Foraging North of the Watford Gap

I have just returned from a brief but hugely enjoyable trip to visit my brother, Pete, in the grand old city of York. The trip brought many exciting experiences, a visit to the handsome York Minster, a walk through York's brilliantly Dickensian streets and so forth. Yesterday morning, at my brother's suggestion, we visited York Crown Court and saw a highly entertaining trial. I also had an excellent day in Durham visiting none other than Mr Luke Emerton, the stalwart of both our Peru STEP team in the summer and a team in the spring to Brazil. We occupied various cafes and generally meandered through Durham's brilliant little streets to the point where we passed the same bemused looking Big Issue seller about seven times in one day. We also took ample opportunity to comment wearily on the frankly concerning choice of music in many of these shops over Christmas.
An interesting idea for the future came out of one of our cafe-conversations. A dream of mine is to travel a substantial part of the Trans-Pacific highway by local bus. I may leave that one for a few years yet though.
This morning Pete drove us back to Farnborough, where we were delighted to discover my sister and Andy had marvellously decorated the Christmas tree yesterday. The afternoon was spent putting various finishing Chrismassey touches to the house.

Merry Christmas everybody...