Cut Off

With all the weather scares in the papers and on the television news this week you would be forgiven for thinking that today’s headline precedes a woeful tale of our being stranded in the caravan in sub zero temperatures amidst six foot snow drifts. Nothing as exciting as that I’m afraid; it’s just that the WIFI on the caravan site has packed in due to some closed season maintenance work and we’ve no idea when it might return. As we are the only people daft enough to be living full time in a caravan here at the moment there is not much pressure on them to get it up and running so blogging will be limited to scribbling offline and publishing when we get near a signal.

Speaking of the caravan site, I came across this postcard in an antique centre last week. It was posted in 1979 and shows our current home Craigtoun Meadows in its infancy.

Yesterday saw us head to Edinburgh with Duncan, Sarah and Rose.

Rose was very impressed with the toy selection in John Lewis.

We managed to have a look around the super Edinburgh Christmas market and sample the mulled wine before Sarah and Duncan donned skates for a quick whiz around the temporary ice rink. We ended the day with an excellent fish and chip high tea in the Scottish Café in the nearby art gallery.

We’re heading to Southport on Wednesday to visit my family and then on Thursday it’s down to Framlingham to see how things are progressing with the house. We’re staying in a cottage in Framlingham for five nights. We stayed there last February when we first visited Suffolk on our retirement house hunt. It’s a super, comfortable and modern little barn and owners Dave and Lyn could not have been more helpful.

At the house we hope to see good progress with the decorating and electrics and to see the kitchen finally underway. We’ve got meetings with the landscape gardener, the kitchen project manager and our interior designer Jemima as well as deliveries of furniture and, hopefully a tumble dryer. We’ve also got a party at a neighbours and a trip down to Rochester to see the southern half of the family. It promises to be a very busy but hopefully enjoyable trip.

If you've got a few minutes spare at the weekend, do me a favour and vote for Christopher Maloney to win the X Factor. My betting on the competition has been unsuccessful so far this year after good wins in the past.Bets on MK1 and Kye Sones proved bad choices. My third bet was done slightly tongue in cheek but with him being a scouser who loves his Nan so much I felt that the odds of 100-1 were worth a punt. Now we have Christopher in the final I could lay the bet and recover my losses on the other two but if he were to win I'd have a £1,000 plus windfall to spend this Christmas. As I'll have no WIFI signal on Saturday I'm going to let it ride and hope I get a phone signal so I can vote.