Well it
has. It's been almost two years. No excuse really, other than I have been busy
doing all sorts of things and, for a while, I thought that I couldn't
get on here anyway.
The
observant among you will have noticed that the visitor counter has changed. The
reason for this is that the company that provided the old one was being sold,
as a result of which every time I logged into this blog, I was redirected to
the seller’s site with the “opportunity” to purchase the site. Being
the Luddite that I am with computers and not wanting to purchase the
site or lose the info, it took me a while to realise that I'd have to delete
the gadget, and the info, before I could regain control of my blog.
So what’s
changed/happened in the last 21 months? Well, firstly, one big change has been
that the person that I mentioned at the end of my blog in September 2013 who’d
asked my out is now, and has been for the for the last two years, my girlfriend.
Her name
is Emma and like me, she works at the hospital. As I said before, we’ve known
each other a long time and had always got on, but for most of that time she was
married as was I (or in a relationship). In fact, I don’t think until we
started ‘going out’ that either of us had seen the other as anything more than
a friend and colleague. It’s surprising what can happen.
Emma has
a son, who is sixteen and we all seem to get along, my lot included, but then
there’s not that much diffence in age between them all. We all even survived a
week together in Menorca!
Menorca
was my first experience of an all-inclusive holiday. I have to confess to being
somewhat anxious, as my preconception was of the sort of place that one would
see in programmes like Benidorm, full of
mahogany people who go to the same place every year. But it wasn’t like that at
all. The place where we stayed was called San Luís and was a quiet seaside town. The
disadvantage to that was that it may have been too quiet for the boys and
Maggie, but ok for an old fart like me.
I also
enjoyed the historical aspect, as the island had been a very strategic port
during the late-18th and early-19th Centuries, but all
this was revealed when we had the boat trip round the harbour, prior to
visiting the gin factory in Mahon.
We aren’t
planning a big family holiday this year, although Emma and her son had a week
in Lanzarote when he had finished his GCSEs and the pair of us had a short
break to Scotland last week (a subject for a later blog) and we are heading to
Malta later this year. As for the kids, Alec has spent four weeks in Turkey
this summer and Drew has been too busy working.
Maybe we’ll have a holiday together next year, but I think that it will
depend on what the boys plan to do.
Speaking
of the boys, Alec has now graduated from the University of Hull with a BA
(Hons) in History and starts teaching history at a local school in about three
weeks, this first year being when he will have to work to get his PGCE.
At the end of that he will hopefully be a fully-fledged teacher.
Drew has
stopped working at Dominos and is now at Starbucks, although this is just to
tide him over as he is going back to college to do a course that will cover the
first year or two of the computing degree that he wants to do. However, the
main reason for not going to University yet is that he has a Polish girlfriend,
Kinga, who now lives with us, and she has to complete some exams before she is
able to apply to Universities in this country.
Drew and
Kinga have also led to their being two other additions to the household, as we
now have a pair of 11 week old kittens who came from Emma’s next door neighbour.
As for
Maggie, she will need to be the subject of another blog on another day!
I am
still travelling to Aldershot one day a week, although the job that I’m doing
has changed. Just before Christmas last year, I received a letter informing me
that I had been boarded for promotion and pre-selected for promotion. All I
needed to do was find a job and be successful on application to “put up” the
rank. Luckily, there was a job in the branch that I was already working in, so
I applied, was successful and as of June this year I was promoted to Lieutenant
Colonel. Essentially, this has meant a bit more responsibility and quite a
bit more money!
So now
that I’ve regained control of the blog, I will attempt to keep it updated far
better than it has been since November 2013!
