Holiday

The Badger Moot 2012 – Part One

Thursday 8th November 2012Thursday 8th November 2012Baggie

As regular readers of this blog will know once a year the descendants of Granddad Badger hire the Puncknowle Manor Estate in the Bride Valley, West Dorset for a week’s holiday and a chance to catch up on all the family news. It might sound like hell to some families but I think to a man (and woman) the descendants (and partners) of Granddad Badger look forward to the annual pilgrimage to the country. This year there were even some Badgers there (despite the threat of a Badger cull), Uncle John and Auntie Margaret flew in from Sydney, Australia for the 2012 Badger Moot.

This is the ninth annual moot and I think it gets bigger very year (we, personally have added two new members) and this year there were 20 adults and 7 (and a half) children, which I believe was a record turnout. Unfortunately not everyone can make it for the the full week (work commitments can get in the way) and I was not exempt from this issue. Work, as regular readers know, is very busy at the moment and the weekend of the Badger Moot coincided with one of the busiest weekends of the season, and my presence was required in quite a fraught weekend. However with Lucinda still recovering from her appendectomy and our entire support team (i.e. the family) down in Dorset it was not an option for her to stay at home and for us to arrive as a family on the Monday. Therefore, I took the Friday off and drove the 125 miles or so to Puncknowle.

The holiday officially starts Friday afternoon as we can get into the house from around 3pm so the remainder of the afternoon and evening tends to get eaten up by arriving, unpacking and preparing the evening meal (Thanks Uncle Bill and Auntie Sally) rather than visiting any of the usual haunts and it is an opportunity to catch up on family news. It is also an opportunity for the cousins to explore the house and set up their dens for the week. Éowyn has always enjoyed playing with her older cousins and gets excited whenever she gets an opportunity to play with them and her little sister is no different. So a week of having them ‘on tap’ was a week of bliss for both of our daughters. And in fairness to the older cousins they are brilliant with both Éowyn and Amélie even if though there is quite a large age gap they involve them in their games and have a huge amount of patience with them.

So just as everyone arrived and begun to settle in I had to wake early on Saturday morning and drive the return 125 miles or so straight to work to put in a full shift. While I was having a difficult work weekend the remainder of the Badger Clan begun the week of fun. Saturday morning saw them disperse to various places in the vicinity including the traditional Saturday morning jaunt to Bridport Market to see what bargains lay to be discovered. Unfortunately for Lucinda Éowyn decided that she didn’t what to really be there and since there was no pushchair seat for her then she was going to play merry hell. So far from a pleasant mooch around a Dorset street market it became a battle of wills with a four-year old, which I think Éowyn won.

Saturday night saw the first of two fancy dress nights: an Hawaiian theme. Everyone dressed up a number with genuine Hawaiian shirts bought in Hawaii. Unfortunately I could not wear mine as I was busy working 125 miles away, well I suppose I could have but it wouldn’t have been the same. I also missed Uncle John and Auntie Margaret’s Thai Green curry and the traditional quiz night. This year saw the older generation versus the young generation with age and experience taking the honours. Due to my ability to absorb trivia I am usually banned from competing in the quiz night and thus have become the family quizmaster putting my general knowledge to good use, although this year may have been different.

Sunday morning saw a very traditional English pastime, indeed during the Middle Ages it was law that every man over the age of 14 should spend 2 hours a weekend supervised by the local clergy doing exactly what had been arranged by Lucy for the Badger Moot 2012. She had arranged for a morning of archery lessons for the family at the Manor and I was probably more disappointed to miss this than the Hawaiian and quiz evening. Everyone seemed to have enjoyed it with John and Lucy being the most adept with Lucinda admitting to being one of the worst. Maybe next time.

