Happy New Year to everyone; let’s hope its a more positive year than 2008.
For us the run up to Christmas was chaos. Firstly Liz was involved in the rescue of 2 borzoi, a long drawn out saga that culminated in her driving to Scotland for 10 o’clock at night to collect 2 dogs. Fortunately these are now rehomed and settling in, she will add something to the NBA website later on. Then on the Monday before Christmas we were hit by the power failure in East Lancashire losing gas & electricity, the electric going off when Liz was halfway through clipping a dog - she had to drive to a friends house with her gear and a dog looking like a before & after commercial - one half shaggy one half neat & tidy to finish it off. Electricity was restored at around 5pm ( just after we’d bought some candles) but no gas. Many of you will have heard about the power failure on the BBC News and how National Grid had to visit every home to switch the gas back on. Sorry but its a load of rubbish they never visited our house - someone was in all the time, nor was there a note through the door to say someone had called. Even now no-one has been, in the end we just turned the gas back on ourselves late on Christmas Eve. We were not the only ones, I know of several other people who never had a visit. I suppose we were lucky as all we lost was the heating, we still had hot water and cooking. Earlier this year our bolier was replaced; the first plumber to give us an estimate insisted he would remove the immersion heater as it was unnecessary as the gas never fails - we insisted we must retain our hot water cistern which as it turns out was a wise decision so yah boo sucks to that arrogant, ignorant, smart alec plumber who was so full of his own self importance.
Christmas was pretty well a non event, for the first time ever we didn’t even have a Christmas tree. No one was particularly bothered about presents - and you know with less stress and hassle we had quite an enjoyable Christmas & New Year. It was certainly less eventful than last year when we had puppies popping out on the day itself - so Happy Birthday to Magic.