Our year ended with a burst of festivities. Not as many as any of us may have hoped but we still collectively managed last days at work, exchanging gifts with friends, a meal out, taking a stall at a Christmas market and visiting another one to make sure we shopped local. We made lots of Christmas gifts, decorated the house, I managed to have an evening around a campfire singing Christmas songs with friends, celebrated the solstice and generally made merry.

Probably the best gift any of us could have wanted this year though was Megan managing to return to join us for Christmas and New Year and on 23rd December Davies, Scarlett and I drove down to Glasgow to collect her.

Which meant our now traditional Christmas Eve activities of making home made crackers while watching Christmas films could happen just as we’d hoped.

This time for the first year ever Ady was working on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day (and then again over New Year), but as a house of adults, many of whom are not early risers (that would be pretty much everyone except Ady to greater and lesser degrees!) it meant I could have a Christmas Day swim, Davies, Megan and I could enjoy a more leisurely late breakfast and we were all ready to open gifts together in the early afternoon.

Fitting with ages, environmental ethos, baggage allowance for those taking gifts back across the Atlantic and our general beliefs gifts were modest, wrapped in fabric and all very well thought out as local, consumable or needed. Which certainly doesn’t mean that any of us were any less spoilt or thankful for what we unwrapped.

Then we headed outside to take our usual Christmas photos in our festive jumpers.

We have had a pretty quiet ‘betwixtmass’ thanks to a nasty cold which Ady went down with on Boxing Day and has slowly moved through the rest of us over the week. Daily testing assures us it is *just* a cold but after two years of not having had so much as a sniffle it has hit us all pretty hard so aside from my daily swims which have been having at least a temporary easing of my symptoms we have mostly been snuggling up in the warm, eating lots of festive food and enjoying each others’ company.

We all managed to stay up and see out 2021 and welcome in 2022 and would like to wish all of our readers a very happy, healthy and new year filled with wonder.