Oakwood as usual

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We're very late this year due to a late burst of bureaucracy by your scribe's employer.

2006 has been a bit of a landmark year all round. This is a team photograph taken at Gillian's 60th birthday in early December. Save this one, its not often you see Les in a dinner-jacket thank goodness.

2006 has been a reasonable year so far, so no complaints, apart from knees aching in the older members and in one case, being replaced.

Individually:-

Isabelle

This year, our baby left home amidst tumultous cheers from Gillian. People have been saying to her for years that she would be sorry when they all leave. They were wrong. Freedom from unpaid taxi duties and the myriad of other things which surround kids is a still a heady and welcome experience. Les would just wish she would stop smiling all the time. Izzy did not coast through her last year at school. It was punctuated by a great deal of hard work, a certain amount of whingeing and panics but culminated in her stunning everybody by getting 3 As. She duly took up her first choice of Birmingham where she is studying music. Arriving at University, previous successes are immediately forgotten so in spite of playing in the Stoneleigh and Merton youth orchestras for a couple of years, she hasn't got into the University orchestras yet because its packed full of very talented 2nd and 3rd years. Maybe next year.

Izzy with G outside her halls of residence in Birmingham. Even Les has had to retract the rude things he has been saying about Birmingham, based on 30 years of prejudice, its really nice. You still can't understand what anybody says of course.

This summer Gillian and Les went off to Salzburg with friends to follow Izzy and the Stoneleigh youth orchestra playing several concerts as part of the Mozart 250th anniversary events. This gave us the opportunity to get lost more often and in more different ways than ever before. Salzburg was evidently designed by somebody with a very thin grasp of spatial relationships. We never left the same way twice and we never got back the same way twice. At one stage, we got close to just abandoning the car, sending the keys to Hertz and getting a taxi to find the airport, until a lucky series of turns unearthed the only sign for an airport in Salzburg. If you are ever tempted to visit, take a guide.

Felix

Fe has had a busy year. This was the year of the graduation so we trooped off up to Sheffield to watch the strange cabalistic rituals as invented, refined and taken to new heights of obscurity by the English. Even the Catholic church could learn a trick or two. The academics troop out looking like giant budgies in their refinery, obscure Latin quotations ring around the building and then all of a sudden, you're done. In Fe's case its only part of the whole thing as he has another 3 or 4 years to go with little time off for good behaviour in architecture.

Fe with Gillian, full of chickaboo outside the Strines Inn (yes, Strines, presumably named after the worst case of constipation to be recorded in Western Yorkshire) after graduation.

Fe had a busy an ultimately successful athletics season. He trained hard all winter but then inexplicably threw the javelin like a beginner for much of the early part of the season although did appear in two home international matches. He finally started to get it together when it was nearly all over in September and hit 70m in training and just short of 66m in competition. This is a good stepping stone so he is working hard again training 4 nights a week and hopes to make another step forward next season.

Leo

Leo has gone east. His job at Sun really took off and they shipped him off finally to Singapore in late Spring although regrettably declining to shift all his junk and we still have a filing cabinet in the hall. He has generally been having a whale of a time. We are occasionally able to get hold of him in his busy social whirl of partying, wake-boarding, partying, scuba, partying, a little more partying in case the other partying had not quite taken all of his remaining time up, and oh yes, some partying. In between times, he has managed to fit in some partying. Leo came home unexpectedly in time for Gillian's 60th birthday to her great delight but he was disgustingly sun-burned, an exotic sight on a drizzly night in December in New Malden. He had a minor calamity in the summer, almost snapping the anterior cruciate ligament in one knee and generally knackering it up doing stunts on a wake-board which he probably regrets, although all the spectators agreed it was a terrific face-plant. The knee seems to be healing well and he hopes to resume a little more circumspectly in the New Year, when not partying.

