Christmas 2025

This year the robin has migrated to Wordpress

 I'm having trouble loading photos to this Blog, presumably some feature upgrade  is responsible.  

Christmas 2024

Grand Days Out

Our New Years's Day walk on the Mam Tor Ridge, Derbyshire

Penny finally took retirement in May, so time to address the items on our "Book-it list". This year we ticked-off some modest ones: Lea Gardens (fabulous blooms in quite large gardens); Bishop Auckland museums; Bowes museum  for a mixture of the sublime silver swan (watch from 5:29 at the very least) and grotesque tat; David Austen Roses (very impressive again, but small scale); a visit to Birmingham to view the fabulous Byrne-Jones stained glass windows in Birmingham Cathedral, as well as spotting decorative architecture that has survived modernisation thus far. Destinations for the future include Sicily, but recommendations are welcome.

To mess with this romantic concept of doing things together; after some "training walks" in both Bristol and Derbyshire (including another Ukraine scouting group walk around Lyme), I completed a walk across the Pyrenees in two stages; the highlights being fabulous alpine vistas and wild flowers. The low points were hot valleys and some days of cloud and rain. Penny stayed home, apart from a visit with Rowena in July, then meeting up in Girona after the end.

 

Higger Tor from Carl Wark, Peak District

I still go out for longer walks on my own in the Peak District. In November we made a start on a long distance walk that we will do together in sections: the GM Ringway. 

My 250th Parkrun was completed in February, but I am not sure that my knees will ever recover sufficiently from the Pyrenees trip to allow me to progress much further.

The children came back home! So we had to make space

Rowena left her job in Madrid in July in order to take up teacher training in Manchester in September. She is enjoying her school placements and participating in a women's football team. With much shorter notice Clara came back from Bristol in August to start a new job locally, again with the National Trust. She's absolutely loving the new "community engagement" job, tasked with creating wildlife ponds alongside school & community groups, and actually in charge of a significant budget. Clara took up a place in a shared house about 3 miles away in early October. 

With two Spanish visitors in August, we had a massive house clear-out in July to free up bedroom space. Interesting what you can find to throw out that had languished untouched for so long. Selling a 30-year old pair of boots on Ebay for £50 was quite the surprise. Other beneficiaries included local Scouts, charity shops and our local free bookshop. 

April 2024 Solar Eclipse; Toronto & Niagara:

With Storm Kathleen creating logistical havoc on 6th April, it took us 12 hours to fly to Toronto via London instead of via Dublin. Nick (my brother Owen's brother-in-law) generously drove us to Niagara Falls on 7th and gave us a walking tour around the main attractions on a gloriously sunny day. 

The 9th of April was another blue-skies day, but we got wet anyway. 

In contrast, Eclipse Day on 8th April, was heavily overcast until late afternoon. We took a bus North to the botanical gardens to join the select few who also wanted to get away from a very crowded Niagara Falls area. Everything went dark for 4 minutes; the birds went a bit bonkers; the horizon all around  glowed like a bright sunrise. Just after totality the clouds thinned slightly to show a slowly enlarging crescent of Sun. 

The Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto is quite something: the Canadian Indigenous culture and Natural History are outstanding, with a world-class interpretative display of fossils from the Burgess Shale.

The Eternal Sudoku puzzle

I took a trip to Berlin at the start of June to attend the European Society of Human Genetics conference.  This coincided with a trip there by Clara and we took a guided tour around the Berlin Wall sites. The lectures I attended were fabulous: Svante Pääbo's lecture on Paleogenetics;  seeing things that were largely uncharacterised 10 years ago that are now better understood and making real contributions to medical care. I tried to advertise my work by sitting on the EMQN stand, by invitation, with some leaflets. I had just one decent lead, but that has now fizzled out, without any explanation from the other side. Still occasionally tinkering amid the Python, but losing my enthusiasm particularly after a Biopython update crashed the source; apparently it's my fault that something which has worked for years now fails.

