Treacherous cycle lanes and other hazards ...

Gateshead ...North Shields, and Hoddesden celebrate the season!

The past few months have been full of odd hazards.

Firstly I had that virus again, you know, the one where I lose my voice for weeks on end (only 5 weeks this time).

That took me from the end of October into early December.

Somehow, feeling grotty and speechless, I have little inclination to chat electronically either.

Then we ran into problems with internet access.

Those seem to have been solved firstly by buying a new computer, and this week by getting a new phone line into the house.

Now the new machine is up and running, comes the inevitable search for those black holes where files hide themselves when you most want them.

I have modified some pictures, and they aren't where I thought they were.

I'll just have to retrace my steps ...

In the meantime we were lucky that our projected trip to Lille was due to take place just a couple of days after the Eurostar trains got stuck.
We hastily cancelled our hotel booking, and headed north to Newcastle.

A reasonably priced "secret" hotel booking turned out to be the Hilton in Gateshead.We were only there for two nights, and only slotted in one 20 minute swim in their pool.

(When we were in Madrid last summer we just missed the opening of the hotel pool by a couple of days. We saw it being filled, which was little comfort.)

So we got used to walking on icy surfaces on hills before the cold spell really took hold here.

One of the early manifestations was just how quickly it had frozen over, snow had turned to ice over a storm drain on my journey to the studio.

Today, most of the remaining few centimetres of snow has been slowly melting, and we no longer have the idyllic scene pictured below.

No time to show some of the knitting I've been doing recently, or the pictures I took of December colour in the garden prompted by Leigh's posting here.