Hello!

Yep, it’s us again, as determined as in previous years to send you some news at Christmas even if we haven’t been in touch all year. We hope you are very well and enjoying life.

We celebrated our silver wedding anniversary in January by spending a long weekend at a swish hotel in Tewkesbury (with Peter and Andrew), but didn’t get as far as organising a tour of previous home localities as we thought we might. If you know us from our time in Nottingham, Sheffield or Solihull then you escaped a visit; but we did have the opportunity to meet Coventry friends when we went to the retirement weekend of the minister of the church we went to there.

Our main holiday was spent in the Lake District, in a cottage next to an old watermill on the western side of Lake Windermere. We had a remarkably dry fortnight and really enjoyed pootling around the Lake in our Zodiac inflatable pretending to be modern day Swallows and Amazons, climbing the odd hill (nothing too strenuous) to catch a stunning view, or exploring villages like the one where Wordsworth went to school (Hawkshead).

The most unusual thing we came across was when Tim and the boys were crossing the lake one day between Bowness and the cottage, having gone shopping, when we suddenly saw a flotilla of about 25 amphibious cars travelling in roughly the same direction! So we zoomed home to get the cameras from Chris and spent 30 minutes or so escorting them at a very leisurely pace down the lake ’til it was lunchtime. It was really weird to see what look pretty much like standard soft-top cars (with the tops down) in the middle of a lake, complete with intermittent wipers!

Mid-year we finally got round to selecting a builder to make two of our bedrooms a bit bigger; he started in early October but as he’s a one man band is still working on the first room—maybe he will complete it by Christmas, and then give us a couple of weeks breathing space (time for Peter and Andrew to move into the newly extended room) before starting work on their old room. The mess is a pain but it will be great when it’s all completed. Once finished we will be fully setup with a twin room with en-suite shower room for any passing visitors, so do book yourselves in (but not ‘til Easter at the earliest please!).