2022 Christmas letter

This has been a year of the UK short break.  Geraldine and I decided last year that due to Covid travel complications, we would not go on a foreign holiday in 2021.  This year, we reached the same decision for different reasons.  The climate issues altered our view on flying and so we reviewed our holiday options and decided to spend one or two nights away in the UK each month.  The strategy worked well, and we’ve enjoyed some lovely visits to places we wouldn’t normally stay overnight, like Richmond (the North Yorkshire one), Appleby, Lancaster, Settle and Sheffield.  The last three trips incorporated a visit to a play or a concert. 

I’m really glad that concerts are happening again.  We’ve been fortunate to attend eight since last December, one being a music festival that had been postponed twice since 2020.  It was an indoor micro-festival organised by Dean Friedman (famous for hits including Lucky Stars & Ariel in the 1970s) and was held at an hotel near Oxford.  Dean met us at the entrance and we took our seats at the front (yes, seats at a music festival: get us!).  Several of the nine artists were particularly funny.  One chap, Boothby Graffoe, has some wonderful one-liners such as “Cigarettes are like weasels – perfectly harmless unless you put one in your mouth and set fire to it”.  Frequent breaks to replenish our drinks, stretch our legs and chat to the performers meant the day passed really pleasantly. 

At about 10:30pm, Dean invite everyone to ‘hang out’ (his words of course; I would never use an Americanism) and so we spent a lovely final hour singing along to tunes from the Beatles and Elton John.  It was really cheesy, but great fun and much less embarrassing than karaoke. 

Here’s Dean singing a song from his 2022 album, American Lullaby. Plus a humorous one, Death to the Neighbours.

The last concert was to see Barbara Dickson.  We first saw her in 1977 when she was relatively unknown and I’ve always remembered a funny line she used then: “And now I’d like to play you a medley of my hit”.  (That singular hit was ‘Answer Me’ but it was soon joined by ‘Another Suitcase in Another Hall’ later in the year.)

We have also been away separately on a few trips, since Gee likes going with her friends and I enjoy my cycling breaks.  I haven’t done much touring this year, although I did enjoy a trip around the Cotswolds on what I called the ‘Ten Counties Tour‘.  I have a low-level desire to cycle in all the English counties, and so far I’ve ridden in 32 out of the 48.  (For the pedants (and I know who you are!), I’m only including the ceremonial counties, not Unitary Authorities).  Most of the outstanding counties are in the South and I can’t summon the enthusiasm to try and put my bike onto a train to get to the start of a trip so the quest will take a while yet.

I passed through Bicester on the Cotswold trip, and whilst there, I visited Graven Hill,  the building site featured in the Channel 4 TV series ‘Grand Designs: The Streets’.  This is a housing project on a green field site where several plots were sold to self-builders.  The TV programmes made the featured houses seem amazing, but when I was there, I had a different perspective.  

The area was still a building site with occupants trying to live their best lives in the few completed houses whilst all around were concrete trucks, builders’ vans, vacant plots and dozens of people in hi-viz vests.  Many of the finished properties were built by commercial entities and were recognisable by their uniformity.  In contrast, the self-build houses seemed rather self-conscious; they really needed to be in their own grounds to fulfil the architectural statement they were striving to achieve, but instead they were set too close together in tiny plots. 

Another incentive to cycle in new areas is a geeky thing concerning tiles.  Not the bathroom or kitchen variety, but virtual ones on a map.  Most serious cyclists use Strava where all their rides are recorded and shown as a breadcrumb trail, but in digital format rather than bread (thanks for the idea Hansel. Or Gretel).  Veloviewer is an app which takes Strava data and turbocharges it.  It also divides the world into one mile squares called tiles and people like me are trying to build up their collection of tiles that they’ve ‘explored’ (i.e. cycled or walked in).  So now, before I go anywhere different, I check whether I’ll be cycling in ‘new’ tiles, and I often build in diversions to explore any tiles just off the main route.  I’m not yet as enthusiastic as a friend who once blagged his way into part of Knowsley Safari Park on his bike just to grab a tile within their grounds.  (I’m still missing that one, but as long as the park continues to have free-roaming lions, tigers and rhinos, it will remain unexplored).

In April, Geraldine fell awkwardly whilst on a walk and fractured the top of her right arm.  So although she was still able to perform wedding ceremonies (175 so far this year!), she was unable to drive to the venues, so I was engaged as a driver for a few weeks.  This worked out well, since I could go for short walks over the moors and gather a few more Veloviewer tiles while she did her stuff indoors.  Her arm is now fully healed, thankfully, and more of the Darwen moors are ‘explored’.

