Yes. I know…we are never at home for long, are we? Again, this blog post will be published a little early this month as we are off on a cruise (and yes again, I know we said we’d never do another cruise) to the Norwegian Fjords on the 29th May and being the cheapskates that we are, we probably won’t buy on board WiFi, so posting on line might be difficult! More about all that later though and I will pick up from where I left off last month now.
We arrived back home without any bother from our month in France…and for once we landed in Edinburgh to blue skies, sunshine and warm temperatures! For the first time ever my sandals (which I always wear when travelling) did not look out of place at all! Our train was on time too and Hazel collected us from Carlisle station as arranged, so all had gone extremely smoothly. We soon were plunged into our, sometimes hectic, life here and it felt like we had never been away at all. I resumed swimming with my friend Linda (the first and last time this month as it turned out) the next day and also went to Speakers Club in the evening. We were asked to read in church that weekend too and on the Tuesday after that, I was back reading for the Newspaper for the Visually Impaired …as I said it felt like we had never been away! And so it has continued all month with more commitments for church, including - coffee mornings, serving coffee after the service and doing Café church on the third Sunday as always. Geoff resumed his usual pickleball and Youth Zone sessions and I returned happily to my charity shop shifts. France soon became a distant memory!
May is always a bit of a hectic birthday month in our family and so we celebrated Hazel’s birthday with a lovely BBQ (complete with a Cuthbert the Caterpillar cake) at their house and then the next day our little granddaughter celebrated (with great excitement) her 4th birthday too. Her party at a local soft play centre was busy, noisy and a bit frantic, with 27 invitees as she goes to nursery and preschool now and all the children in her classes get an invitation…and of course are all her “best friends”! Lots of balloons had to be blown up and party bags distributed! Everyone enjoyed it though…but Geoff and I were glad to get back to the peace and quiet of our flat afterwards! There is another family birthday coming up at the very end of May – mine! I will be on board a big ship on the high seas for that, so I suspect it will pass by sedately and quietly!
We have been quite busy with other things too this month. I gave a talk to a local WI group about my nurse training in the 1970s, which went well and I think the ladies enjoyed listening to all my stories. I was a little taken back to be told on arrival that the speaker always judged their little competitions. No problem I thought, until I was asked to pick a 1st, 2nd & 3rd prize for the best thermometer which the ladies had brought along! HELP! I did my best but frankly one thermometer is very like every other thermometer! However, all the ladies were very welcoming and they insisted on paying me a fee -which I never ask for, I hasten to add- and which was happily donated to charity afterwards. We also went to a really good evening talk and supper hosted by Geoff’s Cambridge Society, at Hutton in the Forest. The guest speaker was Bridget Kendal who used to be the BBC’s news correspondent in Russia and America during the time of Gorbachev and the break up of the Soviet Union. It was a fascinating talk and we both thoroughly enjoyed it. It also gave us a chance to enjoy the delights of the beautiful gardens at Hutton in the evening sunshine which again we both really loved. This last week has also seen us being invited out for lunch with some friends form church and having a tour of their lovely garden and also an invitation to have coffee with another lady from church who told us fascinating stories about her life in India which we both enjoyed.
We have been out and about for lunch on Wednesdays too as usual, but have not really ventured very far. We ate at Allonby one week and had a nice walk along the beach afterwards and also at Bowness-on-Solway where I had some lovely feathered friends (chickens) to keep me company as usual in this place we like. And as always, I got very nostalgic remembering the lovely chooks I had when we lived in France. I still miss talking to those hens! We did also manage one lunch with our friends Linda and Mike before Linda resumed her grandma duties at her daughter’s house in Swindon, helping her out with her new born baby. This makes grandchild number eight for them! Linda and I rarely get to go swimming any more for obvious reasons! Our only other lunch out this month was in the form of a lovely family meet up with our son, Matthew and the grandchildren, Ethan and Hadley, for a picnic at Bolton-le-Sands where we usually meet up. Hazel, Phil and the little one came too (with Xena of course) and so made it a great family day. All the kids love playing there with the dog and usually a kite, so a lot of fun was had by all.
So now we are almost ready for the off once again, this time to Norway which is somewhere we have not been to before. I am really looking forward to this cruise, but have had to re think my wardrobe quite a bit as I got rid of a lot of my fancy stuff when we come back to the UK…no more cruises we said! Geoff can just about get into his dinner suit and I have been buying a lot from the charity shop! We have had to borrow a suitcase as we gave ours away to a refugee charity ages ago…we don’t take luggage to France as we keep most of our stuff there. I have not packed a suitcase for years and as you can imagine it is taking a lot of thinking about… have to take mundane stuff like toiletries, perfume, shoes, brushes etc (all of which we have at the French flat and therefore never bother with!) as well as a vast array of clothes to cope with the very variable weather which is forecast. I just hope we can actually lift this vast case we have borrowed! And more importantly that we can actually lift the case when we have filled it! We set off on Thursday morning, taking the train to Liverpool where we will once again start living the high life on board a cruise ship! I will tell you all about that in next month’s blog. Til then…
A bientot mes amis…