Monday January 23rd 2023

10:00 Lois and I drive over to Harrington, Northamptonshire, the first part of our journey to Cambridge, where we've booked a room in the place we stayed at before in August. That first stay was en route to join in celebrating the marriage of my niece Maria to her partner Tom. Maria is the youngest daughter of my sister Gill and her husband Peter. Sadly Peter died unexpectedly just before Christmas, and this journey is to enable Lois and me to attend the funeral on this coming Wednesday.

we drive to Harrington, breaking our journey there

Quite a stressful drive for a "Sunday driver" like me, and for Lois, who does a great job navigating, as always. The route encompasses some of Britain's nastiest roads, chock-full of lorries, many of them going to or from the North Sea port of Felixstowe, delivering goods to or from the Continent. The journey starts with the M5, then moves to the M42, then the M6 and finally the M1 and the A14 - yuck !!!!

By the time we arrive at our lodgings and check in, we're both stressed-out, numbed, and desperate to relax, so we have a pub lunch at the nearby Tollemarche Arms followed by a 2-hour nap in bed. We're surprised to find that there's snow on the ground here, but I guess the eastern half of the country is always quite a bit colder than the west. It's blue sky and sunshine, but really cold - brrrrr!!!!!

we check into our room, which is in a block of converted farm stables

12:30 We cross the road and have a nice lunch at the Tollemarche Arms: beer-battered cod fillets, peas and chips, with some sort of mango-juice for Lois and a gin and tonic for me. We just feel so relieved to have got here.

we have a nice lunch at the pub over the road

We will travel on to Cambridge tomorrow. I text Gill, and the plan is for us to drop in for a "cuppa" with Gill tomorrow, Tuesday, after lunch. Gill will be very busy, it being the day before the funeral, but she's got her team of helpers, she says, including at least two of her 3 daughters.

17:00 An email comes in from Steve, our American brother-in-law, carrying one of the amusing Venn diagrams he monitors for us on a weekly basis.

Just in case you're wondering, Lois and I have never seriously considered getting matching tattoos, but maybe that's the next step, now that we've discovered that, after 50 years of marriage, we've started to like the same TV programmes - what do you think? Answers on a postcard please, though - have pity for our poor local postman!

20:00 We go to bed on a bit of nostalgia, an old BBC documentary from 1963 about the so-called "Big Freeze" of the previous winter, which we both remember so well from our teenage years. Brrrrrr!!!

Even my little sister Gill remembers the Big Freeze, and also the one 2 years later, which may have been called "The Not-So-Big Freeze", even though she was only about 6 years old, as she reminds us the following day when we chat with her.

Flashback to 1965: my little sister Gill enjoying the 

nicer side of "The Not-So-Big Freeze" in the back garden of our house in Bristol

- tremendous fun!

22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzz!!!!!