We didn't have any recent photos of Leo's exploits so try his diary web-site where amongst other things such as partying, you can rerun the said face-plant.

http://www.dirtyrice.co.uk/home

Les

Les has had a very busy year and for the first time visited South America with a trip to Rio in July. You can read all about it here. Kingston University still takes up 75% of his time but he is no clearer about what he is supposed to be doing but thinks it has something to do with academia. The band played the Burnley Blues Festival again this year and in spite of the previous band blowing up the only remaining bass amplifier, managed to take Hogsmill delta blues to the meat pie multitudes of the North and you can read all about their exploits here.

Les standing on top of Sugar Loaf mountain jet lagged out of his brains and still twitching from the taxi ride between airports the day before. It is cloudy, damp and 18C. Somewhere behind is Copacabana beach where shortly before, hundreds of brown young women wearing pieces of string had applauded him for his tasteful white legs, knee length shorts, sandals with socks and impeccable command of Portugese. His smile is due to the wonderful scenery and has absolutely nothing to do with nipple tassles.

His normal travelling duties continued and as usual he visited Sweden on a number of occasions. This shows one of the many reasons why Swedish is his favourite language with strong evidence that Sweden was originally colonised by an itinerant band of black-pudding manufacturers from Bacup.

He is without question worse on the trombone than he was at the same time last year and his lips have now taken on a permanently pursed look after having to be removed gently and repeatedly from the bell of the trombone. He remains undaunted and intends to produce at least one musical note during 2007 which does not bring the police round.

Gillian

A big year for the family anchor. In March after a lot of pain in the last few years, she opted for knee replacements and had two partials at the same time. This was a big step but it has paid dividends and 6 months later, her legs are in better shape than before the operation with more improvement to go but she was in a lot of pain for some time afterwards and the scars are particularly impressive and are even better than Les' scars after years of football.

She has continued with her athletics work through all of this although is trying to wind this down a bit. With the kids gone, lots of other avenues open up so she is still considering options, hang-gliding, being the first person to climb Everest on their hands and so on. Travelling will definitely feature in some form. This has already started happening when we went to New Orleans (conference) and Colorado (staying with old friends) in October.

A visit to New Orleans and Preservation Hall led to a spectacular coincidence. The last time we were there was in the 1970s and Les met a guy from London who had moved there. Thirty years later, he marched in and said to Les "I know you". It turns out he had just come back to New Orleans after Katrina. That's him on the right. New Orleans is still in a really bad way and will take years to recover.

Renting a car is important in the USA so we decided to hire this neat little sub-compact.

Mary

Nannie-chuck hasn't had a bad year and is in good health for a person of her age . She is snug and warm in her little bungalow and firmly intends to stay there until they remove her by the heels. Felix will be bringing her down for Xmas although may have to put her on the roof-rack to avoid ear damage. Nannie gets a bit over-excited when she has company and er, talks, er, a little more er, than usual, er, which presumably covers the normal hours of sleep also. We don't have a current photo this year unfortunately so will have to remedy that over Xmas.

Pets

We had a tragedy this year unfortunately. Kerby, tortoise star of numerous previous newsletters due to his unusually prolific and erratic sexual proclivities, succumbed after attempting to hump what appears to have been a badger and we miss his antics greatly. His companion Trampolina is probably secretly relieved and she is well and at this moment, crashed out for a month or two.

Our dopey cat Dotty is still well and occasionally conscious although then only for short periods. She gets dafter each week and perches in odd places, Les' head, Les' keyboard when he is trying to type and so on.

Dotty in typical pose. She unusually has her eyes open although there isn't much going on behind them.

This year is the year of Fang, our giant spider who suddenly appeared in the summer. Your scribe always understood that the reason why British spiders are safe is that they are not big enough to get their fangs into you. Fang does not seem to have this problem so we are staying well out of the way just in case.

Fang, idly hijacking a very surprised member of the vole family whilst eyeing up a fox at the end of the garden for dessert.

We hope you and your families are well. We wish you a very merry Christmas and health and happiness in 2007.

Xmas News; Oakwood home for the persistently bemused, 16th December, 2006