Bye Bye London

Well it has been wonderful for us and the girls to catch up with all our far-flung family. Far from being too overwhelmed by all the different rellies everywhere we’ve been the girls have loved everyone and had a wonderful time – as have Jase and I.

Upon returning to London from Malta we all shacked up with Trish and Harry, where the girls found themselves in a veritable paradise – a wonderful big garden complete with trampoline and tree-house and Harry and his room full of toys (especially, to Gizane’s utter delight, knight’s armour and swords for dressing up – move over princess dresses, we have a new passion!!) – and of course not to mention, Trish and Harry – whom the girls had a ball with. It was nice to chill out and relax in a home without having sights to see and tours to catch every day.

We returned also, to VERY cold weather, which surprisingly for me, I actually enjoyed after the humidity of Malta (and because we were only there for a week). Very autumnal, being cold but sunny with the gorgeous big trees turning yellow, red and orange and leaves flying everywhere.

Simon very kindly lent us their spare car for our stay, which allowed us to visit Grandad almost every day, as well as visiting Jeremy and Emma and gang in Brighton and then Simon and Leigh and gang in Haslemere. In Brighton Jeremy introduced Jason to yet another funky hat shop, to my Horror (!), but I was glad we went in cos it was indeed very funky and thankfully had a much better array of girly hats than boys’ (on the day) and I came away with a new hat – yay! Twas my birthday that morning in Brighton and Jeremy very kindly baked me a yummy cake.

Unfortunately the next day was less pleasant when I had a bit of a fender bender with another car in the hideous traffic congestion near Kingston station one dark, gloomy, rainy dusk, which caused some scratching to Simon’s car (I am SO Sorry) and quite a bit more to the other. Urgh!!! That was NOT a nice night! (This has been a jinxed trip for cars - Andy scratched our hire car in LA and Uncle Paul scratched the car he hired for us all when we first arrived - I'm never borowing/renting a car Again!!) Trish had organised a Guy Fawkes bon fire night (complete with lifelike Guy) and I felt like burning that whole afternoon’s event on the fire with the Guy. Some heavily mulled cider soon eased the pain. The bonfire (very ably built by Ian) managed to burn away merrily despite the constant rain and most of Jeremy’s fireworks succeeded in dazzling the night with only a couple sputtering out in the wet!

The week flashed by and too soon we were saying ciao and bye to everyone. Very sad to do so, especially to Grandad, who had interrupted his chair-aerobics to spend our last morning with us there. It was lovely to see everyone and especially nice that the kids all got along so well with their second cousins, having had an absolute ball with all of them. So enamoured was Francesca of Jonti’s expert monster impressions that she has now adopted that as her default pose for photos!! Thank you Jonti! Unfortunately we did not get to catch up with Jack due to conflicting schedules but luckily we were able to see Brenda for a brief afternoon and introduce the girls to her.

(PS - we forgot to upload photos for first UK post - hence there's lots here, to read with that one)