Monday afternoon I arrived back in Puncknowle for the rest of the week. We spent the afternoon round the house before heading to Weymouth for this year’s ghost walk. In 2009 we took a ghost walk around Dorchester with our guide Alistair dressed in full Victorian regalia. We enjoyed the way he told the stories, in fact he toned the stories down that night when he realised that he was scaring the kids a little too much, so we booked him again this year for a trip around Weymouth harbour (not Melcombe Regis – we don’t want any misunderstanding on that matter). He met us at the Boot pub dressed as 16th century pirate and took us for a hike around the sights of the old harbour. This year the kids were not as scared and Finley challenged him on many aspects of his stories. Indeed Éowyn joined in the banter, when began to tell us of a submarine shipwreck in the harbour and the ghostly noises heard by divers exploring the wreck. ‘I know what noises they heard,’ she said, ‘Woo-oo‘ she continued without waiting for an invitation to reply. We had been concerned that she may get a little scared by the stories and were prepared to leave if it came to it but Éowyn loves her stories and that is exactly how she saw the trip and the anecdote above just illustrates how much she enjoyed it.

Tuesday was my first full day there and so we headed to probably our favourite place in the area: Lyme Regis. It is a beautiful town on the edge of Dorest with a little sandy beach at the edge of the main pebbly beach. We bought the girls buckets and spades and after a couple of lessons off Granddad we happily making sandcastles. As you can see from the photos below it was not exactly pleasant, it was dry which was a bonus, but a little on the cold side so the coats and wellies stayed on. Tuesday was also our day to cook so we left mid-afternoon to head back to prepare the Mexican themed meal, O.K. Fajitas and Chilli, for the 20 adults and 7 children.

The next day was Halloween and our second fancy dress party of the week. Everyone put so much effort into the night and their costumes that I have decided that it deserves an update all of its own. So please click here to read about the day and more importantly look at the many photos of the night.

That left one day of our holiday. 2012 was the year that London hosted the Olympic and Paralympic games but London wasn’t the only venue to host events. Weymouth harbour hosted the off-shore sailing competitions and to take advantage of the expected influx of visitors Sealife built a tower and observation pod at Festival pier to carry up to 69 people 174 feet (53 metres) above Weymouth bay for fantastic views of the area. The great thing about this attraction for the Bagnall family is that the tower is operated by Sealife, which in turn is owned by the Merlin Entertainments Group which means that we could use our Merlin pass for free entry. The view from the top is spectacular and we were lucky that it was a bright and clear day and we could see miles of coastline and many of the landmarks of the area.

After lunch we headed to Weymouth’s sandy beach for more sandcastle building and splashing in the sea. Before we headed for the Manor house and packing up to leave we asked the girls if they wanted a ride on a donkey. Éowyn was initially up for it but when we got there it was Amélie that was the most excited and Éowyn changed her mind. So it was Amélie that took a trip down the beach on a donkey and indeed when the ride was over she got all upset thinking that daddy’s three pound meant that she could keep the donkey. ‘My donkey!‘ she screamed as we dragged her from the beach and back to the car. Cruel parents.

And so our annual trip to Dorset ended with a late night journey back home so that I could return to work on the Friday morning. It is quote often said that you need a holiday to get over a holiday, in many ways it didn’t feel like I got a holiday but nevertheless it was great to spend some time with Lucinda and girls, even if it was a bit of a rush.

Please feel free to click here for the Halloween write up and the photos.

Peace and Love

Baggie

Take me to your leader

An Hawaiian jigsaw

Hawaiian night

It’s a little big Mum

Monkey attack!

A typical Hawaiian scene

The power of the sea

Amélie

Éowyn

The Badgers strike back

Should I be aiming at my sister?

Don’t upset mommy

I’ll go this way

Enchanted garden

A natural…

Jump!

And turn

And Splash!

Throwing stones in the sea

Playing on the sand

Learning from the best

It’s a little cold

Dancing on the beach

Grooving on the beach

I crush your castle!