Goodbye to Marley

Marley, one of our beloved black cats, died September 9th, age 12. I had taken him to the vet surgery in the morning. He had been somewhat subdued in the previous couple of weeks, showing rapid breathing. After tests, the Vet wanted to tranquillise him for some x-rays. I didn't feel happy leaving him while this was happening. The diagnosis was fluid on lungs and heart, so prescribed diuretics. He seemed OK once I got him home and he trotted off happily to the garden. I had instructions to remove a bandage on his leg that had held a canula in place. Handling him to do so triggered what is now a traumatic memory: he started frothing at the mouth and struggling to breath. He died shortly after, and it took me weeks to get over the grief and feeling of remorse. But I have rehearsed happy memories of him which helps. We buried him in the garden with "full honours", on a bed made of items of clothing from each of the four of us, including a pair of my underpants.

 

Where's my dinner?

Gardening and jam making:

Marmalade again in January; not particularly good despite the significant effort required. Plenty of garden-blackcurrants to share again in June, but I pushed off on the walk to Spain so had no time to make any jam. I made a good harvest of locally-picked blackberries in August and some decent jam.

The plum and nearby damson tree yielded nothing this very wet and cool year. With the Pyrenees walk I missed harvesting the apples at the right time, meaning more for the squirrels and microorganisms. The small number of russets saved were excellent though. Pink fir apple potatoes in pots did quite well with this weather.  

After the wonderful alpine wild flowers in the Pyrenees, I bought some seeds of hemiparasitic yellow rattle, which grew in profusion in the Pyrenees, to plant in old vegetable plots that I can no longer maintain because of my ruined knees & back. The backup is growing some seed in small plug-sets alongside grass seed as a host, which seems mildly evil.

Visiting parents

I have managed more than "once every three months" trips this year. Admittedly one was to attend the funeral of Auntie Tessie, my Dad's cousin. Interesting again to met the many extended-family relatives that I haven't seen in quite some time. Some were small children or teenagers when I last saw them; now grown up. It was a bit of a revelation to see how much affection there was for my Dad as he & Tessie were "close", having shared a childhood home for a few years. I suppose I hadn't seen it like this, but family holidays as a child, social events and family celebrations were spent with several of these people. We are having a 90th-birthday party for my parents on 7th December, with some of these same family invited. 

We also go to North Wales about once every six weeks or so to visit Penny's Mum, which is usually accompanied by gardening or house DIY fixes and maybe a walk on the way out or back.

Happy Christmas 2024

Covent Garden 6th Dec 2024

Christmas 2023

It's been a long break since I last did one of these, but I am late with Christmas cards this year after "family issues" and falling ill with the lurge, so here goes. This Blogger format is not a good one for putting photos in. I had intended to put more of the everyday in. You will have to do with links to the intermittent and scattered contemporaneous blogs below.

This photo is from a Christmas Party in 2022 organised by our Ukrainian guest Nataliia - I put on a "magic" show. The "magic" was Mobius strips and flexagons. Some people were fascinated and I am sure the kids were just baffled. I had hours and hours of absorbing pseudo-creativity preparing the paper strips. 

  

In February I went to Valencia when Rowena had a wisdom tooth out. Any excuse for a a few walks though. Less happily I had a phone call with the news that Mum had a heart attack and was in hospital. My long-suffering (and I mean: he's a bloody hero) brother Owen then provided full-time care for Dad, and then both of them for a few weeks at my parents' flat. I did a mere week, but living quite a long way away*, I cannot frequently help. 

In April, over the Easter weekend, a trip to the Isle of Wight with Penny and Clara. I did a bike ride from Bristol to Bournemouth just beforehand.

May marked the start of my 10th year of retirement! In 2014 I saw it as "a gift of time". Well, I have done quite a lot I think: several long walking trips; finished the Munros; four house clearances; a programming development project now in its 5th year that has received no commercial or academic interest beyond nice words of encouragement. I haven't done much this year, but I basically need to pack it up and put it in the public domain or it will become my permanent Sudoku puzzle.

Our street had a Coronation street-party, less than a year after the Platinum Jubilee party. Very Groundhog Day really. 

In June Penny and I marked 25 years of marriage by a trip to our favourite location: the stretch of coast between Robin Hoods's bay and Ravenstor. Fabulous weather, wild flowers and walks on the beach.

I took members of Nataliia's Ukraine scouting group on a day walk around Hebden Bridge. An old school friend, Jon Owen, joined me for a chat at our lunch break.

In July, a 3 week return to Iceland (links to blog) to trek in the lesser-visited far Northwest, and the classic Laugavaur trek. The former had abundant orchids and other interesting flora, the latter a march through fields of ash!

yes, the hat looks daft

An unexpected bonus was the Litli-Hrutur eruption that began about two days after I arrived, Rowena flew out from Spain to join me on a trek to see it live. While I was away, Nataliia and Masha moved out to a flat nearby, with Masha's older brother joining them.

