Of course that does mean that the latest possible news can be yours! Imagine if I'd started this at the end of November, as was the plan. You'd all be missing out on the most exciting of news of all! Allow me to explain.
You know I can never actually remember what's gone on in the year. So I usually tell you all about my holidays with the girls – and let's face it, that's the most exciting part of the year. It sticks in the mind. This year, however, was a little different. I got a boyfriend! Now it's not that I've not been trying to get a boyfriend or anything like that. I'm a woman, I have needs! I need someone to help with certain DIY tasks round the house... Well, just before the summer holidays, I managed to acquire a boyfriend. So that's a pretty big part of the year!
Another big part, although not good, was that my Dad died in June. Exactly, Charlotte pointed out to me, a year to the day after Michael Jackson died. We had a fantastic funeral at the crematorium in Aldershot, to which loads of people came. Then there was a rather good do back at Mums place.
And just before the holiday (I will bore you with that, just wait a bit), I decided that it was probably time to move on, and find a place of my own to live in. After all, the big house is a pig to heat, and it's way too much for me on my own with the girls. I started looking at houses locally, thinking to get the big house on the market after the holiday and see what we could get. I got a couple of valuations, and chose the one which seemed the most realistic, and it went on the market. We had a reasonable offer within 2 weeks, and I started looking in earnest for something for myself. And found it! Compromises, always compromises! I found a gorgeous little Victorian semi – in Peabody road. Not as far from the abattoir as I'd like, but with its own off road parking, and a really nice garden. And the best part? All three of us liked it. We'd been to see 3 places the evening before, and each one had been liked by one of us, but not the other two. By the time we left the place in Peabody, the girls were begging me to buy it for them! It does have one bedroom in the basement, which may be a bit of an issue, but Lizzy was enchanted, and bagsied it for herself!
“So why aren't you there?” I hear you cry!! Well, we ended up losing our buyer just a week after they'd bugged us to move early. I'd agreed to move out at the end of October – not an arbitrary date, you understand, but half term, in which much could be accomplished! But they lost their buyers, so we ended up back on the market, our sellers also – the whole chain collapsed like a house of cards in a gentle breeze! Obviously we went back onto the market, and we had loads of people come to see the place. I even got a call from the agents telling me that one couple liked the place so much they'd put their place on the market! Oh the charming naïveté! In the end, we had 3 couples wanting to buy our house – as soon as they'd managed to sell their own. I confess – I did get a little depressed by this, and after languishing on the market for quite some time, I decided that I'd take the house off the market and try again in January. After all, it was getting close to Christmas, and I was bored trying to accommodate all the carpet treaders. And that's the big news. On Friday, after a week of being pestered, I accepted an offer on the house. So there you go – any kind of organisational skills would have robbed you of that nugget of news, and you'd all be sobbing bitter tears into your Champagne, wracked with sadness at my plight, unaware that I'm not entirely unhappy!
So all this house stuff has somewhat occupied my mind since August, leaving less vivid memories of the holiday. We did, as usual, go camping. We went back over to the West coast of France, camping at Le Truc Vert, which, as you know from previous years, is scant 300 yards from the beach. We actually got our electricity this year, although our cable wasn't quite long enough to stretch from the electricity point into the tent. Luckily I'd taken with us a VERY long 4-gang trailing socket, so I plugged that into the cable and wrapped it up in a plastic bag. And hoped for no rain! Sadly that hope didn't come true, and we had what has to have been the coldest, wettest trip to that campsite. Good job I said “campsite”, not “ever”, because I suddenly remembered the trip up to the mountains 3 years before, where the temperatures got down to 1 degree in the campsite overnight! Despite the cold and the wet (and the shameful 3 trips to McDonalds) we had a brilliant time. There was still enough warmth to allow a certain amount of depastification of legs on the beach!
It was even better than usual, because we took Emma's friend Neisha, who's a lovely girl. She is, however, afflicted with a somewhat dangerous allergy – nuts! So we had a rather scary afternoon one day, having bought a bunch of food from the Vietnamese vendor at the market, only to find that the chicken wings (you were expecting me to say chicken feet, admit it!) had something on them from the proscribed list (nuts/sesame/whatever), and the poor girl started swelling up like a balloon! A panicky rummage ensued, during which Emma managed to find and half unpack the epi pen, ready to stab poor Neisha, only to be told that all we need to do was locate the anti-allergy pills. It was a subdued bunch of girls who found their way down to the acceuil to find out where the nearest hospital was, just in case! Thankfully there were no other incidents of that kind!
I met, and made friends with a couple of Germans – Sina and Roman. They invited us to play Kniffle (the German version of Yahtzee) with them, and taught me how to play. The older girls, Neisha and Emma, would go to the beach in the evenings with the rest of the young folks, where fires are lit and much multi-lingual chatting ensues. In fact, we all decided we'd go to the beach on the last evening, and roast marshmallows. We invited Sina and Roman, and told Roman that as a man, we were sort of expecting him to help out with the fire. We collected a very large bag of pine cones (there's a surprising amount of natural fire starter in the campsite!) and set off to the beach, having been assured by Roman that he had the lighting of our proposed fire well in hand! Oh boy, did he have it in hand. He'd brought a jar of petrol with him! Still, no trouble getting the fire to light.
I was sad that we hadn't been able to persuade Zoe and Christoph to join us at the site, because they're such good company. However, I was really pleased when Zoe contacted me by email at the end of Summer to say that they weren't sure what they were going to do with their October holiday! Well, I couldn't resist the opportunity to have them stay with me – after all, when we move out of the big house it's going to be way more difficult to squeeze in an extra 5 people. As it happens, you can get 8 people into the big house with delightful ease! I figured that I didn't have to move out until the end of October, and so I'd use Zoe and Christoph to help me pack/discard junk. As you know that all fell through, so we ended up just having a really good week with the family instead. One of the days I sent them off down to Portsmouth to the Historic Dockyard, on a trip of education and history, only to have them arrive home telling me off for not mentioning that there's a brilliant shopping centre RIGHT NEXT TO the dockyard!! We had a lovely day in Farnham, where Zoe and I must have visited every single charity shop in town! We had a really nice lunch in a pub which actively encouraged us to bring Emily-the-dog in with us. And then we walked up to the top of town and visited the Castle! I can't believe I've lived in this area for the last 40 years and that's the first time I've been to the castle in Farnham.
I was sort of sorry that our holiday took us out of Farnborough for the air show week. I know I actually like to be not-here for that time usually, but the Vulcan bomber was in the skies during the show, and I was thrilled to have managed to catch sight of it on one of the practice days before we left. In fact, on mentioning to Roman that I'd seen this plane, he opened up a lot, telling me that he was really into flying and planes, and had just started learning to fly. I was surprised that he knew nothing of Farnborough Air Show!
So, allow me to take this opportunity to hope that you had a fabulous Christmas, and wish you the very best of New Years! Who knows, maybe next year you’ll get your letter before Christmas!
Love - Sian and the Girls!
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