On the first of the month we had a delightful surprise visit from our friends Ruth and Subash and their children Suresh and Ezhilvizhi to introduce us to their new baby, Rajendra.  On the fourth I got my second covid jab at the Newark showground, just outside the town.  I can't help feeling a peculiar kind of pride in the way human science has risen to the challenge and developed effective vaccines in just a few short months.  It seems the risk has to be immediate and palpable before we can mobilise our efforts in this way, while we look on in despair at the challenge of climate change or just carry on as if it doesn't exist. Our daily Poppy walks continue to give us exercise and continuity and a widening circle of friends.  This is Zak, a gentle giant who Poppy seems to adore. This year has been fairly busy with celebrancy work and May was no exception, including my first funeral where I encountered rival funeral parties.  I met most of the mourners in the...

After months of browsing Ebay and a mysteriously named site called Apollo Duck I finally made the decision to buy another boat.  For the first time in my boating career I let experience triumph over hope and actually went shopping for something sensible - a dinghy, which I could sail occasionally and store inexpensively at a local sailing club.  I then spent weeks trying to work out what kind of dinghy and even made an offer on a type of boat called a "scaffie", only to realise just in time that it would actually be too heavy for me manhandle.  To cut a long story short I ended up making an offer on a Cornish Cormorant which was kept down in Christchurch on the South Coast near Bournemouth. Having got a tow bar fitted to our little Fiat Panda I drove down to Christchurch to pick up the boat in early April, my first long car journey since the first lockdown in March 2020.  Here it is fully rigged in our front garden.  It has a little bowsprit and a traditional gu...

What a strange Winter it's been, biding time and tuning in to the various Coronavirus dashboards each day watching the numbers soaring and declining and reflecting on what it means for oneself and the wider world.  Sue and I have weathered it better than most I reckon, blessed by relative financial security and through our travels a degree of resilience to hardship and uncertainty.  Routine has helped, every other day I go for a run - this is the Queen's Scone and Devon Park on a wintry February, usually the home of Newark Parkrun, now suspended for more than a year. Sue's two allotments have given her much needed space and as well as working on these she's turned the house into an impromptu greenhouse.  Here her cucumber plants are slowly taking over.  Fortunately they've now been relocated to the poly tunnel on the nearby allotment at Fleming Drive.  Actually I was quite sad to see them go. On the days I don't run I take Poppy for her morning constitutional an...

One of the good things about having a dog in lockdown is that you get out and meet people.  Poppy has made lots of friends on our regular walks around town and this is Charlie, one of her favourites.  Charlie comes to the riverside walk on our side of Newark most mornings on his mobility scooter.  He exercises his dodgy knee and feeds the birds (and the rats).  Poppy is always pleased to see him and he her.  Over the months we've passed the time of day together I've learned that he used to be in the Pioneer Corps and that he buys and sells antiques.  He also knows a lot about the town and its inhabitants.  Sometimes he gets to know one of the transient rough sleepers who turn up on the benches on the riverside walk from time to time and he has been known to bring them sandwiches. Then there's Ruby, a lovely black poodley looking dog who has similar energy levels and who she loves to wrestle.  Ruby's owner Judy lives with her partner in a house ove...

Early this month we got the very sad news from our friend Bernie that his wife Anne had died, following her second liver transplant just before Christmas.  Anne was a fellow public sector accountant and I'd known her since the mid-nineties.  Bernie and Anne came out to see us when La Fulica was in Catania harbour in Sicily in August 2003, when we were in the middle of that fantastic hot summer cruising the Italian coast and islands.  They did us the great and very generous favour of paying for us to jojn them in the Villa Politi, a beautiful hotel with pool in Syracusa.  Later they came to visit us in Puglia.  Anne's liver failed catastrophically and without warning about ten years ago and she showed enormous courage and determination over her first transplant, which gave her another decade of active life.  She was such a force in life it's hard to comprehend she's no longer here and I'm sad we didn't see her more often in recent years. Last week my ex-wife...

November and December rolled on in much the same way as the rest of 2020, with our lives narrowed and simplified by Coronavirus.  I took this photo on one of my morning walks with Poppy, the weather bright and misty for a change, instead of grey and damp.  Sometimes I really miss those bright dry winter days in Puglia, where despite the cold wind if you can find a sheltered spot the sun starts to warm your bones. Every day I check out the infection and deaths data on the UK Covid dashboard and the international one maintained by the New York Times.  As the number of cases climbed relentlessly from early December it seemed inevitable there would be a new lockdown and Sue and I cancelled already tentative plans to spend Christmas in Devon with her sister Julie.  In the end we stayed home and had a Christmas not unlike the last one, gorging on duck, Netflix and Quality Street. Poppy has been oblivious to it all and such an enormous psychological asset over the last few ...