This is the second part of our beach lunch with friends.  As mentioned before, we invited some good friends to our beach hut for the day and all of our children, now teens were busy doing other things leaving just us grown-ups to enjoy beach hut life.  We chatted and chatted, laughed and giggled but mostly we missed our teens.  Happy they are doing fun things, teenage things but we still missed their chatter, noise and music playlists.

We ate Clams with Chorizo for lunch but started the day with gin cocktails from Gordon’s Gin website – Gordon’s Lemon Blossom (recipe below).

Our rather stylish glasses in this photo are actually sundae dishes bought from a hospice charity shop on a recent visit to Rye.  They weren’t cheap but when it comes to hospice charity shops, I buy big and quite right too especially if you’ve experienced the support of a hospice in some way.  My mum spent her last few days in a hospice and the work the staff do left us with such peace that my crazy lovely Mum was treated like a welcome friend who had come to stay for a couple of days.  They not only made her feel like the woman she was way before she was ill but my dad and us kids felt it was ok for her to leave us and go on her way.  They let me cry long into the night unhurried and quite fabulously, her last drink was a gin and tonic – what a way to go.  At her funeral we drank gin, tonic and Dubonnet mixed together.  Her favourite.

Beach hut life has been great for us this year and in the Autumn and Winter when our beach hut has to be dismantled and stored away until the Spring, we will be fill our days with long woody walks and beach picnics.  But not yet, I’ve more to share with you before then.

Gordon’s Gin Lemon Blossom

50ml Gordon’s gin

25ml lemon juice

20ml sugar syrup

20ml elderflower cordial

Soda water, chilled

Shake together with ice in a cocktail shaker and pour into glasses and top up with soda water.  This is a bit different from the recipe on Gordon’s website in that they pour over ice but we didn’t have room in our super fab glasses for that.

This is not a sponsored post – I just like Gordon’s Gin.