWP then you won't know what we had, will you? Well, it's in the Victoria Lounge (so that's a good start) there's tea, of course, and plenty of it. Then the waiter brings a nice three tier cake stand, laden with sandwiches (sans crusts, of course) on the bottom tier, smoked salmon, egg, chicken and tuna. The next tier has individual English cakes, in the shape of small loaves and with cherries inside, and generous sized buns plus two glasses containing jam and cold custard. The final tier is crowded with small cakes and things, ten in total. Believe it or not, we had to leave a couple of the small bits and pieces, else I might have burst, just like Mr Creosote in the Monty Python sketch! Sorry there are no pics, but the Boss forbade it as being in bad taste in such surroundings. She was probably right, as usual.


On the way there, I got a couple of pics of the foundation work for the new building.

That's a quite big machine down that hole! It's at the back of the Pavilion wing, I hope it's not too noisy in there at the moment.

This one is more to the side of the Pavilion, similar machine loading by stretching the bucket down as far as it will go into the vast hole out of shot, to the right of the picture.

They are certainly getting on with the job. I could say that they were "knocking doors out of windows" or that they were "cooking on gas", both of which terms you would no doubt understand. But I have in my mind a term used by one of my old old customers from many years ago, but in similar circumstances, which was "breaking eggs with sticks". Does anyone else know that expression? Or can anyone shed any light onto its origin?