Apologies for the lack of posts, lots has been happening. The birth of my grandson Magnus, the passing of my brother Geof were the two main events both of which occurred in the same week. We were driving down in our motorhome in expectation of Magnus arriving. I had rung my brother to say we were on the way down and we were planning to drop in. When he answered the phone he sounded very poorly apparently with a bad chest infection. Because of this we said that we wouldn’t visit then as we didn’t want to pass anything onto Magnus and his mum, but would pop in some days later when he was feeling better. Two days later I got the news that he had passed away in the night. This was obviously quite a blow to us all. It was a period of very mixed emotions, delight at the new birth tinged with sadness at Geof no longer being with us. Although Geof was firmly convinced that we were crazy to move to such a remote place and that we were living in mud built houses ( only half true! ) , whilst eating basic root crops ( not all the time! ). We learnt that he and his wife Sue, were planning to come up to Orkney for a visit and had changed their car to something more suited to the long drive ( 700 miles ), such a shame that he never made it, but Sue is planning to visit next year.

We stayed down in Suffolk until the arrangements were clearer then headed home as the funeral would be in a months’ time. So come the time we drove down again but this time in the car. I shan’t go on about such unhappy news but everything went smoothly with a big turnout.

During the summer we had a number of visitors staying with us, not quite as frantic as the previous year, but it was great to see Karen, Anna’s sister Julia, Anna’s granddaughter Jasmine, my oldest ( or do I mean longest ) friend Anthony Cross, Chris and Christian. I did my usual helping out at the “NOB shop” at the Ness Of Brodgar, although I could not be around for most of August as we were both away in Lyons France for the World Bridge Championships, certainly a change of temperature at around 38 deg every day there, but the event went well and the venue was great. We had several splendid meals at restaurants run by Paul Boucous.