Christmas
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I hope that 2022 has been a happy year for you, despite the news and events not always being good for many people in the United Kingdom and around the world. Our year has been good and I will mention a few of the things that happened below. I am making this the last of my annual updates as it seems to have become just a list of holidays and galleries of us stuffing our faces through the year in various restaurants and consequently has a very self-indulgent look to it. I do have all of my photographs online so if you do still want to see them, I shall put a link at the end of this page. We started off 2022 by decorating our hall and living room, we had ordered our new furniture in Ocotber 2021 but everything was taking so long to arrive we postponed the actual preparing and painting until the new year. Decorating is something I really dislike doing but when it was all finished I was very pleased with myself and the results made our efforts well worth the mess and trouble. We were so proud of ourselves we decided a trip to France would be a suitable reward so we had a week in Brittany and a night in Paris. The weather was great and very warm for April and this made the trip a big success. In May we attended a garden party at Buckingham Palace as a result of Stuart's BEM award; this gave us a good excuse to have a few days in London and take in a few more calories. The weather on the day was not brilliant but after a quite heavy shower the sun came out and we had blue skies for the rest of the afternoon so were able to have a very good look around the palace garden. There should be pictures of this at the top of the page but I will put links to all of the mentioned photos after this message. Both of us really enjoyed it which was a surprise as to be honest, we weren't really looking forward to the event and we were able to see the royals up close and see the palace from a different angle. For my birthday in June, we took another trip to Paris; the weather was really good and this made the trip even more of a success. There were a couple of restaurants we were not able to get a table at last time but we managed to eat there on this trip and were not disappointed. We both really enjoy visiting Paris and this trip was no exception and was made even better by staying in 'Le Marais' one of our favourite parts. Normally, we like to take Eurostar when we visit France but as we were only visiting for five or six nights, we flew, which always seems to include more hanging about in airports than we can be bothered with. In 2021 we had to cancel our summer holiday in France due to COVID 19 so we decided to stay a bit longer this year to help make up for that. We booked five weeks in Nice and thought it would make a good place to visit other towns in the Côte d'Azur from and this turned out to be true as we managed trips to Cannes, Menton, Villefranche-sur-Mer, Grasse and a few others. Unusually the weather was far too hot for us and rather curtailed our trips but thankfully we were able to cool off on the beach and did things like scuba-diving to keep the temperature down. As usual, I have mainly mentioned holidays in this Christmas catch-up as other everyday things would be less interesting. Here are a couple of brief mentions though. Stuart has been very busy this year and work has kept flowing in, we both managed to get COVID 19 but not at the same time; Stuart was unwell for a couple of days and I didn't really know I'd caught it until I tested positive after a slightly sore throat. Next year is our 25th anniversary so we are planning a trip to our favourite towns in France and hoping to push the boat out a bit. Well, that's about it from this neck of the woods for 2022; I hope that you all have a very merry Christmas and a very happy and prosperous 2023. Love, Here are links to the aforementioned trips' photographs. Buckingham Palace Garden Party See all of my photographs in Gallery.
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