Geraldine has recently been spending many hours on Right Move, looking at houses in South Yorkshire.  Not for us, you understand, but for Emily.  In the summer, Ellis (Emily’s partner) accepted a job in Sheffield working for the University’s Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre.  This was a good career move for him and so Emily also began seeking job opportunities in Sheffield and she recently accepted a role which starts in January.  She received several offers for her house in Hazel Grove as soon as it went on the market, and hopefully, the sale is progressing smoothly.  Buying isn’t proving quite so swift, but I am confident that they will find somewhere suitable before long.  In the interim, they will move into a rental property so the pressure to find somewhere permanent is delayed.

When Emily goes on holiday, I am often employed as a cat-sitter which I really enjoy.  It’s an easy gig, since the cat spends many hours asleep, and when he does venture outside, he remains within hearing distance.  With a single rattle of his biscuit box he comes running, so he’s easy to manage.  I am hoping that this task won’t end when Emily moves to Sheffield, since this region will offer more opportunities to explore new areas on the bike.  The visits may be reduced, however, since Emily may be less able to afford frequent trips away. 

One cat-sitting visit coincided with the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, so unfortunately I couldn’t attend the street party held outside our house.  I missed a really good event when tables were set up in the road for residents to enjoy a sociable afternoon and evening with food, music, games and quizzes.  My only contribution was to help put up the bunting beforehand.

We were very saddened by the news of the Queen’s demise in September but we chose not to join the queue to experience her lying in state.  It feels as though a significant chapter has now closed.  I felt it acutely since the parallels between Queen Elizabeth and my Mum are very clear.  They were born in the same year, got married a few months apart and their children are of similar ages. 

On a lighter note, during the lying in state, I couldn’t help noticing how wonderful and symbolic was the word ‘queue’: a solitary letter doing all the heavy lifting with four other silent letters lined up behind it doing absolutely nothing.

Laurence is still cycling, running and swimming in his spare time, and he put the training to good use in August when he entered his first triathlon.  He was accompanied by a more experienced triathlete who’d been giving him advice on how to manage the race.  When the individual times came in, it transpired that Laurence had beaten him.  Whoops!  Laurence really enjoyed the experience and he’s now considering entering an Iron Man event next year.  I don’t know where he gets his energy from.  [An aside: could an Iron Man be considered FeMale?]

In May, he went on a much-postponed trip to the West coast of America with his friend, Liam, and although they are very good companions, they have completely different characters.  Each morning Laurence would get up at around 6am and go for a 10+ mile sight-seeing run around the area and he’d have returned and showered before Liam was even awake.  Laurence loved the trip, mainly the National Parks and mountains, but not Las Vegas at all. 

In 1978 my old school ceased to be a boys’ grammar school and became a sixth form college, but this summer, it closed altogether, being unable to compete with the much larger Blackburn College nearby.  I went on a trip round the old place just before it closed, but the memories had long gone.  Although I could recognise some corridors, the distinctive wooden benches in the science labs which had embedded sinks and gas taps had been replaced with free-standing tables of a style found in every college.  The views across the playing fields from the classrooms were now obscured by new buildings, and the gym had been turned into a library.  The smell of the old changing rooms still lingered though, at least in my imagination. 

The school has an alumni website and there are plenty of memories on there for me to tap into.  This year, the site provided the opportunity for me to meet up with two former school friends after more than 45 years. 

One of my old school friends has been trying to interest me in mountain biking (his hobby), but I don’t think I’ll ever become a convert to this very muddy variant.  We go for rides over the moors every few weeks, but I derive more enjoyment from ticking off Veloviewer tiles than the rides themselves.  (Don’t tell him, though!)

Other than a mild Covid infection just after Christmas, we have both enjoyed good health this year, although I did find myself on a course of antibiotics in January after a thorn embedded in my knuckle turned septic.  I have several hawthorn hedges which require regular cutting back and although my leather gloves were fine for keeping thorns out of the front of my fingers, they lacked any protection on the rear for my knuckles.  To prevent future incidents, I recently invested in a pair of armoured gardening gloves and although I haven’t tried them yet I’m very hopeful.

My claim to fame this year has been a cameo role on Google Streetview.  I noticed the camera car pass me as I cycled up Broken Stone Road near Blackburn, so I watched out for the new images to appear on the internet a few weeks later.  I appear on several images taken as the car approached from behind, but strangely, I am missing from any images looking back after the car had passed.  I suppose it saved them having to blur my face. 

When Google Streetview arrived in the UK, they missed out Smithy Close for some reason, but I noticed that this year, we’ve finally had a visit.  I was very pleased to see that they came in July when the garden was looking good. 

And finally, don’t you find it a bit strange that in the UK the Royal Mail delivers the post, yet in the USA, the Postal Service delivers the mail? 

I hope you all have a lovely Christmas and New Year and that 2023 is less politically ‘interesting’.