All present and correct

Just noticed that Paul has now signed up - that makes a 'full house' (or should that be a 'royal flush'). For those of you with a sheltered upbringing (!) here is a quick explanation. Anyway, I digress (0; - nice to see everyone on board, it was beginning to look a bit like a solo venture. We're away for a couple of days from tomorrow (what? again? I hear you cry!) so I expect to see a packed blog when I get back!!! Somewhere not quite so hot this time, more news to follow.

Hooray - at last i have arrived ....................

Hello Harris famliy im here its me bruv PAUL. got the week off so i thought id try & join u all. no pics yet but will try & get in to it when i can. Have a week off work with tina and jacie-ann, so just taking some time out together, as has been all work and no play. speak soon x by the way simon, i have read most of the stuff posted and was wondering about something you said "what it lacks in content it makes up for in brevity", just wondered what that meant, lol, i know, brevity is not a word i am familiar with, some guidance would be good..........bye for now

Back to the sunny (!) UK

Back home again and it looks like we brought the Mediterranean sun back with us! Here's a handful of the inevitably *huge* stack of photo's we took over the week. I think the digital photography age now means we don't discriminate at all - just take half-a-dozen when one well-chosen one would have had to do in the past.




These are of the well-known Pisa and the lovely town of San Gimignano. The latter is a historic town sitting on top of a hill famous for it's towers earning it the nickname of the 'medieval Manhattan'.





The first of these two is of the Ponte Vecchio in Florence looking like I imagined to be an upmarket London Bridge (before it burnt down in Samuel Peyps time) - now it's packed with very expensive jewelry shops. The second is of the famous Campo in Sienna, the site of the crazy annual horse race which is essentially a representation of a historic 'turf war' between the 17 rival subdivisions (or contradas) of the city.


Lastly, here's one I'm quite pleased about - it's a 'classic' Tuscany countryside shot. Can't remember exactly from which tower this was taken, I just recall climbing an awful lot of steps over the course of the week.

B.t.w. Andy, I noticed your last post was still in 'draft' did you just forget to publish it, or were you still 'fine-tuning' your message?

Greetings from Tuscany

This has got to be a quickie because I only have a few minutes left of my Internet Cafe session here at the 'Grand Hotel Continental' in Tirrenia. I was just booking some tickets to a museum in Florence that we were planning to go to on Friday. This is going to be a bit of a 'whistle- stop' tour around Tuscany (along with getting plenty of sun and sea) - all in 7 days!!!

We went to Pisa this morning and did the hike to the top of the leaning tower - spectacular views all part of the deal! Already we all think we're going to come back 2 stone heavier each, the food is terrific! We're going to try to fit in a tour of Sienna on Wednesday so it's all go! Anyway, pictures to follow - not sure how I plug in my camera on this PC. It tough enough trying to find the 'at' key, all the punctuation is in a different place!!! So back to the beach (it's a tough life!) - speak to you all again soon!

Welcome to the new kid on the block

Good to see Andrew signed up to the blog (alright, strictly speaking it's 'sian & andy' but who's counting?). How is it going with you guys? Still looking for your first contribution - we're not expecting the new JK Rowling or anything (0; Have you been affected by all this bizarre weather, I been hearing tales of floods, did they get to you?

Back in the Surrey branch office, we're all whizzing about getting ready for a week in Italy starting Saturday. It's a breakfast time flight so it'll be a antisocially early start that morning. I guess that's all part of the holiday experience. We're staying in Tuscany which we've not been to before and we're all looking forward to it. Hopefully get a few piccies up on our return. We're hoping to get to Pisa and Florence at some point, both of which are fairly close by.

In keeping with our teaching heritage, I will be expecting 500 words from everyone over the coming weeks with working title - What I did on my holidays. Marks will be awarded for spelling, punctuation and layout as well as content!

Variety is the spice of life ...

... but 4 seasons in a day is a bit much! I think there was a storm last night but I am convinced I would sleep through the apocalypse so I wasn't troubled by it. As it happens, all four of us went over to a friends last night for a bit of a 'social'. I brought over the Really Nasty Horseracing Game (by request!) and it went down very well. As usual with our events, there were far too many people to play a board game with a single person per 'player' even with a 6-player game like this one. I did try to convince everyone that we could play two different games at the same time (I had brought a few with me!) but they aren't all as big board games fans as me (see thursday_club) so we just 'doubled up' and essentially played 2-person teams and had 12 rowdy adults packed round one table. The kids (aged 18 down to 11) were in another room playing equally rowdy games of Pit and Werewolf.

As if that wasn't enough in terms of numbers, the host family also occasionally take in foreign schoolkids while they are on school trips to the UK, so I don't know if these 5 Hungarian teenage boys thought the British are *always* this loud on a Saturday night!

Weather wise, we had a short sharp storm this afternoon but it was bright sunshine before and after - I wish it'd make up it's mind!

Creeping out from under the bed clothes

WOW! That was a loud storm this morning. Anyone else get it?
I've only just braved it from under the duvet. Mark was going to an open air concert in London today, hope it dries up a bit by the time it starts. This weather is quite rediculous isn't it? I know we say this on a yearly basis but I'm sure this is exceptional. We went to a barbeque yesterday and the weather was glorious....I didn't need to borrow someone's jumper until at least 7.30pm which means it must have been a positive heatwave!!!
Hope everyones weekend is going OK

Increased popularity

I just idly dipped into the statistics for this site and nearly choked - over 200 hits (visits as opposed to visitors) in 3 days!

