Time to reflect

Can you believe it, the summers long gone and that was when I last posted so it's time to get up to date. So what have I been doing for the last 3 months I hear you ask (or not).

I carried on playing bowls until we left for holiday in mid September without any further personal success but I play for fun and it was another enjoyable season so already I'm looking forward to May next year with the warmer weather and the bowls greens opening for play again.

September brought around our second holiday of the year when we flew to Hurghada in Egypt for 10 days in the sun, it really was very warm with daytime temperatures in the mid to upper 30's C (around 100F), but it was a very good hotel with lots of swimming pools to cool off in and we both had a very enjoyable time, we had one or two issues with the hotel firstly we'd booked and paid extra for a sea/pool view room only to find ourselves in a room overlooking the back of the hotel and the entrance to the hotel next door, we complained without success but they did allow us extra time without payment on the day of our departure. Secondly I enjoy a few alcoholic drinks and if I'd chosen too I could have been drinking from 10am until I fell over (but I behaved myself this year), my wife isn't the same and is quite happy with a diet cola, although sometimes it was possible to get sugar free cola during the day it was never available in the evening which seemed strange considering this was a Muslim country and Muslims don't drink alcohol.

Not long after returning we had a weekend away at Hopton on Sea which is near Great Yarmouth, we'd booked to see Heatwave, Alexander O'Neal and Gwen Dickie's Rose Royce who were performing on Sunday evening and we stayed over at Potters resort where the show was on Sunday night travelling back the next dayHeatwave and Alexander O'Neal performed to prerecorded backing tracks which made their act less flexible but Gwen dickie had a live backing band, My favourite was Heatwave folllowed closely by Gwen Dickie but all were good and we had a good time, going on to the disco after and not returing to our room until well past 1am. As a child my parents didn't have a car so many of my summer holidays were spent at Great Yarmouth simply because a local coach operator ran fleets of coaches there every Saturday during the summer, although i'd been back since then it hasn't been for more than 30 years and it did bring back memories of earlier days and times as we spent a few hours there before checking in at Potters.

So that's it really up to now, my son moves again on Saturday, the woman he shared a flat with decided to move in with her boyfriend so he's found a smaller place which he and his girlfriend are going to share, at this time I'm not going down to help with the move as his older brother is getting a van from where he works to help him but if anything goes wrong with that arrangement the I'll need to sort something out.

Christmas is again just around the corner and I'm trying to compile a wish list for close family members without much success, as I've stated in previous years I'm at a time in my life when if there's anything I really want then within reason I can afford to go out and buy it, my daughter said to me a couple of years ago , its not about what you need it's more about what you'd like but don't feel justified in going out and buying it but even with that I've got my playstation and Wii now so that doesn't help either. perhaps I can think of some things to take on our cruise in February when we celebrate my wife's 60th (but don't let her know I told you her age), or I'm helping out a friend who's allotment is too much for her perhaps I can ask for a ton of farmyard manure.

They say it's the British who always talk about the weather, well this year's no exception, after a scorching week or two in June, July has been very wet, our local paper reports that only two days have been free of rain at some time and this is after the met office forecast a "barbecue summer " with high temperatures and dry sunny weather. the greatest impact on me personally is poorer weather to play bowls in which means heavier wetter greens and less enjoyment of what is otherwise a very enjoyable pastime. So how'a the season been going I hear you ask (or not), ell I've not had so many games on a Monday and as far as the Monday league is concerned we look almost certain to finish mid table, we've no chance of winning or even promaotion but we'd be unlikely to be in the bottom 2 or 3 either. On a personal level I played last night in the club triples semi-final which we won so we play the final Friday evening when hopefully the weather will be better, it rained all night last night making it an unenjoyable experience even though we won. I can take some credit for our win as I delivered a third of our bowls but the decisive contibution was made by another club member who at 17 is this years county singles champion, quite a considerable achievement, still they say if you don't play well then play with someone else who does. I'm still in the club pairs also again with a very good partner but we've only played one game up to now.

It's beeen some time since I posted but I wanted to come on today particularly, my brother Alan who died a couple of months ago would have reached 60 today, I now find it difficult to believe in the Christian belief of life after death but I am big enough to accept I could be wrong (shame most Christians aren't) so if you're out there Alan happy birthday, i do still think of you and always will as long as I draw breath..

