Christmas 2019 News

It’s that time of year again where one writes to all one’s friends to tell them that, like everyone else, we have done nothing vaguely interesting in the last year, BUT WE ARE STILL HERE! Janet is now 68 and I am 74. (You can tell it is Mike writing by his laboured attempts at humour). And we are both generally in good health… apart from the odd bump in the road we all encounter at times. 

We have more or less decided not to venture out of the UK for breaks, the reason being that air travel has become so tedious. We are not concerned about our green footprint and are content to let the world rage on about all that, less you are concerned that we may have become eco-conscious. There is no chance that will happen though we recycle assiduously according to the current dogma though recycling died for me when I discovered that all our glass bottles, carefully washed, had been integrated into junction 12 of the M4. 

So we drove our worthy (non-hybrid and getting old) Toyota up to Norfolk in August and November to attend upon my bruvver Paul and his wife Carol, who are always kind to us. (Despite being an older bruvver and therefore more brainy, Paul does his best not to treat me as the pest who used to bother him when he was 11). We also visited Jean, a cousin of Janet, and her husband Stephen in their retirement in Lincolnshire. Retired but very active. 

In March, June and November we penetrated to the deep south, known as the Isle of Wight, to see Janet’s Dad, now 93, who demeures chez Richard and Jeanette, Richard being one of Janet’s younger twin bruvvers (wot she used to look after when she wuz a little girl). Secrets are being revealed here… read on! 

I achieved a lifelong ambition to visit “disgusted of Tunbridge Wells” which turned out to be a nondescript town, with a drug problem, somewhere in the south east, on the way to Hastings. So our excitement at all this travelling around has known no bounds. (Janet dissociates herself completely from this newsletter). 

In April, to vary our routine I went into the Royal Berks Horspital as a day case for a routine prostate operation and reappeared a couple of days later hardly able to hobble because of overexposure to their air conditioning system. We don’t visit the hospital much ‘cos we can’t afford the parking. 

To inject more excitement we embarked on a lo-carb eating regime a couple of months ago and are losing about one pound a week, except for the weeks I put on a pound. The jury is out on how this will go, but I’m enjoying cream on everything: coffee, jelly, curry, the lot! And our respective clothes fit better. (I put in ‘respective’ for clarity). 

Having retired for the most part from pressing the buttons (we slide our fingers across our iPads more these days), in good weather we are spending more time in the garden and have planted more trees. I refuse to watch Gardeners’ World (a BBC TV gardening programme) or similar because of their impossible standards, but am beginning to value the fact that precisely where you plant a shrub almost does not matter, whereas a missing semi-colon in a computer program could cause the failure of a mission to the moon. 

The sprogs, Tim and Ben continue to work very hard in their respective jobs which, amazingly, focus on computers. They both run sporty, red cars, despite my advice to 'never buy a red car'. They are both very independent, which you would want, and very kind and gentle with their ageing parents.

We enjoy our involvement with Earley Christian Fellowship which continues to grow gradually with people coming from we know not where, and lots of young people. There’s been a couple of weddings this year with more coming. People wonder why we would want to live in Reading. Well, we have the gasworks, chip shops, curry houses. Even IKEA. What else could you want? Traffic is increasing to the degree that we routinely use a satnav to check local routes and avoid the town centre after 4pm most days. But we have dear friends in the church, and we hear that many older people in the world, especially men, have few friends. 

But, apart from day to day living, there are opportunities to be a help to local people, and once you move, it’s not so easy to make new friends. We hope you enjoy the Christmas/New Year holiday, and continue to enjoy God’s richest blessings in 2020.