Home Thoughts Weekly

Christmas isn’t a time of year I look forwards to; it’s too commercial, too full of expectations and false promises and the daylight hours are too short. However, I appreciate I’m very fortunate to have friends and family and I value the time the season offers to be with them. At the River Cottage Canteen in Bristol, just before Christmas, we celebrated Tom’s birthday with three of our four children, their other halves and Bee. A truly happy occasion was made even happier by the news that we’re anticipating not one but two new arrivals in 2017. It looks as if we’ll need a bigger table for my birthday next November! Without my dad and Tom’s mum it felt important to make memories with our remaining parents so we drove to the south east to collect Ma and Tom’s dad, Ken, so that they could spend the Christmas week with us. We’re very happy that they’ve both been out on the boat this year, but we’ve added fish and chips at Tenby, beach walks at Aberaeron and Poppit and surprise...

Well, I knew I was in for some hard work and so it’s proved - and there’s more to do - but we’ve managed to find time for leisure and family too, so here’s a quick update of what we’ve been doing: We went out for a late October sail and had visit from a seal who tapped the bottom of our boarding ladder hoping to be rewarded for a treat. There wasn’t much on offer but our visitor seemed happy to stay and chat for several minutes. We had a sad but healing trip to Devon to scatter the final remains of my mother-in-law’s ashes in the village where she was evacuated to and spent so many happy years. On the way back we stopped in Cardiff to introduce my father-in-law to the delights of Welsh rugby… he says he enjoyed it, but he doesn’t look totally convinced in these pictures. I also roped FiL into making marmalade with me. There are no Seville oranges but this batch should see us through until then. My poor elder daughter, a busy working mum, has had one illness after another,...