Nanny and Granddad at Lyme Regis

Weymouth’s latest attraction

Bagnalls abroad

Tuesday 29th May 2012Tuesday 29th May 2012Baggie

I was doing so well with updating this website and then May befell this corner of the internet. Regular readers may be wondering what has happened, ‘has he got bored?’; ‘has he run out of gas?’ or ‘has nothing happened?’. Quite the contrary my dear readers, we have been away, on holiday, vacating (if that is a word). The football seasons have finished, live programming is slowing (not quite gone away but definitely reducing) and so we decided to take advantage of this hiatus in my busy work life and head off for the sun as a family.

We only booked the holiday last month (Friday the 13th for any of you friggatriskaidekaphobics among you) and were due to fly out on Lucinda’s birthday from Gatwick airport. We upgraded to more sociable flight times (0730 instead of 0430) but still decided to book a hotel near Gatwick just to avoid unnecessary fuss on the morning, it is hard enough to get yourself packed a ready that early in a morning without the additional hassle of attempting to get two sleepy youngsters ready too! So with suitcase packed and Lucinda’s presents and cards packed we headed to Gatwick on the Thursday night bound for Tenerife the next morning.

In the build up to our holiday the weather in the UK had been atrocious: the wettest April since records began, night frosts in May (Snow in Scotland and in parts of the Midlands!) and generally cold, dark, damp days. So, with the magic of the internet at our fingertips, we searched for long range weather forecasts for Tenerife. Tenerife, (for those of you that don’t know is the largest of the Canary islands – more geography later) and the Canary islands as a whole, were experiencing a heatwave at the beginning of May with temperatures of around 40°C (104°F in old money) but the long range forecasts that we could find were predicting thunderstorms and rain for the majority of our holiday. ‘Just our luck’ we thought and we became a little despondent. We have a knack of taking the rain with us on holiday (Barbados, Italy, Kent), which is good in some ways as we are both fair skinned and easily burn but wet and windy weather is not conducive to a happy holiday, especially with two little ones (then again neither would 40°C temperatures either).

This was also going to be Amélie’s first flight (and only Éowyn’s third!) beating her sister by exactly a week for the bragging rights of who was first to fly (although both flew as foetuses) by virtue of being 598 days old as opposed to Éowyn’s 605. So it was with a little trepidation that we headed off to the airport at Oh my god it is early o’clock. Just what you want on your birthday. We checked in and went through security and on to the plane pretty painlessly (without any of the trips to the toilet that accompanied Éowyn’s first flight!). It was a full flight with very little leg room on our chartered 737, however with Éowyn now requiring a seat of her own it was nice that we had a row of three seats to ourselves. Both girls were excellent on the plane especially considering it is a long flight (4 hours 20 minutes on the way there) without any onboard entertainment (thank Steve Jobs for the iPad!). With a certain amount of counterintuitiveness (is that a word?) we actually think that a longer haul flight maybe easy purely down to the fact that the children can be entertained for hours with a film or cartoons on a small seat mounted screen. Hopefully we will test this theory soon.

An hour coach journey greeted us on arrival in Tenerife, as did 22°C and overcast skies. It is Lucinda and my first experience with a package holiday (usually we book everything separately and hope for the best) and it does take the worry out of many things. You literally arrive at the airport and follow the signs, however it does mean that a big group of you all arrive at the hotel at the same time and so at the end of an exhausting trip it takes another 40 minutes or so before you get to the front of the check-in queue and finally get the keycard to your apartment, all the time while attempting to keep two children in view (extremely difficult when they run in opposite directions – imagine herding cats). The other benefit of a package holiday is that you have a rep who can help sort out issues and we called upon our rep almost immediately. Check-in was relatively painless until we tried to confirm that there was a cot (for Amélie in the room). There was no cot and there were no cots available until tomorrow. Not what you want to hear after 12 hours of journeying. Thankfully that problem was handed over to the rep and by 1800 we had a cot in our room in plenty of time for Amélie’s bedtime.

