What Happened To June?

So what happened to June? I sit down to blog and realise that it's almost a month since I last posted.

There we were, enjoying the glorious weather with walks down the sands from Walberswick to Dunwich......

  ...... and having a lovely day in Rochester in almost 30 degrees. 

Taking little Theodore to the top of the castle.....

......and enjoying the wonderful views.

And suddenly June was almost over and we were driving up to the caravan in St Andrews in time for family birthdays.

Glorious June became anything but. This was the temperature at 12 noon on or around Midsummer's Day.

The gloomy temperatures were matched with equally gloomy skies but we had a good time. 

We don't see enough of little Rose and Melody.

We went to some great places. Such as The Fairmont St Andrews with its incredible light installation.....

....and we got a window seat for an excellent dinner at the highly acclaimed Seafood Ristorante on a stormy evening with waves battering the coast and surf that would not have looked out of place on Bondi Beach.

I got out with the detector a few times.

The hobby takes me to some beautiful places.

One of my favourite fields was "available" the farmer said.

But trying to detect in these conditions is well nigh impossible.

This is all that turned up

Although there was one find of interest - a James VI eight penny groat.

The highlight of the visit was Rose's birthday. I find it impossible to believe that it was six years ago that we drove like the wind to meet our first grandchild before visiting time ended.

And now she's all grown up.

Her birthday party was mermaid themed and supermum Sarah whipped up a cake in a couple of hours.

The rain stayed away for the party.

On our final day, while Marion and I were wrapped up in anoraks, the girls played happily on the outside trampolines at Cairnie near St Andrews. 

The internet signal was virtually non-existant during this visit - hence the lack of blogging but we're back in Framlingham now and I'm hoping to get back into it.

It was time for a big party on the other side of the family this weekend and over forty kids headed to Tiny Town near Aylesford to enjoy a few hours in the soft play area and a session of shooting "Ghosts" at Theodore and Catherine's joint Ghostbusters themed event.

The ghosts in question were daughter-in-law Josephine as Slimer and son Paul as the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. What a handsome guy!

We saw this parked in Fram at the weekend. It was such a magnificent machine it would not have looked out of place in a movie.

Keen to support our local artistes we decided to go and see Ed Sheeran in concert. We didn't fancy a UK stadium so opted for Vienna next August. After refreshing the screen for almost an hour, my turn finally came and I bought the tickets. It's very refreshing to see the attempts that the promoters are making to stop secondary ticket sales by limiting the number of tickets to four per person (we only bought two) and saying that passport or similar i.d must be presented upon entrance. Looking at the rip-off prices resale ticket sites are asking for a Saturday ticket to Latitude - this sort of policy should be applauded

Bad weather in Scotland meant that at least we could get to the cinema. We found a great little place in Dundee - Dundee Contemporary Arts. It had exhibitions, a very good restaurant and two comfortable screens.

Marion loved the animated movie The Red Turtle. I enjoyed it but it wasn't my favourite.

Yesterday we went to Cineworld in Ipswich to see Baby Driver. We expected great things from this after reading the glowing four and five star reviews. The car chase at the start was fantastic and the way that the entire film was choreographed to the soundtrack was original and entertaining but when you've seen one spectacular car chase, the other two or three in the film became repetitive for us and I'm afraid it didn't blow us away. 

Speaking of five star reviews, "I really enjoyed reading this book" is not exactly a thorough review but, if everybody really enjoys reading my novel, that will certainly do me. If you haven't read them yet, both my novels are available on Kindle this week (until 19th July) for just 99p.