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Note to self, buy at least 2 packets of magnetic letters in future! Anyhow, happy new year to all you out there in blogland! It's been a while (again!) since my last post, must get into better habits this year.

I hope you all had the Christmas you wished for. Ours was noisy, busy but not as frantic this year. We spent a lot of time together, about 10 days in all and we were still speaking at the end of it, a minor miracle! It was a wonderful Christmas and we brought in the new year playing Pictionary and Articulate, laughing at my dad's artistic skills and the new words introduced to us by the teenagers, plus I did a bit of middle aged lusting after Take That (Howard in particular) at midnight!

Christmas Eve we all ventured to a local church for the crib service, needless to say we were late, and went in the wrong door having to walk past a very large congregation. We even managed to persuade my 17 year old nephew to join us, and it was lovely family event.

The weather was the usual Christmas affair, plenty of grey skies and rain, but we looked out of the window one day to be greeted by this, there is something about a rainbow which is really special, don't know why but I think we all love them.

Yesterday was D-day for eight walls in our street. Before Christmas a row of us decided that we would like to replace our mismatching walls and hedges with the railings that would originally have been here. After much organisation by one of our neighbours Frank (a lawyer and therefore very well organised!) we finally demolished the walls yesterday. What a day it was!

Ian battled through a horrible cold to demolish ours, which turned out to be very well built, if the ugliest in the street. Helen and I supplied bacon sarnies, tea and cakes. Our new neighbour Lynn made the most delicious soup for lunch which we ate in our kitchen. Eight hours later we were still there! Various people would disappear and come back bearing wine, the bottles this morning bear testament to the alcohol consumption! No wonder my head was thumping when I went to bed!

It was a brilliant day, it made us realise how fortunate we are to live in this neighbourhood. When we decided to move here there were a few raised eyebrows and comments amongst some of our friends. Our street is opposite a large council estate with a reputation it really doesn't deserve. This meant that we could afford a much bigger house than those in the supposedly "better" areas. It was the best move we ever made. Ok, financially we could have made more elsewhere but here we have fantastic neighbours, a lot of whom have been here for 30 plus years. There is a real sense of community, people buy here because they want a home, not a pension. Yesterday proved that even more to me, we all sat around and chatted for hours and have made a pledge to have these get-togethers once a month from now on. What a great way to start the new year!

By the way, I came downstairs in peace and quiet to do a bit of blogging. For once my battling children decided to play in Jack's room. Great I thought, I'll disappear and write my post in silence. Ha! Two minutes later, here they are behind me fighting over a piece of string and singing "The Skye Boat Song" - at least Jack is, Kit is just putting words together that make no sense, much to Jack's annoyance. Children - who'd have 'em??!!...............