Before we even arrived in Tenerife there were two things that I wanted to do while we were there: a) visit Loro Parque and b) visit Mount Teide. We only had a week so two big trips were all that we thought we could reasonably manage and still have time to relax. So the next morning we booked the trips via the reps and again decided to embrace this package lark rather than hire a car (and car seats) and head off under our own steam as we would usually do.

We also checked out the kids club and the crèche, so that Mum and Dad could have a little me time too! Unfortunately I think this was one of the few disappointments on the holiday. Éowyn loved the idea of going to Kids club (or holiday school as she called it) but had a bad experience on her first day when one of the boys screwed up her drawing (which was bad enough) but that was compounded by one of the adults in charge dismissing the importance of that to Éowyn by merely giving her another piece of paper and throwing her screwed up drawing in the bin. We only managed to convince her to go once more (I had to stay with her for 25 minutes before she felt settled) and although she seemed to enjoy it, she didn’t want to go again.

Amélie was the same. The crèche was not free and we had decided to pre-book 3 sessions when we booked the holiday as it was cheaper to do so. However, when we arrived there just because you had booked didn’t mean that there was a space available for you. Spaces at the crèche were limited to only 6 (which is good) but these got booked up very quickly and the time slots didn’t seem to marry with the hours we had booked and were thus owed. We had booked 3 two hour sessions but the timeslots available were either one hour or 90 minutes and trying to juggle when Amélie could actually go with the hours we were owned got very complicated. Nevertheless we managed to book the correct number of slots for the hours we were owed and all seemed hunky-dory. However Amélie had other ideas and did not want to go to the crèche. This is not like her at all. Éowyn is often shy and takes a while to accept new surroundings, Amélie just charges straight in there and settles herself in without a care. Not this time. Maybe because we were in a strange place and then she was being left in a strange place but there were tears everytime we left her, which was not pleasant.

Éowyn did however make one friend by the pool and girl of about the same age as herself called Brooke. She constantly looked out for her and was so excited whenever she saw her whether that was by the pool or in the restaurant, but unfortunately they didn’t get to play with each other everyday because of trips that we had both booked.

We booked two trips while we were in Tenerife and the first was on the Monday and at 0740 we headed out on a coach to Loro Parque. Loro in Spanish means parrot and that is how Loro Parque was initially conceived as a reserve for parrots but it now has a diverse number of animals (and plants – the orchids particularly interested Lucinda) and is probably the biggest attraction in the whole of the Canary Islands. The zoo still has the most diverse collection of parrots in the world (not the most as a Mr. Antonio de Dios of Birds International in the Phillippines has the largest collection of parrots in the world – over 10,000) but also has chimpanzees, gorillas, tigers, jaguars, sea lions, dolphins (the largest dolphin show pool in Europe) and is only the second place in Europe to have orcas (killer whales to you and me). It has the longest shark tunnel in Europe and the world’s largest indoor penguin exhibition. Loro Parque has set up a foundation and most of its profits go back into conservation projects. Have I sold it to you yet?

The zoo is wonderfully laid out but the main attractions are the shows. We only managed to see the sea lion, dolphin and orca shows (we missed the parrot show) but thoroughly enjoyed them all and the only disappointment of the whole day was the fact that the penguin exhibit is being expanded and so was closed. There was a small enclosure with some Humboldt penguins in but that was it. Damn you Loro Parque we will now have to come back and visit you again! There are plenty of photos on the Flickr page if you are interested.

Our other organised day out was to visit Mount Teide. The Canary Islands are volcanic in origin and lie off the west coast of Africa in the Atlantic Ocean. Tenerife is the biggest of the islands and is dominated by the volcano Mount Teide, the highest point in all of Spain (in fact it is the World’s third largest volcano after Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa on Hawaii’s Big island). The area around Mount Teide has been given national park status and is a World Heritage Site. Teide is currently dormant (which is good) and last erupted in 1909 however the area around the volcano is bleak and mostly barren giving it an appearance similar to many of the planets that Captain Kirk visited and either ended up fighting or falling in love with an alien that dwelt there. The only strange being that we saw was a man dressed up like one of the original inhabitants of Tenerife, the Guanches.

