A Christmas letter from Link Cottage
December 2006
2006 began quietly but muddily, i.e., excellent off-road running conditions! In fact, running has been good this year, with best times in some events for four or five years. Something must be working!
At Crook Peak I was first lady and won the much coveted chocolate cake. This is an honour I had longed for! The lucky male and female winners each receive a cake and two seconds later are presented with a large knife with which to cut and share the prize with the other runners. That’s what running is all about! (It also helps to top up the wine cellar if I’m lucky.) Peter too has been running a bit, but has achilles’problems so spends more time biking, off road of course.
The orchard at Brent Knoll race, November 2006 (3rd lady)
Family highlights this year have included the wedding of our niece, Lottie, to another Peter. The wedding was held in Devon and we rented a holiday property at Dittisham which was roomy enough for Katherine, Dan, Emily and Charlie; Sarah, Jacob and James, and Peter and me. Emily was flower girl. What a star. We had a great week, with biking and hiking and zipping around on ferries and steam trains. The littles enjoyed being by the water and paddled and fished for crabs.
The following weekend was Peter’s sister’s 50th party, held on a riverboat from Marlow. On this occasion we met up with the other side of the family – lots of Peter’s relations with whom it was good to swap stories after long time no see
.
Peter’s work has taken him to Rome, where I joined him for a warm and sunny and oh so historic weekend. It just wasn’t long enough. Rome is not just what you see on the ground — in places it goes down for several centuries, millennia even, so exploring takes longer than anticipated. We were hardly unpacked from Rome when we set off to spend Easter trekking in Wadi Rum desert in Jordan, where we also visited Petra, which is somewhat awesome (and hot!).
This was really interesting and we were in excellent company and fantastic scenery. We slept under the stars. When you woke in the night you could trace the path of the Plough overhead: magic.
At the end of August we spent a week or so in North Wales where the weather was, well, Welsh!, but this didn’t stop us from tackling some of the peaks that were still visible under the clouds and as we had taken our bikes we had plenty to do. We also went to Andalucía and stayed a couple of nights with friends we had made in Jordan. This included a good long walk with our friends in the Sierra Nevada and some excellent food. We returned to the Alhambra which is a “must see” if you have never been there and did a few more hikes. It is good walking/scrambling country. One of these days I will feel fluent in Spanish with which I am still persisting.
Helen and I again did the Karrimor, this year in Galloway, which we must now call the OMM or Original Mountain Marathon, as the principal sponsor is Vango. We were very late in on day one and had our worse (minus) score ever. I hope we don’t get blacklisted! If it is any consolation, Ranulph Fiennes got timed out on day one (but he was doing a tougher class). The club’s big race was this month and we have also helped at Beacon Batch and the Mendip Muddle in timekeeping and competing.
The other major bit of news is that I took early retirement but am currently working one-third time at the University. In my “spare” time I work two days as a volunteer for the National Trust on conservation work, i.e., cutting down and burning brambles and trees that encroach the grassland. The group also checks Exmoor ponies (which are supposed to help sustain the grasslands), mends walls, fences, gates and stiles, picks up skipfuls of other people’s rubbish and we have a lot of fun, come rain or shine.
Peter has just completed a term at the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge. I joined him for a few days on a couple of occasions and we took advantage of being away from Somerset to cycle round parts of Cambridge we had not visited for years. We visited the Thetford Forest and the Brecks: flat but windy!
and here are our delightful grandchildren.
We’ll be visiting the English ones very soon and looking forward to seeing them immensely.
We plan to be in Canada next summer. Sarah has just landed a new job working for le president of Canada Poste. It sounds very high powered!
First snow in Ottawa
Emily and Charlie