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I was at University of Sheffield last night for the BIN@Sheffield2011 conference dinner. A brilliant evening at Firth Hall with some old friends and colleagues from Digital South Yorkshire and the IET. Excellent local food with some fabulous music provided by Ray Gelato. If you get chance to see Ray and his band perform then make certain to take along the dancing shoes!

Congratulations to Mark Sanderson and colleagues for the organisation.

Robert, Ann, Catherine and Sara at the White Rose Awards 2011 presentations.

Our congratulations go to the winner of the category ‘Best B&B/Guest Accommodation’ – Kilham Hall which is situated near Driffield. We would like to take this opportunity to thank all our guests and suppliers for their support since we began the business 5 years ago.  We took our daughters Sara and Catherine to the awards ceremony at Doncaster Racecourse and had a wonderful time. We look forward to trying again for the award next year.

We are delighted to announce that we have once again been assessed by Visit England and have retained the Five Star Gold Award which we have maintaned since we opened 5 years ago. We thank all our guests for their continued support and also our local suppliers, in particular Fenton’s butcher of Tickhill for providing us with the excellent quality bacon and sausage we serve at breakfast. Feedback from the assessor regarding breakfast: ‘Expertly cooked, with well sourced ingredients all noted to be full flavoured. …..An excellent all round breakfast’

We’re always looking for ways to improve what we do, so we’ve just gone live this afternoon with a new on-line reservation and payment system, making it even easier to book your stay with us. Watch out for our special offers on midweek breaks – just click on the Check Availability button at the top of our web pages for further details.

Goats born just minutes ago

A few days ago I went to the Butterfly House with my daughter and two grandsons and had a wonderful time. We just missed the birth of two goats by minutes. It is amazing how they manage to stand up within a few minutes of being born. Also a first for me – I held a snake and a stick insect!! I only plucked up courage because a young girl held them first and then I was asked if I wanted to hold them. I could hardly say no, “I daren’t” could I? – Ann

Ann and Robert are absolutely thrilled to announce that we’ve made it to the finals of the Welcome to Yorkshire White Rose Awards in the Best Guest Accommodation category.

The news came exactly five years to the day since a group of our friends helped us cut the ribbon to open Throapham House for business. It was our wedding anniversary too – so a good excuse to crack open a bottle of bubbly!

We’re facing stiff competition from some of Yorkshire’s Finest Guest Accommodation providers – including last year’s winners at 17 Burgate. We will be flying the flag for South Yorkshire at Doncaster Racecourse in October and would like to wish all finalists good luck. Whether we win or not, we would like to thank all our guests for their wonderful comments and support.

The Swallows are certainly having a busy time at the moment. It doesn’t seem two minutes since I went into the garage and saw five tiny birds pop their heads up to be fed by mum. Their bright yellow beaks were almost all I could see. The other day, I saw them take their first flight and couldn’t resist going into the garage for their latest (and possibly last) photo shoot.

Still no sign of the Mallards that appeared in April – I suspect they are busy raising their family somewhere nearby. I hope they drop in on us sometime, it will be nice to see them again.  Ann

We’ve recently upgraded all the TVs in our guest bedrooms ahead of Digital Switchover in Yorkshire later this year, so now all our guests can watch Freeview in their bedrooms and only one remote control to contend with.

With Internet TV guests can also use BBC iPlayer and a number of other catch up services including news channels from around the world. You can use the TV as a web browser if you really need to (in my opinion the TV remotes need to get much easier to use – are you manufacturers listening?) and we’ve even got our own internal channel for local tourist information. Any local visitor attractions, restaurants and pubs reading this would please get in touch with us as we’d like to make your information available to our guests in an exciting new way.

Apple’s Airplay technology now works easily through the new TV sets (it used to be a bit clunky to use with our old sets), so you can now play your iTunes music wirelessly through your bedroom TV without messing around with an iPod dock. Just select the channel from your TV remote and tell your Airplay device (iPhone, iPad etc) to play to your room TV. Easy.

Don’t forget that our guest lounge has both Freesat and Freeview and has supported Internet TV and Airplay for a while – great for catching up on Doctor Who.

Last spring we planted about thirty strawberry plants, thinking they would look nice among our rose beds.  Big mistake – they ran amok so we were able this year to replant about two hundred having given a similar number away to friends and family.

They are now ripening nicely though so it looks like our guests will be able to enjoy fresh strawberries from the garden for the next few weeks. With a bit of luck we’ll also have enough to make some jam.

The fine weather we’ve been having recently is giving a lovely display of roses this year too. It’s a lovely evening here and our white climbing rose is filling the air with perfume, so I’m sat in the garden having a nice glass of wine while the sun goes down.

We woke up one morning to find this pair of mallards on the small pond at the bottom of our garden. They were daily visitors for a few weeks in late April / early May but now seem to have gone elsewhere.

One day we had two males fighting it out over the female for a few hours.

A floating duck house was very hastily constructed, only for one of my school friends to tell me that mallards tend to nest some distance from water.

It seems we lost our population of sticklebacks over the hard winter but the pond has a good population of newts and the swallows have returned to their regular haunt in our old tack room. Right – time to tend to the tomatoes.