The trip was entitled ‘A Jeep Safari’ and so in convoy we headed with other tourists around the national park stopping at various sites to get a close up look of the terrain. This included walking through a lava tube and through the pine forest that surrounds the caldera. Unfortunately we didn’t go to the summit of Mount Teide (in fact we didn’t ascend the final 5,000 feet!). The road ends at 7,730 feet and from there the quickest way to up the volcano is via cable car, however unless you arrive particularly early the queues for the ride can be four hours long! But even the cable car itself doesn’t go to the top the final 660 feet requires special permission the park office in Santa Cruz and it is limited to a maximum of 150 per day. There is a 6 hour hike that would have avoided the queues for the cable car but we decided to be content with the view from the road.

Before we returned to the hotel we stopped for lunch at the camel park where there was a camel ride included as part of the trip. Health and safety hasn’t really arrived in Tenerife and the Bagnalls sat precariously either side of a seesaw-like bench strapped between the camel’s humps with only a small strap to stop you falling the 8 feet or so to the gravel below. Lucinda sat with Amélie on her lap and I sat with Éowyn on mine both holding onto the camel with one hand and our wards with the other. It seemed a very long 20 minutes!

Our only other excursions were the half kilometre trip down to the beach. Down being the operative word as the hotel was up quite a steep slope from the beach, which was an effort on the way down and an even greater effort on the way back up. Being a volcanic island the sand is black volcanic sand and heats up extremely well, it is highly recommended to wear flip flops or sandals and it is rather hot under foot.

The hotel was excellent and being all inclusive took away the worry of a) finding somwhere to eat b) finding something for the kids to eat. This is only the third time Lucinda and I have been all-inclusive and we have to say that this was by far the best for choice and quality of food (and wine and beer). So much so we have both put on half a stone (7lbs/ 3 kgs) in the week we were away – ah well, back on the diet! The weather, too, was kind without so much as a hint of rain. The hottest it peaked was 33°C but was mainly in the mid to late 20’s which is perfect for us and apart from being overcast on the first couple of days it was blue skies all the way.

So, as you can probably tell, we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves and our only regret was that we didn’t book 10 days! But this is turning into an epic (I think it is the longest entry I have made thus far) so I will stop there and for those of you that haven’t fallen asleep I have included a few of the 1,000 or so photos that we took, there are many more on the flickr site.

Peace and Love

Baggie

The Bagnall family

Where shall I sit?

Ice Cream for lunch!

Like my hat?

Pardon?

Nee-Nah!

You can’t have too many straws

You can’t have too many ice creams

I said you can’t have too many straws!

Movie star!

I like being on holiday

Hang on to your hat!

A budding photographer

And one of her photographs

I’m off!

The Tears of a Clown

And I believe that is Checkmate!

I’ll keep you cool mum

The Bagnalls at Mount Tiede

Three of the Bagnalls

Mommy and Amélie

Keeping off the sand!

This sand gets everywhere!

My first black sand sandcastle!

The view from the balcony

Playing in the sea

The all inclusive bottle of wine

Mother’s Day and Daddy’s birthday

Monday 26th March 2012Tuesday 27th March 2012Baggie

It has been a busy week and hence a second update in just over a week. It began on 17th March which is not only St. Patrick’s Day (the Patron Saint of Ireland) but my eldest sister’s birthday. It was also the day before Mothering Sunday and a couple of days before my birthday so what better excuse for a visit from Nanny Fran. Nanny Fran made the journey on her own as Auntie Liz was heading off to a JLS concert in the evening, but she was joined at our house by the birthday girl herself, Auntie Mary.

Éowyn gets so excited when Nanny Fran comes down that she will quite often wear herself out and so it was on Saturday. She was so worn out that she spent much of the afternoon asleep. This meant that Amélie managed to get a greater share of Nanny Fran cuddles. It saved arguments.

