22nd March 2024

Sue and I met up with Charlotte and her family at Sarah’s for a Palmer family meal. Jamie and Ruth were in Cambridge for the weekend, celebrating Ruth’s birthday with a performance of Sleuth at the Cambridge Arts Theatre.

Sarah and Lee had prepared a delicious Mexican meal for us all to enjoy, and afterwards we moved on to the obligatory board games, as the sisters always insist. Alice made the most of having her grandparents around, doing jigsaws and playing a game of Fairy Snap.

Archie was a little overwhelmed by the company at first, but soon settled and enjoyed being cuddled. Sue and I stayed until Alice and Archie’s bedtime, at which point Alice promptly informed Grandad it was time to go and kindly escorted me to the car.

It was a lovely evening and a real pleasure to enjoy another Friday night with the family, something we missed so much during the Covid years.

23rd March 2024
Sarah and her family attended the 1st Newbold Verdon Scout Group’s Easter Fayre, where Sarah sold her plaster cast moulds. Alice was delighted to win the Easter Bonnet competition.

27th March 2024
With rain forecast for each day over the next fortnight, we took charge of Nala and Rocky while Jamie, Ruth, and Joey are away on holiday in China and Vietnam. The previous evening, Jamie had briefly called in to drop off his rabbits, which we settled in the greenhouse, before heading into Harborough for a meal with friends.

Before the dogs and the rain arrived in the afternoon, I managed to plant up a dozen tubs of potatoes using the seed potatoes I’d bought on Monday, which were already getting rather leggy. It’s a bit of a gamble against a late frost, but since they’re in the garden, I can cover them if necessary (assuming we’re not away!). I also planted five rows of onion sets at the allotment and a few shorter rows in one of the raised beds in the garden.

28th March 2024
On a cold and damp day, we had a surprise visit from Sarah, Alice, and Archie. They had been visiting their friend Chloe in Medbourne and called in for coffee on the way home. Unfortunately, Sarah was rather preoccupied, having lost her wedding ring. At first, she suspected it might have slipped off while tidying the garden over the weekend, but after a thorough search with a metal detector yielded nothing, she began to think it may have ended up in the batch of plaster she mixed for the Scout Fayre. She was in the process of contacting those who had bought moulds to see if anything had turned up.

29th March 2024
After a couple of days of travelling, including a one-day stopover in Beijing, Jamie and his family finally made it to Vietnam. Having visited China several times during his childhood and teenage years, he found this experience markedly different and was unimpressed with the current regime. He messaged:

“Two days of travelling and finally made it to Vietnam. China was an absolute joke! WiFi is banned, Google is banned, Gmail, WhatsApp, and Visa bank cards are all banned. Nothing works if you come from a Western country.”

How things have changed since we visited that fascinating country.

Coincidentally, I noticed that on the very day Jamie arrived in China, my blog was accessed twice from within the country. Am I just being suspicious, or were the authorities checking up on my son?

31st March 2024

The family gathered again for lunch on Easter Sunday, this time at Charlotte’s. After a morning spent unwrapping and hunting down an absurd number of chocolate eggs in Newbold Verdon, Sarah and her family joined Sue and me in Rothwell for the celebration. We’d left Rocky and Nala at home to amuse themselves in the kitchen with their toys and some treats, four dogs around a dinner table is simply too many for comfort.

Since Sue now has an electric bike, we had offered her old pedal bike to Sarah several months ago. This was the first opportunity to hand it over, though I had to remove the front wheel for it to fit in my little Fiesta.

Charlotte, ever generous, had been up since 5 a.m. preparing the meal for us all, with Suraj lending a hand later on. As expected, it was a superb spread for the ten of us and two dogs. The main course of lamb, chicken, pigs in blankets, roast potatoes, new potatoes, peas, stuffing, broccoli, parsnips, and carrots was cooked to perfection. Traditionally, one element tends to be forgotten in the flurry of preparation, and this year it was the carrots, which remained forlorn in the pan.

Dessert was a delicious serving of roasted pear in honey and brown sugar, accompanied by ice cream and washed down with a very acceptable sparkling wine.

Fully satiated, we then played Pin the Tail on the Easter Bunny, aptly won by Alice, followed by several rounds of Rummikub, which Charlotte fittingly dominated.

Meanwhile, continuing their adventure in Vietnam, Jamie, Ruth, and Joey caught a sleeper train to their next stop: a homestay with a local family on a rural farm.

 

 

 

 

 

3rd March 2024
Jamie, Ruth, and Joey are packing in the activities thick and fast during their time in Vietnam. The photographs they share daily on Family Messenger show just how much they’re enjoying themselves; it all looks wonderfully vibrant and exciting. The weather appears to be in stark contrast to the wet and blustery conditions we’re enduring back in the UK.

They’ve now reached Hạ Long Bay, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of Vietnam’s most iconic travel destinations, located in Quảng Ninh province. The name Hạ Long means “descending dragon”, a fittingly dramatic title for such a breathtaking landscape.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

7th March 2024

On a weekend when Storm Kathleen swept in from the west, bringing high winds and temperatures creeping above 20°C, Jamie, Ruth, and Joey returned to the UK. They flew into Heathrow late on Saturday night and collected their animals, who had been holidaying with us, on Sunday lunchtime. With the house returned to its usual state, I spent the afternoon planting another couple of rows of potatoes, while Sue went to a film showing at Harborough Theatre.

Just before the weekend, the small laptop I usually take on trips abroad decided it needed an update, so I allowed it. Maddeningly, upon rebooting, it triggered Microsoft’s BitLocker, a Windows security feature that encrypts entire drives to protect data from theft or exposure. To get it working again, I needed a sixteen-digit recovery key… which I didn’t have! As luck would have it, Sue and I are travelling to Albania later this week and had planned to take that very laptop with us. Fortunately, on Thursday, en route to Kettering to buy some trousers, I dropped the machine off with Suraj. Heroically, by Saturday morning, he had rebuilt it with a new operating system and returned it to us, crisis averted.

8th March 2024
First thing this morning, I had my haircut, followed by coffee with Jim Hankers. I then spent the remainder of the morning preparing the propagators for seed sowing on Wednesday, before heating a flavoursome bowl of parsnip soup that Sue had made a few days earlier.

Sue, meanwhile, had embarked on a postponed local ramble with her friend Sue, who was recovering from a bout of the sniffles. During a blustery afternoon, I entertained Sean in the garden room with more coffee and a few nibbles, while Sue, fresh from her morning exercise, began the task of packing her suitcase for our upcoming holiday.

Elsewhere in the UK, people were preparing themselves for a glimpse of the solar eclipse. Sue’s sister Philippa and her husband Paul, both keen umbraphiles, had flown out to Texas last week to witness the phenomenon firsthand. The next total eclipse will be visible in 2026, sweeping across the Arctic, eastern Greenland, northern Spain, and Iceland. I wonder which vantage point they’ll choose next?