My own health is thankfully excellent I had a check up yesterday with X-ray, blood tests, urine tests and an ECG and as long as I keep taking the small amount of medicaton I need for blood pressure and cholesterol I'm in near perfect health.

My brother was cremated last Monday so that's 3 funerals I've been to in a little over 6 months and I'll be more than happy if that's the last for a while, I suppose as we grow older then so do our friends and relatives so it's one of the drawbacks of older age. I once worked with someone who loved going to funerals, if anyone at work died and they needed a volunteer to attend the funeral he was always there, as well as standing in line to walk past the coffin of statesmen or women who had passed away. It's certainly not my idea of fun and if my own is the next funeral I go to then that's fine with me.

On to lighter things, as mentioned in a previous post I'm bowling now the summer's here again, our "B" team in the triples league had only got 2 points from their first two games, I played in the next two and we've got 9 points from those, more by luck than my prescence but it does mean we're moving up the league a bit, hopefully I'm playng again on Saturday then maybe in the league again Monday but I may be dropped for that, I was playing with the captain this week and although we won I didn't have a great game.

After months of deliberation we've finally booked our Caribbean cruise for next February when my wife celebrates her 60th birthday, the first cruise we liked we were advised against, so we looked again and found another sailing from Miami but when we came to book we couldn't get flights into Miami, so once again back to the drawing board, we finally settled on a P&O cruise sailing from Barbados 4 days before my wife's birthday, so she'll be celebrating it aboard the ship Ventura and in Curacao in th Dutch Antilles. I enjoyed my last cruise so much I just can't wait. The only down side to it is by the end of February I will have used more than half my annual leave for 2010 but it will be nice cruising the Caribbean while everyone over here is shivering through the winter.

Yes I did come back from Tunisia but I've been busy since then. So let me tell you abut my holiday first.

The hotel was very nice although showing it's age in places, we went for a relaxing 2 weeks in the sun and more or less that's what we got, the only persistent rain we had was after dark one night and on 2 days there was a little rain in the wind for a short time, all in all the weather was as expected though disappointingly 2 of our last 3 days were cloudy. I didn't get to do the 2 day excursion into the Sahara but we did walk the 2 miles into the resort centre a number of times. It was a holiday hotel and the staff were exceptional and trustworthy too, i foolishly left my credit card wallet in the room but when I got home I phoned the hotel to find that it had been handed in so nothing was lost apart from the cards themselves and my phone charger and my battery charger both of which I also forgot to bring away, most unlike me I'm usually so thorough when we leave. Thankfully I didn't have too much to drink so there was no repeat of my falling down the stairs from last year. Outside our hotel but in the grounds and part of it was an artificial bowling green, I hoped to get on there once or twice during our stay but in the end my wife came with me and we played 7 times, she even beat me twice and she's never played before, shows how good i am. I like to take part in the activities when i can and this year joined in the petanque' or French Boules which is similar to bowls but much less skillful, not many English speaking people had a go but I got on well although there was a language barrier with people from Germany, France, Belgium, and Holland, but with one exception an elderly German who took it so seriously challenging decisions made by the animation team, bullying his colleagues in his own team and refusing to play with the English, he pretended not to speak English but when I challenged him one day he clearly understood me when i said "don't push me sunshine". So that' all over I'm back at work and we're quite busy and I'm looking forward now to september when we go back to egypt for 10 days.

Since returning my brother who is still hanging on has got considerably worse, in fact last night we expected him to die but he's still going today, he's now painfully thin, has no strength, he tries to speak but is largely incoherent and I feel if he sees this weekend at all it will be his last. His qualiy of life is now zero and it's not only painful for me to see him like that but also painful to see how distressed his wife and children are at this very dificult time.

As I said the bowls season is with us and i had my first game last Saturday, then I'm playing again this Saturday and on Monday in the triples league, while I've been away they've played twice in the triples league and only managed 2 points out of a possible 12, I doubt that i'll make any appreciable difference but I will be trying my best. we're in the bottom league so we can't be relegated again but we were hoping after losing out by a tiny margin last year to acheive promotion this time, already that seems unlikely.

My football team did get relegated at the end of the season , on the last day they expectedly lost but all the other results went against them also so t's league 2 football next season for them and me, hopefully they'll do better at a lower level but it doesn't always work out like that