North Pennines

Wonderful walking in Allendale

We spent the half-term week not by EasyJetting down to Barcelona but by driving in the opposite direction, up the A1 to Northumberland, and spent a week in a lovely cottage in Allendale. The weather was really excellent with several days of brilliant sunshine, and I managed to fit in a decent moorland or riverside walk every day with the rest of the family doing about half of them. We also renewed acquaintance with my cousin Jeremy (and wife Edwina), who owns a large house and a grousemoor close to where we were staying, and the boys fished in his trout lake and burned heather on his moorland. In addition we met his two small daughters, my first cousins once removed. On Wednesday we went down to Durham to collect Guy's girlfriend Beth, renewed acquaintance with the cathedral which is one of the finest buildings in the world, and visited the Angel of the North. We even fitted in a trip to a leadmine at Killhope (and I walked home over the moors afterwards).

All in all an excellent holiday, and we kept in touch with the sea and boats through our reading - the excellent Narrow Dog to Carcassonne (the one about the narrowboat which crossed the English Channel with two pensioners and a whippet on board, and then headed down through the canals), and Paul Heiney's Last Man Across the Atlantic, which sounds like my kind of racing, to be honest (Sam found it a bit frustrating).

Coming back we glanced at the ybw.com discussion forums and were amazed to discover that an innocent post about doing laundry on board had become four pages of rants about whether people who worry about washing are fit to live aboard their boats at all. Oh dear. Possibly, having chosen to spend a week in English hills instead of in the Med, we are disqualified from posting to the Liveaboard Link for ever?

Jeremy & Ben with fine trout

Angel of the North (note tiny human at the foot for scale)

All five of us neatly arranged by height, with Hadrian's Wall at Sewingshields behind. Thanks to Guy, who worked out how to use the self-timer

Merry Christmas from just me

Video of photos made for Sam's funeral    Dear friends and family As I hope you all know, this year has been a difficult one for me. On ...