Our trip to England

We usually visit England in December to see the girls and Pam's father and maybe (if time permits) catch up with some friends.

So that is where we have been for the last week.We stayed at Laura and Dave's house in Sale.

Laura and Dave only moved in last week so there were plenty of jobs for me to do. One job, which was down to BT, was to establish their ADSL connection. The fact that it wasn't done is why there haven't been any postings to this blog since last Friday.

The company in England was warm.

We had a fabulous time with Laura and Dave who looked after us very well. We were also pleased to see Pam's father who we are glad to say is well.

Whilst we were over visiting Pam's father, we took the opportunity to visit our great friends, Hugh, Angela and Andrew. We all went out to the local restaurant for a pre-Christmas meal which Hugh very naughtily paid for.

We also had a chance to catch up with our other daughter Jemma and her boyfriend Jamie.

Whilst the company was warm, that is more than you could say for the weather. When it was dry it was frosty but pleasant, when it rained it was just wet and miserable.

The worst thing we noticed was how few hours of daylight there were. That was something we had forgotten about . It wasn't light until about 8am and then started to go dark at 3pm - some days it was just dark all day. On those occasions we had the lights on in the house from the moment we got up to when we went to bed.

By the time it had got to Thursday, my joints were aching and I was coming down with a cold. I spent most of Friday daytime asleep getting over the awful night's sleep I'd just had which meant I missed an exhausting shopping trip into Manchester with Pam, Laura, Jemma and Jamie.

After that chilling experience, I won't be rushing back to England during Winter. Forget White Christmas - give me sunshine any day.