Yule Log 2009

Hello Again, dear Friends and Family

It's a year later and we're all still alive here in Leamington Spa. This is what we've been up to in 2009 (pictures in progress - click on them to enlarge):

JANUARY: The year began in chilly London where Max and Lachlan joined the shivering crowds on the Thames embankment, watching several million pounds of fireworks expire dramatically over the London Eye. Cam joined the Scouting movement as a Beaver, Max was proudly diagnosed with dyslexia and dyspraxia like his older brother, and Lachlan got his first teaching job as a maths tutor to a 10-year-old neighbour. We made a trip to the Royal Albert Hall to see Cirque de Soleil perform their surreal acrobatics. And as the month drew to a close we celebrated Australia Day with our Anglo-Ozzie next-door neighbours and a nostalgic meal of prawns, damper and lamingtons.

FEBRUARY: Snow closed play (actually, work) and our boys rejoiced in a number of days at home throwing snowballs, building snow men and tobogganing down the slopes of the local golf course. Snow drops, those welcome harbingers of spring, were hard to spot as they struggled up through the ice.

Our half-term holiday was spent by Derwentwater, in the Lake District, where there was enough of a thaw to allow us to climb seven Wainwright fells in three days.

Cam turned six and chose a sophisticated lunch at Leamington’s best – and only – sushi restaurant over a party with his classmates.

MARCH: We joined our neighbours for the biannual clean-up of our section of the Grand Union canal: picking up litter, re-locating dog poo, and exhuming old shopping trolleys from the murky depths.

The National Trust re-opened its doors; Alyson was taken on her traditional Mother’s Day cream tea and daffodil jolly; and it was already time to fetch Duncan (and a term's worth of washing) home again.



APRIL: Spring got into full swing and took us with it.
Over the Easter holidays, Alyson and Cameron visited a donkey sanctuary, we had our traditional Easter Sunday in much-loved Kew Gardens,









and on Easter Monday had lunch with friends in Islington, who took us to see the 2012 Olympic site beginning to take shape.

We spent the rest of the week following in the footsteps of Alfred Lord Tennyson, walking long stretches of the southern coast of the Isle of Wight from a well appointed base in Freshwater, but without the company of the Muse.

Did you know that Queen Victoria died in the Isle of Wight? Well neither did we until we got there.




Back home again, Cam threw himself into rehearsals for his first Scout gang show where he appeared as a piano mover in a flat cap so large that nothing was visible from the neck up as he helped (Right Said) Fred haplessly shove a piano from one side of the stage to the other.

MAY: The sun shone, and the woods, fields, parks and gardens were overtaken by colour and chlorophyll, as ever.
We were moved to visit the furthest tip of Cornwall for a few days to admire the

gardens, tramp the coastal paths, and contemplate possible retirement in or around Alyson’s Penzance gene pool.





JUNE: Deep in the fens, Duncan delightedly triumphed in his first year examinations and attended his first (and second) May Ball held, as custom demands, in June.

Alyson was undiagnosed with thyroid eye disease and returned to wondering why, oh why, her eyes no longer move properly together or apart, and why she sees not just two of everything but now four (making way too many children). On the last day of the month we trained down to London for the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition, one of the intellectual highlights of our year, where we get to spend a whole day in elegant surroundings talking to enthusiastic research teams about their work.

JULY: Max bussed across the channel with his art class to spend an exciting week in Paris exploring the galleries, the food and the locals.



Once the school year had come to an end we decamped immediately and at once to Cornwall to take possession of a cliff-top National Trust cottage on the Lizard peninsula
before the high-season prices began to bite. We walked, walked, walked, swam, flew kites,






and walked some more all around this magnificent southern-most tip of England.


Like the dragon in Rosemary Manning's Green Smoke, we love Kynance Cove (above) best of all.











AUGUST: Alyson had a birthday and just managed not to turn 50. We spent much of it in the Regents Park open-air theatre enjoying an energetic and charming production of Hello Dolly.











