It's been a while.....

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-18^th and early-19^th 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!