That'll be due to the fact that we have some pictures of the TdF and I put a 'keyword' to that effect in one of my posts. The result was we got a link to this humble page (!) from a very big blog specifically about the Tour and 94 hits came directly from that site alone. Well, I guess that's our '15 minutes of fame' (see Andy Warhol quote).

I've got photos too!

Well this is the third time I've tried to write this blog!!!!!

We went to Gravesend to watch it all pass and I forgot the camera, but George remembered I had the phone so pictures need to be studied under a micrscope but at least we were there for "Tour de France" en Englaterre!

Pictures as promised

Well, that was a great day out. The atmosphere around central London was terrific yesterday. It seemed to be a marvellous advert for London and the what with the upcoming Olympics (is 2012 really that far away?) I reckon Ken must be feeling pretty pleased with himself. I found myself a good spot to watch from the inside of the park where I could also get to one of the big screens. I watched some of the warm-up laps and then settled down to watch the early riders on the screen.

The times of the UK riders were publicised well in advance so I trooped over to the roadside to see Millar and Wiggins flash past (see photos - Millar and Wiggins in that order) before running back to the screen to see Bradley miss out on second place by a fraction of a second. Minutes later the eventual winner slashed a full 10 seconds off the lead time to knock Wiggins off the podium. As I write, it transpires that Millar made it to 3rd place overall as the tour left Britain. Of course it won't last but it was fun and a great plug for the UK.

Warning - strange yellow thing in the sky ...

... the UK is on alert! Panic buying of lawnmowers in B&Q causes huge drain on the National Grid! Yes, it's true, I was in the big orange shop early this morning, came back with a new mini-hover and gave the bottom meadow it's first trim since being installed over month ago! See pic for end result. Note the strategically removed rotary drier (0;

Up b4 everyone else!

Morning peeps!
Just been doing a spot of research after having read through my son's business studies assignment which he intended to hand in on Tuesday............more work needed I fear!
I will be checking out the old velo's on sunday at the overcliff in Gravesend. Hope it isn't 50 deep.
Well at least the sun has finally arrived. I ate my breakfast in the garden thismorning and so did the slugs by the look of my strawberries and lilies!!!!!!!!!!! They must be superslugs to get passed the vast amount of very unorganic slug pellets I have resorted to this year!
In my next garden I will be doing all I can to encourage as many birds and frogs and toads to the garden as I can.
Simon - hope everything went well with Lauren's trip.
Everyone - Don't forget your suntan lotion today.....................Bye ....Ruth xxxxxxx

Tour de London

While we were up in town tomorrow (Sat) picking up Lauren from her week away I thought I'd take the opportunity to spend the afternoon in Hyde Park soaking up the atmosphere of the very *rare* occurrence of the Tour de France in England. Saturday is the prologue 'time trial' so it'll be a bit like the downhill skiing with all the riders on the course one at a time. There are some great maps of the course on the official TdF website. Ruth - you should check out the London > Canterbury Stage# 1 - it goes right by your place.

I might take the 'ole camera with me and see if I can't get back with some piccies. I did read somewhere on the web (uk.rec.cycling) that some one had calculated with and estimated attendance of between 1 and 1.5 million people lining a 7.9 km course, that came out at around 50 deep for the whole course. Oh well, let's hope that 10x zoom is up to the job!

A very belated happy birthday for the 27th Simon.
Can't get onto this site very well Im using a mac and it does'nt like internet explorer much. Which this site seems to pick. So thats my excuse for seeming to forget your birthday.
Anyway just been up to my usual thing. Writing and fiddling about with music on the computer. Going away to Majorca in september, might be the next bit of sun we see!
Hope everyone is well.
Mark x

Still no twins yet

That well-known technophobe, Paul, still hasn't set up an account yet - come on mate! Somebody tell him how easy it is! Just so that his contribution isn't lost to the world, I'll cut & paste his email to me from last week;
hello bruv - paul here not very good with computer its more Tina`s thing.
yes it was very good to see u all MUST do it more often !
What it lacks in content, it makes up in brevity.

Anyway, we're down to a 3-person family a.t.m. what with Lauren being off at Nottingham on a 1-week University taster session. What small contact we've had would seem to indicate that she's having a good time and getting a lot out of it. It's organised by the Sutton Trust via Lauren's school and I think it's a really great idea.


One other thing I thought I'd mention is that had set up an account with a web-tracking service (for another site I run) and it was no extra effort to get the system to track hits on this site as well. After an initial slow start, we seemed to be getting a flurry of activity over the last weekend - here is the graph they provide. What is interesting is that we had 10 visits on Sunday alone, 6 of them unique (i.e. from different computers!).

Hello. Great idea this. I signed on a few days ago about midnight after coming home from an evening out. Did'nt write anything then because there seemed to be at least 52 letters on the keyboard! Can see a bit clearly now.
Good to all catch up last week hope everyone is well. Will write some more soon, x