"Of all the medicines in life , a smile is by far the best medicine " Sri Chimnoy . Is this the day when life starts to spring back to normal ? Is the day when we can indeed smile and think the worse is over . I wondered as I stood leaning against a wall watching the Covid World go by me. I do like a good lean against a wall . We had settled into lockdown quite comfortably in Wales .It was hard to believe we had been here seven whole weeks now and it had started to feel relatively normal . We had forgotten if I were honest what normal feels like . This is the new normal. . I couldn't remember the last time I went for a meal . It seemed ... read more

I have been rather naughty today . I have broken Covid guidelines . I have travelled further than 5 miles from home . I have driven from Wales into England . I had a parcel to pick up at the nearest Post Office . The nearest had proved inaccessible due to flooding so the next nearest was about 8 miles down the road in the next county of Cheshire and the next country of England. I needed to get out and I was going to enjoy myself . Malpas is a picturesque place deep in the heart of the south Cheshire countryside . It once had a motte and bailey castle situated somewhere near St Oswalds church but in all the years I lived there I never once discovered it . Malpas like many small towns ... read more

Day 305 - Rain in biblical proportions . It started yesterday morning .It feel heavily. The deluge from the sky came on the back of Storm Christoph. We knew it was coming . The sky blackened and the rain fell in sheets . Not what we wanted living by a river which up to now had been benign . It rained until lunchtime . It continued through the afternoon . Our phone rang and a message came - we had moved from Flood Alert to Flood warning . The texts kept pinging in as the rain continued to fail . By evening it had not stopped and a quick check on the Natural Resources Wales site showed the river Dee was rising quite rapidly ., It had not reached its highest point but it was clearly ... read more

Well I do like milestones . My 928th blog. Who would have thought it when I wrote the first about my trip to the United States ? . My first flight on an airplane properly . A long distance , long haul what felt like trip of a lifetime. I never would have thought that I would be writing about riding round France in an Audi TT nor travelling to Croatia and Greece in a motorhome . It never entered my head that I would travel in Gabby or move back to Chesterfield . Now full circle have left Chesterfield and find myself writing about lack of holidays , distance walked and Covid . But there it is . 928 blogs . It feels an achievement . I felt walking that I had done everything and ... read more

I missed my walk yesterday due to the ice on the pavements . I have had to get my head round a different regime since arriving in Wales . Back in Derbyshire I shopped on a Saturday , Walked on a Saturday . Here shopping as moved to the early hours of Tuesday morning .Xmas and New Year have been so different this year and it is hard to get my head around lockdown It is Day 228 of Lockdown and our world feeling very different . Good news - the Oxford vaccine has been approved and is being sent out to hospital hubs for the first injections today . I wonder if that will give us more of a sense of normality . Would we start to see a reduction in positive cases ? Would ... read more