Been suffering with thick head, cold and aches for the past two days.  And that, coupled with my lack of voice, has meant that I’ve kept away from the office (firstly, people couldn’t hear me; secondly, if they could, they’d laugh; thirdly (and most importantly) nobody wants to risk catching another bug this close to Christmas).

Am feeling better today, but still tired.  I think tomorrow I’m going to need a serious coffee before I start to get my head back into gear.

Pictures from mid-October.  Nearly done on the backlog, promise!  Clicky on the piccy as usual…

Batch two from our trip to Lake Garda.  We took a trip into Verona one day – here’s the photos to prove it!

Have to confess I had been a little nervous about another Italian city having found Naples so horrible.  But Verona was clean, friendly and very easy to get around, and full of interesting places to visit.

Click on the picture to the left or here for the Flickr set.

Second batch of Italian pictures up – same link as before.

But I did want to share with you three cute cat pics:

First batch of photos from our holiday (September seems a long time ago!) are now posted – click on the picture above or here.

I don’t normally post anything political here.  No, I don’t have sinister extremist views. I’m just not sure anyone’d be particularly interested in what I thought.   However, I am making an exception here for a political campaign that is party neutral: Mysociety.org’s Free Our Bills campaign.  For those of you who’ve not come across Mysociety.org before, they’re the main project of UK Citizens Online Democracy, a charity which exists to promote online democracy (surprisingly enough!).  They are behind some very well known projects including: the Number 10 petitions website, TheyWorkForYou.com which helps you find out who your local elected representatives are, what they’ve said in Parliament, and WriteToThem.com which lets you communicate electronically with your MPs, councillors and others.

Their latest campaign is Free Our Bills which is asking Parliament to make draft legislation available in an open way, which will enable their site (and anyone else who wants to offer anything similar) a chance to e-mail interested people when a draft bill comes up that they have previously expressed an interest in (for example, you could ask to be informed of any law that mentions “inheritance tax” or “abortion”), show which MPs were involved in which bits of law and generally open up the law-making process for the 21st century.

If this sounds like something you’d support, please click on the link or picture above and mail your MP, asking them to support the campaign and Early Day Motion 2141.  I have, and received a letter today from her confirming she’ll sign up.  Please do support this – it’s only a few clicks and costs you nothing!

Sunday was our first wedding anniversary.   As we’re off to Bruges with Sarah’s brother and father in a fortnight’s time, have only recently returned from Italy and this weekend was the big St Albans fireworks display, we weren’t going away.   So, we had friends round for drinks, chilli jacket potatoes and a trip to the fireworks (though some of the wimped out, wisely, given how wet we got).

And then on Sunday, we went for lunch at Darcy’s restaurant here in St Albans.  Sarah had a delicious looking chicken and chorizo starter, followed by pumpkin and goats cheese salad, with me choosing the Italian three bean soup followed by pork with sage-roasted apple.  And then we both decided that as it was our anniversary I might be allowed to fall off the diet wagon for just one day and splurge on desert.  And what a desert – chocolate, caramel and peanut spring roll with chocolate ice cream.  Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.  Very good value too at £19.90/head!

Earlier in the day we exchanged gifts.   I have a wonderful new book about St Albans Abbey (paper is the first anniversary) together with his’n’hers sponsored donkeys at the wonderful Donkey Sanctuary near Sidmouth.  And Sarah has a picture of the Lady Chapel in the Abbey, which was where we were married, taken by me, printed professionally onto paper (of course), then given a canvas effect and wrapped onto a wooden frame.  I can heartily recommend One Vision Imaging!

We don’t know his name, nor where he comes from.   All we know is that he seems fit and well cared for, very friendly and likes to spend a lot of time in Mum and Dad’s garden!  Click on the picture above or here to see more.