Nanny Fran and Auntie Mary saw a huge leap in development of Amélie since their last visit and it does seem over the last few weeks that she has grown from being a baby to a toddler very quickly. She now walks everywhere, to the point of not wanting to be picked up. She is interacting with many more things and her vocabulary is going through that rapid increase phase where there is a new word nearly everyday. She will quite happily sing ‘Old MacDonald’ to herself and jabber away to her toys. On Saturday we sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to Auntie Mary and Amélie joined in! She doesn’t suffer fools gladly though and Éowyn is quite often on the receiving end of her wrath if big sister is doing something that she doesn’t want her to do. She is also a little thief. She will ‘move’ (shall we say?) anything that isn’t out of reach and hide it somewhere. Lucinda’s camera was found in one of the saucepans in the cupboard; the remote control was found in her toy kitchen and my watch is still A.W.O.L. hopefully it will turn up soon. She has now earnt the name Swiper, (‘Swiper, no swiping!‘) from Éowyn after a character from Dora, the explorer.

The following day was Mothering Sunday (Mother’s Day) so we let Lucinda have a well deserved lie in before we made her breakfast in bed. If you can’t treat your mother on Mother’s Day when can you treat your mother? Now saying that, Lucinda’s mum had invited us all round for Sunday lunch (Lucinda and her brothers and all our families), which puts a bit of a nonsense on the previous sentence, especially when she prepared all the food and she wasn’t feeling very well. Nevertheless 14 of us sat down for Sunday lunch. It is always nice when the whole family gets together and I know Lucinda’s Mum and Dad really enjoy being surrounded by their decendants, and who wouldn’t be.

The busy week didn’t stop there. My birthday was on the Tuesday and so we decided that we would go away for a couple of days to get away from it. Lucinda booked us a room at the new Shoreline Hotel at Butlins in Bognor Regis (West Sussex – for those of you with poor knowledge of UK’s geography – still not helping? About halfway between Brighton and Portsmouth. Still not helping? Find Staines (just west of London) and go south until you hit the sea and stop. It is somewhere around there, if that still hasn’t helped maybe you watch a little too much CNN).

I went to Butlins with a little trepidation, it has to be said. Never really been tempted to spend any time at a Butlins (or alternative) and I had never been to Bognor Regis (although it was good enough for King George V) but we packed the car and headed south. I am not ashamed to say that I was pleasantly surprised by both Butlins and Bognor Regis. The Shoreline Hotel is excellent, it has really been thought through for kids. The room was divided into two areas, the main area that you would expect with a little seating area and a double bed with TV and DVD player (although I can proudly say that we didn’t even put the TV’s on in our stay) for Mum and Dad. Then separated by the bathroom (that included a child’s section in the seat so little ones can use the big toilet safely, without fear of falling through) there was a kid’s bedroom with bunk bed and their own TV and DVD player. Éowyn loved the bunk bed and immediately climbed the ladder staking her claim to the top bunk. We were a little wary of letting her sleep up there but she was perfectly safe going up and down the ladder and so we let her sleep there. Amélie is still a little small for a bed (even with a side on) so we hired a cot for her.

When we arrived we found that you could book a ‘Character Breakfast’ where one of the ‘Characters’ (i.e. men in big suits) would come and sit with you and have breakfast with your child. We thought that it would be nice for Éowyn and attempted to book it but unfortunately (or fortunately as it turns out) they were all fully booked for our stay. Nevermind we headed to breakfast the next morning and yes Billy and Bonnie Bear were there and having breakfast with a number of the children, but in between course they came and paid a visit to every child in the breakfast room. Now you may be forgiven that this would be something that Éowyn would like, but a teddy bear bigger than daddy ambling over to you when you are eating your Coco-Pops is not what our three year old thought was a pleasant experience. Amélie, thought it was brilliant but Éowyn cowered by her Daddy until the furry freaks had moved on to another table. We were glad that we hadn’t shelled out for the ‘Character Breakfast’. However, because we didn’t know that the characters would visit every child we hadn’t taken our cameras down to breakfast (why would you?) but we rectified that the next morning, when it was the turn of Bob the Builder and Fireman Sam to paid us a visit, with pretty much the same results. Although we did have photographic evidence this time!