Rowena returned to Manchester from Valencia University, graduating with a Masters in translation, but left again in August to take up a full time job in Madrid. So the house was quiet again once more.

In September, I unwittingly selected "the hottest week of the year" to walk The Ridgeway  (links to blog)  I thought I had set myself a moderately challenging agenda of daily distance, but with several successive days officially exceeding 30C when I was walking on unshaded lanes, this was little short of madness. 

Penny reached her 60th birthday in September, and the four of us went to the South of France, staying in Maresille, Avignon & Menton. Once again, unseasonably high temperatures made this something of a daily challenge to reach spectacular sights like Pont Du Gare, Canalaques, and Grand Monte on the French/Italian border. Penny, Clara and I travelled all the way there & back by train.

The Roman Aqueduct at Pont Du Gare

I took a stopover in London on the way back to see New Scientist Live at Olympia, taking in a view of the nearby Thames Barrier for the first time.

In November, partly to make up for the Ridgeway disappointment, and inspired by a short visit to Whitby in October, I took a few days walking "The Jurassic Coast" of Devon & Dorset, as recorded in my cakewalks blog

Masha & Nataliia, came for dinner on 2nd December, where Masha enthusiastically decorated our Christmas tree and declared my home-made trifle "the best trifle I have ever eaten". 

Our usual pre-Christmas treat of a visit to London included taking my Mum and Dad to lunch on Mum's 89th birthday. 

Then a visit to Tate Moderns to see "Infinity Rooms". As good as they were, the plurality implied by the title, only reached the minimum quantity to qualify, no more. A pity because they were rather impressive and there was room in the vast space for at least two more. A second immersive experience that had several more rooms, was The War of The Worlds. Set in a Victorian London under attack by invaders intent on destroying everything, it was hard not to think of current Earthly World events.

Gardening and jam making:

For the last several years I have grown potatoes and beans. The hot & dry weather and constant watering demanded in 2022 put me off this year. So, of course it was different this year. But I got a decent harvest of blackcurrants, gooseberries and plums: so many that I invited a neighbour to share and made jam with each.  The oddest though was my 2022 discovery of a lone, very productive, damson tree with which I made lots of jam. This year, after repeated visits to this tree I only recovered 700g of fruit, popping the small gleanings of each visit in the freezer. This gave me 3 jars of the fruitiest, jam ever. Plenty of apples too: no russets last year, but some good ones this.

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* I get to see them about every 3 months now, after they chose to move from living just a 5-minutes-walk away from me in December 2019. They will think I somehow harbour a grudge by recording this, but in terms of sheer practicality, moving away was the daftest decision they could have made. I am frustrated that what was obvious to me, seemed less so to everyone else when they announced their move "back" to Hertfordshire without asking my opinion. The reason given (to me) was "the traffic on the roads is too busy in Manchester". 

Penny and I had committed to doing whatever was necessary to provide care for them when M&D moved nearby in December 2016. The frequency of their needs (doctors visits eg: specialist eye appointments) had begun to increase in frequency in the year before they left. This when Dad's ability to drive was already at danger levels, and I had refused to be a passenger in the car for several years. After Mum's heart attack this year and understandable lack of enthusiasm to drive, with Dad's now-awful eyesight he was finally persuaded to give up ownership of the car entirely this year. 

Owen is regularly at Mum & Dad's several times a week taking them to medical appointments of various sorts.  It takes him 45 minutes travel each way from where he lives; quite a burden that.

I have decided that I am going to stop driving once I reach 70, to give me time to get used to the idea and managing without it. 

Christmas round robin 2018

January
The knee-flogging for 2018 got off to an early start with two Park Runs on New Year's Day: Stretford & Sale Water Park, and cycling between the two.

As cold as it looks

A resolution to do a substantial walk at least twice a week until the Big Walk, starting with a crisp, cold one from Mam Tor with SWOG

Taking High Tea ... in the Beetham Tower

A great time of year for watching wildlife programmes, popular with all the family

Much preparatory work for the End-to-End (E2E): footpaths and road-connections on mapping software, saving in various versions on blog, Google maps. Lists of possible place to stay en route.

