I’m sure we say it every year but we can’t believe it’s nearly December. It’s pouring with rain outside and blowing a gale but it still doesn’t feel like winter yet. Matthew is convinced that when he was a child he helped his dad sweep up leaves in the garden for the bonfire on bonfire night but the leaves have hung on late this year. As usual we have had a busy year but wouldn’t life be boring if it wasn’t.
Matthew is still managing to hold on at the council despite a gaping hole in their budget for the next few years. So far the engineers still have plenty of work. Matthew is busy managing his coastal monitoring team, doing some emergency and business continuity planning, some construction heath & safety and quality management. He finds his mixed bag frustrating at times but always interesting. Life could get even more interesting over the next couple of years as the four Councils in East Kent start to merge their services. This means he could find himself still doing roughly the same job but working from any of the four locations in East Kent.
His main DIY task of the year was to completely refurbish the bathroom. He started the project just before Easter and optimistically thought it should take about a month to complete – rip everything out one week, day to fit new bath, another day to fit new basin, etc. He has only a few finishing touches to do now but these are absurdly time consuming. He hopes to have it finished by the time the kids come for Christmas! To give Matthew his due he was rather poorly at the end of July when he had another urinary infection laying him low for a fortnight. Our doctor decided that enough was enough and carried out lots of tests ending up with Matthew having a biopsy on his prostate early in September. The results showed that he has very early stages of prostate cancer and he has been put on active surveillance for twelve months (monitoring blood tests every three months) before they decide what to do next. Fingers crossed he can stay on active surveillance for a while.
Sarah’s gardening job is a lot less complicated than Matthew’s job which is the way she likes it – Dyke House and The Oast House on Mondays, Willow Cottage and The Chapel House on Tuesdays, Crossways and 2 Treasury View on Wednesdays, her friend Liz and Knapton House on Thursdays and Lee Priory and Waterfall Cottage on Fridays. Looking at that list of names it does sound pretty idyllic and most of the time it is a lovely job apart from the days when it looks cold grey and miserable outside and you have to push yourself to go out. Most of her employers are lovely too, some are second homeowners who live abroad and there are a couple of rather eccentric elderly ladies but she manages to get on with them quite well - at least they are always glad to see her back after a break. She feels so much happier and healthier working outdoors and would hate to have to go back to an indoor job e.g. school or office work. Sometimes Sarah feels guilty that her job is a lot easier than Matthew’s but then she does the lion’s share of cooking, cleaning, washing, ironing and shopping.
Lizzie has been studying hard down at Falmouth and is now in her final year. We hope that all her work pays off and that she is able to get a job next year. She has been working at Burncoose Nursery (where David works) in her holidays but that is only part time. They set up and worked on the Burcoose stand at The Chelsea Flower Show this year. They were delighted when the stand won a gold medal and David had his moment of glory when he was on the telly with Helen Mirren – all for a couple of seconds! We went to visit Chelsea a couple of days later and had a great time. We chose the sunniest afternoon of the week and it wasn’t too crowded. It probably helps being tall because you can look at things over people’s shoulders.
Tim and Bekki bought their first house together earlier in the year, moving into a small town in north Hampshire in the middle of August. As usual things didn’t go entirely to plan but after a hairy couple of months things went through ok. Sarah is very amused now that Tim has become the perfect “house husband” - helping with the cleaning, mowing the grass, cleaning the car, going shopping and off to B&Q at the weekends for his DIY bits and pieces.
Because Matthew was concentrating on the DIY Sarah was in charge of the vegetable garden this year. Her only disaster was the Purple Sprouting Broccoli which sprouted much too early and was massacred by the Cabbage White Butterflies. In the autumn we spent three weekends trimming back the hedge between us and the neighbours .It had been allowed to grow about two feet into their garden and meant getting in one of Sarah’s gardening mates to provide some extra muscle, a huge bonfire on bonfire night and about four trips up to the tip with Sarah’s big trailer. But that’s it done now for a few more years.
We have been away on holiday in the caravan twice this year but with a new caravan. We decided to take advantage of the VAT reduction and trade our old caravan in for a new one. Our choice shows that we are getting older as we have gone for one with a fixed bed but boy does it make a difference. No more making each evening and putting it away again each morning.
After a local weekend break to get used to the new caravan we took it down to Cornwall for two weeks at the end of June. We went to the Roseland Peninsula where it is still very unspoilt. The views all along the coast are fantastic and we did a lot of walking along the coastal path. Some walks we had done before and some were new discoveries .Our camp site was not only very close to the beach at Pendower but is was also just across the water from where Lizzie is living in Falmouth so we were able to see her and her fiancé, David, quite a few times. The weather was mostly fine but we were lucky as it was the last of the good weather in the southwest until September.
We also managed two weeks away in the good weather in the middle of September. The first week was at Charmouth where we managed some more coastal walking and a whole two couple of days sunning on the beach! We then moved to a small caravan site in a village in north Somerset where Sarah’s ancestors came from in the early 1800’s. We went down to the records office in Taunton and found the record of her GGGrandfather’s birth but no record of his parent’s marriage. They were miners on the Somerset coal field and then moved to South Wales when the pits were in their hey day. Sarah found the museum in Radstock which had a lot about the local mining industry - fascinating and very personal. Again we managed some good walks and some sightseeing. We are already planning our holidays for next year – in the summer a week in Cornwall to see Lizzie’s graduation ceremony and then a week in Dorset because we love it so much. In September we are going “cultural” with a week at Chatsworth and then Blenheim Palace.
We are making the most of the time this winter when Sarah’s gardening skills are not required and are off again in January 2010 - a week on the edge of Dartmoor (we thought this area might be worth exploring) then off to Exeter Airport and onto a plane up to Edinburgh for another week staying at a hotel which Tim and Bekki recommended from their honeymoon last year. We have never been to Scotland before so it’s all quite exciting.