The world from my window

Well, Delia's ham is in the oven ready for glazing, Mr Grigg's making sweets and James Bond is on the telly. Across the road, the church candles will soon need lighting for Midnight Mass as the village pub fills up on Christmas Eve. We've had the church carol service - a great success - the fish and chip van had a bumper evening last night and the tills have been ringing at the community shop all day. Personally, it's been an amazing year, with unexpected travels and new opportunities turning up left, right and centre. I'm not quite sure how this blog - or my life - will rattle along in 2015 but I will be sure to keep you posted. In the meantime, a merry Christmas to you and yours and a happy, healthy and peaceful new year. Remember, if you wanna do it, do it. If you don't, don't. I was asked to write something to read out at the carol service on Sunday. So I turned to my journal from two years ago when I was home alone in Corfu with Mr Grigg. ...

The Beetle’s trundled more than eighteen hundred miles across Italy and France, with cars and lorries tooting both in frustration (it takes longer to get up north, the slow way) and admiration. Well, she is rather stunning for a forty-five year old. We’re pleased to be ensconced in our Brittany Ferries cabin, with Mr Grigg watching Licence to Kill on his laptop and me struggling to work out the code for the free WiFi and children next door who are so excited they’re bouncing off the walls. If they were mine, I’d put them in the top bunk and then close it. But as the ferry chugs across the channel through the night, they’ll soon be asleep. Which is more than can be said for me after a night out in Le Havre. On a bank holiday here in France for the Ascension (and it should be a bank holiday in Blighty too for Oak Apple Day), places to eat after a three-hundred mile journey were in short supply. We ended up in a bar called Au Bureau with disdainful Parisi...