February
More walking, you get the idea

The Roaches

Macclesfield canal

Printing the E2E route to paper in sections, getting parcels ready to send (documented elsewhere). Taking Clara on practice drives still.

March
My biggest online treat of 2018 has to be this:

Not mincing your words

I decided Trump could easily get ditched by his own party, once he had served 2 years because:
a) Pence would be able to take over for the last 2 years and still run for two further terms
b) Poor mid-term results (Nov 18) would make this easier
c) Impeachment grounds would be the undeclared election expenses paying off two women to remain silent over his "affairs" with them.
While this looks more obvious in December 2018, I gave the above opinion to Mark B on 18th April If I turn out to be right,  he'll be the only one able to back me up!

25th March - 2nd June
From the Bottom to the Top: 850 miles from The Lizard to Peebles, after I completed about 2/3 of the intended route:

It was, mostly, an exhilarating experience, especially along the Cornish Coast Path and Pennine Way, if a little tedious traversing Staffordshire. Tellingly the other "best days" were when walking with others rather than the lonely plods.

Doing this meant I abandoned Penny to deal with all matters arising: from Clara taking her driving test (the day I left for Bristol) to the trauma of A level exams. Clara had to re-take her driving test, so Penny took the many more evenings of driving practice. Guilty.

June
First a longish rest from walking, trying to adapt to a life back at home, then a raid on 3 Munros during some very warm, humid days. Mheall Ghaordaidh a remote slog, Beinn Sgulaird a lovely high ridge walk, Ben More on Mull a horse-fly sauna on a still day, but with a most enjoyable arrete forming a NNE ridge descent.

The NNE ridge from Ben More towards A' Chioch

Stunning sunsets in Oban

July

3rd July, Manchester Arena - a true spectacle for Pink Floyd fans

Time

Roger Waters

Clara went Inter-railing and Rowena went to Malawi, so Penny & I became trainee "empty nesters"

A rare day of summer rain

We volunteered to help on the National Vegetable Society's stall at the RHS Flower Show, Tatton Show.  To people visiting the stall I was a veg expert, offering expertise with such gems as "don't refrigerate tomatoes" and the difference between F1 and F2 (the usefulness of a genetics degree).

Clara came with me to test a walk when she got back

August
My previous meeting with Jon was ... about 40 years ago. We had a lot to catch up on.

A trip to pick up Rowena from Heathrow. I stopped overnight in London Colney with Des, then visited Geoff & Pauline in Colney Heath. A brief stopover waiting at Runnymeade: the peacefulness of the river as the 'planes roared nearby.
                         

As the dry, hot, summer continued, we watered the garden each evening using salvaged shower-room water, with a little help from Heath Robinson

From shower waste-outlet into barrels

Overflow mode

Rowena, Clara & I went to the Edinburgh Festival for a few days. A mixed bag, once again, of good and (mostly) disappointing performances. Clara & I rounded off with a walk to Arthur's Seat and the Camera Obscura.

Then a trip to Bristol to install Rowena in her student house.After a long break from walking, there came a day when I just had to get out or go mad ... a favourite being the circuit around the head of Hope Valley

Mam Tor from Rushup

September

A day out at "Manchester Bee in the City" 

A week in Madeira: a whale watching boat trip, a couple of walks in the mountains and some long bus rides around the island.

Some narrow lavada paths with big drops, mostly unfenced, in spectacular valleys

 

As if that wasn't enough for one month, the finale of Munro-bagging with friends was next: Stuc a' Chroin and Ben Vorlich followed by food, a party and the most fabulous CAKE!!! baked & decorated by Clara.

October

Clara "I'm not going to university" took an extended trip to London, experiencing the pleasures & pains of shift-working as a restaurant "runner", and a course in dressmaking on Saturdays.

November

If it isn't obvious by now, I like a long walk, and it was time for another, so I took off for 8 days on the South Downs Way

and back to helping at a "Code Club" at a nearby primary school. 30 pupils in a small ICT suite was madness on day1

December

In September I was invited to join "Replicon Genetics, a biotech startup, as a developer. Let's see how that goes in the long run. For now it's a bit like returning to my undergraduate days of hobbyist programming. This time it's Python not BASIC & FORTRAN, but still DNA sequences. As an indirect consequence I happened to be passing the cat cafe in Liverpool

Dunham Massey garden is, dubiously, decked out with a "Winter Wonderland"