Memories and so on ...

Hi all

Today I'm a cricket widow - been a footie widow, would have been a tennis widow but there wasn't much coverage here, and I'm sometimes even a bull-fighting widow! At least today Pete's playing himself, not just watching the pro's. He's been out playing an away match somewhere near Alicante and I don't expect him back much before 10.00. Amy's in bed though not asleep and Jess and Beth offered to do the supper dishes (I'm not one to refuse that!) so I have some peaceful time I hope.

Enjoyed the recent messages from you all. What a time you have had mum and dad, all over the mainland just about. Sorry about the ferry though. Pete was obviously quite young when you all went on the 'band' trip but he had plenty of comments of his own on reading the various memories that Steve sparked off. I remember we used to go to Cornwall to the house of one of dad's cousins for our holidays until the summer we moved to Chinnor (Aug. 1967?), when the move itself took the place of the holiday that year. We were in Cornwall - right down near Land's End if I remember rightly - when my first tooth came out ... going back a bit, eh? That's enough of my dim and distant past.

In the not so distant past, in Botswana, we had most of our cats. As you've read from Beth's message, the girls do miss having pets but we can't have any in our present situation. Our first was a kitten who mewed outside our door asking to be adopted, and we kindly (foolishly?) obliged - we named her Rossini (yes, I know he was male) and then one of her kittens was called Tosca. That was the end of the musical connection though. And after that all the cats we had were always 'done'. Your kits look very loveable indeed Ruth and Julian, and we're still hoping to come and meet your family first hand soon.

I'm expecting a special delivery tomorrow - not what any of you might think! I've signed on (and paid - small ouch) for a training course to be a Kindermusik 'Educator' and all my material should be arriving in the morning. The package is being Fed Exed over from the US and we've been given a tracking number that we have been using to track its progress over here to us - been very exciting over the last couple of days! I went to a Kindermusik class while we were visiting a friend in Gabs and it looked very good. The courses cater for groups of children - and their mums - from birth to school age and is very physical, hands-on, movement and music kind of material. It's like running a franchise I guess, and I'll be able to do it as a private enterprise doing as little or much as I (and demand) want. The training starts on the 18th - over the e-mail mostly , with a few phone calls in between - wish me luck.

Amy joined me a paragraph ago so I'm going to stop and take her back to bed. Will post this shortly I hope.

By the way, as far as we know UK is still safe - the girls just needed to get up-to-date with inoculations that we managed to miss out on over the last little while!

Love to you all
Jan