I think we chose quite a good time to pay a visit to Butlins for it was out of school holidays, still early in the season and, for once (for one of our holidays!), the weather was fine. This meant that we could easily get on the all the facilities in the children’s play areas and the swimming pool was relatively empty. The swimming pool was the big hit of the holiday. Éowyn has never been very confident in water and it is one of the things that we have promised ourselves this year to get her to enjoy the water and if possible to begin swimming lessons. Part of Éowyn’s issue with swimming is that it gets your hair wet. So before we entered the swimming pool this time we put her hair up with a hairband, something that she usually will not allow you to do. Whether it was this lack of fear surrounding her hair getting wet or the fact that the pool gradually deepened from nothing to 4 feet (1.2 metres) or so (it was the toddlers’ pool) or even the confidence of holding her daddy’s hand she wading right in until the water was up to her chest. I then supported her and slowly dragged her into the deep (relatively) water. I got her treading water and then dogging paddling, with the support from dad and the armbands. Initially I worried that I had done it all a bit too quickly but the next day she wanted to go swimming and grabbed my hand and said ‘Come on, Daddy, let’s go into the deep water.‘ The challenge will be to continue this, before the newly gained confidence ebbs away.

There wasn’t a lot of time to exploring the finer areas of West Sussex, although we did have a quick nose around Bognor Regis. One place that we did find was just along the coast, east of Butlins, a small café called The Lobster Pot. In the neighbouring town of Felpham (not to be confused with Feltham) The Lobster Pot serves the most delicious café food, if perhaps a little pricey. However, if you are in the vicinity I would wholeheartedly recommend the walk along the coast. I think we went there every day and the staff were extremely friendly especially to a nosiy little three-year old.

Lucinda’s Uncle David and Auntie Sally (Lucinda’s father’s brother and his wife) live in Middleton-on-sea which is just a couple of miles from Bognor and as I had never visited their house we decided to pop in on the way home. Éowyn and Amélie charmed them, as of course they would. Éowyn, especially took a shine to Uncle David and had him playing in the garden with her and then started calling him Granddad. In fairness to her, Uncle David is a lot like Lucinda’s dad, they are brothers after all and I think there was definitely some of the ‘Kin knows Kin’ subconsciousness type thing going on. So it would be perfectly natural for her to equate them as the same, I think that it shows the love and trust that she has for Lucinda’s dad that she was so familar with a man she has hardly ever met, for she is usually so shy around people.

So back home Wednesday evening, only to prepare for my Uncle Roy’s funeral on Thursday and a round trip to West Bromwich. We took Éowyn and Amélie for it was only a small funeral and I had not seen many of my relatives in such a long time, it is shame that it takes something like the death of a family member to bring us all together. Something that I must try and rectify this year (if only I could get this cloning thing to work). It was nice to introduce Éowyn and Amélie and in some case Lucinda to my wider family, especially since there doesn’t seem to be many of us left. We were slightly delayed leaving as swiper had been up to her usual tricks and hidden mommy’s purse. Fearing that we had left it in Bognor Regis we phoned Butlins, The Lobster Pot, Uncle David and Auntie Sally and the local Bognor Regis Police station. Lucinda then cancelled her bank cards before she noticed where the little thief had hidden it. We will have to watch that one.

So the clocks have sprung forward, we have warm spring-like temperatures and the lawn has finally been mown (or should that be mowed?); summer is on its way and I have detained you long enough, go and enjoy the sunshine.

Peace and Love

Baggie