Today I was listening to radio 4 and a profile of David Hockney who was wandering round North Yorkshire with Andrew Marr. At one point he said that he had spent 30 years away from England because he couldn't stand the long dark nights and grey drabness of the English winters. Well the weather here has been decidedly unseasonal, no snow, just high winds and rain, drab. I know exactly what he means, all the colour is drained out of the days as people shuffle about saying musn't grumble.
Christmas is a way of forgetting about this drabness for a day at least and having a jolly good time, albeit under the influence of as much alcohol as is available. It makes for a jolly good time and yesterday was no exception in the Williams household. We had a full house with Jackies' son and daughter, Jackies' brother and his two daughters. We also had Cats new boyfriend Stuart and Naomi who popped by for an hour. The Christmas lunch was a vegan affair, as Jackies' daughter, Cat is of this persuasion and therefore it's nut roast with all the trimmings, not a bit of dead animal to be seen on our Christmas table. I'm happy to go along with this, well as if I had a choice, as I'm not a big fan of turkey, but I miss those little sausages wrapped in bacon.
Strange thing though, when Jackie opened the fridge today to russle up something for tea she found a plastic container with some leftovers of beef, stuffing, and those little sausages wrapped in bacon. How they ended up in our fridge was a mystery, perhaps brought by one of our guests, and secreted away in our fridge to be taken on somewhere after our party, who knows. Anyway we decided to claim them as they were on our premises, in our fridge and so we had a good old fashioned fry up. With a touch of horse radish sauce it was quite delicious, and a welcome antidote to yesterdays vegan feast. Although, as tasty as Christmas dinner certainly was it's hard to call a vegan meal a feast. Somehow, and call me old fashioned, there's something to be said for exotic meats at feast time. They had it pinned down at those medieval banquets where they went in for quail stuffed inside fowl stuffed inside ducks stuffed inside turkeys covered in layers of bacon, but I digress.
We scoffed the food, drank the bubbly, and the wine, and the gin, and the malt whiskey, had a bit of a sing song and partied till midnight. No one threw up and nobody fell out with anybody, which maybe doesn't count as a real Christmas, perhaps, anyway, a jolly good time had by one and all.
If all goes to plan this could be our last Christmas in England for quite a while. By the end of next summer we hope to have bought ourselves a small yacht and be heading west to our little hideaway in the Dominican Republic. To get there though there is the little obstacle called the Atlantic ocean. The plan is to get ourselves signed up to this thing called the ARC, which stands for Atlantic rally for cruisers. This is an annual event where upwards of 200 boats set sail from the Canaries and head for St Lucia. All the boats are tracked by the organisers with some fancy hi-tech gizzmo stuff and it takes about 20-25 days to complete the crossing. We first spotted this about 4 years ago, before we knew the first thing about sailing and thought it sounded like an adventure. You could join one of the boats for about £3000 pounds, which had proper sailors who looked after stuff whilst we would just be crew and enjoy the ride. A bit of a steep price but what an adventure we thought.
Well, here we are now about to sign up for the 2012 trip in November, but with our own boat. We don't actually have the boat as yet, but hope to sort that out by the Spring this year. Then we have to sail it south to the start in the Canaries and this time next year we'll be celebrating Christmas in St Lucia, or somewhere in the Caribbean. Now won't that be an amazing thing, to sail your own little boat across 3000 miles of ocean, just Jackie and me.
So that's the plan, to escape greyland and have a big adventure, I mean what else would you want to do when you get to 64, well I will be by the time we cast off, and you know what....... I can't wait.
Christmas is a way of forgetting about this drabness for a day at least and having a jolly good time, albeit under the influence of as much alcohol as is available. It makes for a jolly good time and yesterday was no exception in the Williams household. We had a full house with Jackies' son and daughter, Jackies' brother and his two daughters. We also had Cats new boyfriend Stuart and Naomi who popped by for an hour. The Christmas lunch was a vegan affair, as Jackies' daughter, Cat is of this persuasion and therefore it's nut roast with all the trimmings, not a bit of dead animal to be seen on our Christmas table. I'm happy to go along with this, well as if I had a choice, as I'm not a big fan of turkey, but I miss those little sausages wrapped in bacon.
Strange thing though, when Jackie opened the fridge today to russle up something for tea she found a plastic container with some leftovers of beef, stuffing, and those little sausages wrapped in bacon. How they ended up in our fridge was a mystery, perhaps brought by one of our guests, and secreted away in our fridge to be taken on somewhere after our party, who knows. Anyway we decided to claim them as they were on our premises, in our fridge and so we had a good old fashioned fry up. With a touch of horse radish sauce it was quite delicious, and a welcome antidote to yesterdays vegan feast. Although, as tasty as Christmas dinner certainly was it's hard to call a vegan meal a feast. Somehow, and call me old fashioned, there's something to be said for exotic meats at feast time. They had it pinned down at those medieval banquets where they went in for quail stuffed inside fowl stuffed inside ducks stuffed inside turkeys covered in layers of bacon, but I digress.
We scoffed the food, drank the bubbly, and the wine, and the gin, and the malt whiskey, had a bit of a sing song and partied till midnight. No one threw up and nobody fell out with anybody, which maybe doesn't count as a real Christmas, perhaps, anyway, a jolly good time had by one and all.
If all goes to plan this could be our last Christmas in England for quite a while. By the end of next summer we hope to have bought ourselves a small yacht and be heading west to our little hideaway in the Dominican Republic. To get there though there is the little obstacle called the Atlantic ocean. The plan is to get ourselves signed up to this thing called the ARC, which stands for Atlantic rally for cruisers. This is an annual event where upwards of 200 boats set sail from the Canaries and head for St Lucia. All the boats are tracked by the organisers with some fancy hi-tech gizzmo stuff and it takes about 20-25 days to complete the crossing. We first spotted this about 4 years ago, before we knew the first thing about sailing and thought it sounded like an adventure. You could join one of the boats for about £3000 pounds, which had proper sailors who looked after stuff whilst we would just be crew and enjoy the ride. A bit of a steep price but what an adventure we thought.
Well, here we are now about to sign up for the 2012 trip in November, but with our own boat. We don't actually have the boat as yet, but hope to sort that out by the Spring this year. Then we have to sail it south to the start in the Canaries and this time next year we'll be celebrating Christmas in St Lucia, or somewhere in the Caribbean. Now won't that be an amazing thing, to sail your own little boat across 3000 miles of ocean, just Jackie and me.
So that's the plan, to escape greyland and have a big adventure, I mean what else would you want to do when you get to 64, well I will be by the time we cast off, and you know what....... I can't wait.
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