2006 January to March

It's the end of the year and rather than let everything that happened fade away into distant memories, I thought I would make a note of them here in case I bang my head and get amnesia and forget who I am and what I have been doing for the last year. Here's January to March.

January was our first time in Scotland celebrating Burns night. The local church put on an impressive feast of haggis, neeps and tatties and accompanied it with various people reading Burn's poems. I didn't undersatnd a word but it was all very cultural and helped me understand the natives. At the kids school the whole school celebrated living in Scotland (as opposed to being Scottish which would have excluded half of us now living here). Isabelle (pictured below) got to do a song and dance at the Scottish Evening which was torture using the repeated reciting of Auld Langs...and Flower of Scotland using out of tune instruments and tone deaf children.


February according to my diary is an uneventful month and none of us can remember anything of significance happening. We got roped into doing a clean up in the local woods. Earlier in the year we had seen a bigcat in there. Not a domestic type..a proper wild one...a panther we think. Secretly we were hoping to find its lair, but instead all we found was a load of rubbish. Still it was good to get involved and this photo of us all appeared in the local paper.
We were still doing the Cross Country races and here is a picture of Isabelle at Berwick on Tweed on a cold and frosty morning and me in the river at Peebles.




March was the start of spring and the changing landscape is impressive. I was away for a week with Isabelle's year group to York. This meant spending a week with 100 9-10 year olds touring all the sights of York. I have been a regular visitor to York through camp stuff. We used to have the reunions there but rarely have I bothered to see the sights. The attraction of the pubs on Micklegate usually outdid the need to visit the Minster and after a pint of Theakstons OP I never did manage to see the York walls. This trip made up for lost time and by the end of the week I never wanted to see a museum shop ever again or hear about Viking toilet habits. Whilst we were there camp and Dunbar made a connection through Chris Wooldridge who is in charge of opening the walls and at camp collecting rubbish. The teachers had heard Chris on the radio on Radio 4's Home Truth's and to our amazement we actually bumped into the local celebrity the next day. Click the link to hear more about Chris. Here is a picture of us on the Ghost Walk in York....oooooh!