Duncan did, rather reluctantly, turn 21 and promised to try not to lose the key of the door. We celebrated the occasion in the depths of the Cotswolds in the company of his Mammon and Brain fathers, family, and those of his friends who were not on holiday in far-flung places — the downside of being born in the middle of August.



Max and Lachlan returned tanned and happy from their annual sojourn in Wasdale, climbing up and down fells, sinking into bogs, and jumping off bridges. Without pausing for breath they packed their carpet bags and morphed into teenaged super-nannies for a week, looking after the impeccably behaved sons of some good friends in Wiltshire. Cam enjoyed several days at Mad Science “camps”, while Mum and Dad were at work, making smells, bangs and satisfyingly gooey long-chain polymers. Trevor developed kidney stones and now has a keener appreciation of what women go through in childbirth.

SEPTEMBER: Before the school year began we spent a day at Broadstairs in Kent, reliving the seaside holidays of Trevor’s youth. Charles Dickens’ Bleak House loomed over us as we built sand castles, desported ourselves in end-of-season deck chairs, and tried to pretend it wasn’t raining.

On the return journey, we stopped off in Canterbury, and learnt that the Archbishop is subservient to the Dean when it comes to cathedral matters.



Duncan hitch-hiked all the way to Dundee in a day, and then worked his way back down to London via the Edinburgh festival. Lachlan started at Castle Sixth Form College in Kenilworth, Max returned to Year 13 (his final one) at Trinity School in Leamington, and Cameron went into Year 2 at Clapham Terrace Primary (where we are pleased to report he loves his teachers and is currently very happy). Alyson worked day and night producing a database for the Further Maths Support Programme, a successor to the wonderful Further Maths Network which has helped restore mathematics to its rightful place in the English A-level constellation. Trevor began his second year working for sigma, the maths support initiative at Coventry University.



OCTOBER: We discovered Geocaching, a satellite-powered form of orienteering which allows you to hunt world-wide caches of ‘treasure’ with the aid of a hand-held GPS. Duncan returned to Cambridge to start his second year as an anthropologist. Trevor turned 73 and the next day we jumped on a cheap Ryanair flight to Tuscany to spend a week of sunshine in a deliciously mellowed mediaeval villa – complete with dovecote bedroom for Cam. We climbed the leaning tower of Pisa, saw the mountain sunset from the walls of Volterra, fell in love with the towers and gelati of San Gimignano, stumbled into a costumed games convention in Lucca, dipped our toes in the blue Mediterranean, and contentedly sipped our grappa as the leaves turned gold in the Tuscan vineyards. In fairness, we should add that collectively and/or individually we also got sick, got sick of each other, deeply and obviously mourned missing a Halloween party back in Leamington, couldn’t see the views because of double/triple/quadruple vision, went on a long guidebook walk along an ancient pilgrims’ way now utilised by heavy traffic, got lost in the hire car, etc, etc. But the first version is by far the nicest so we’re going to stick with that.

NOVEMBER: Max started driving lessons. Duncan was voted President of the Robinson College Students Association and succeeded in getting sanitary bins into the women’s toilets (though not yet the men’s). He also launched his literary career writing for Varsity, the Robinson Brick, The Tab (Cambridge’s new and supposedly satirical online tabloid) and the College pantomime.

DECEMBER: And here we are in December. We have dutifully watched a stageful of six-year-olds with tea towels on their heads, eaten 120 mince pies, cut down a fir tree, and stuck several hundred cloves into unsuspecting oranges to make the house smell festive. On Wednesday we go to our favourite candle-lit Ex Cathedra carol concert (go out and buy a CD) and on Saturday we’re lined up for Sandi Toksvig’s Christmas Crackers at the Royal Festival Hall, where she’s going to put Ronnie Corbett on top of the tree. The yule logs are already burning in both fireplaces – we don’t know how Father Christmas is going to arrive unharmed but so far he has always found a way.

Merry Christmas from us all...:
Alyson, Trevor, Duncan, Maxwell, Lachlan and Cameron