After a lovely day yesterday, we followed it up with another most-excellent day today (well, at least so far!), when we headed for a Sunday morning walk in the woods. Lardon Chase and the Holies, to be precise – which sounds more like a seventies band than a National Trust park to me, but hey. It was a great walk, which we did with Sara’s sister and her family (all shown in the photo).

Incidentally, just down the hill (back towards Streatley) there’s a mansion being built, which is rumoured to belong to Spice Girl Geri Halliwell – and which overlooks George Michael’s house, down the hill on the other side of the Thames….!

After an extraordinarily busy January, one of the things that was keeping us occupied finally paid off today, when my wife Sara got a (temporary) promotion. From Easter onwards, she will be acting Assistant Head at her school, covering for a colleague taking maternity leave.

I’m extremely proud of her (hence the Champagne) – such a position at the tender age of 30 is pretty phenomenal as far as I’m concerned, and it’ll look brilliant on her CV. So we are celebrating with a reasonably nice bottle of what Zap Brannigan would refer to as Cham-pagan. Cheers!

Today was a bit of a sombre day, being as it was the funeral of my wife’s uncle, who died a week or so ago. The funeral was a very nice service which I won’t dwell on, but the wake was very different to the few others I’ve ever been to – it was at an airport! Apparently Ron (the deceased) and his wife were regulars at the cafe in their local airfield, which backs on to Gatwick, where you can watch some lovely old planes come and go. So they held the wake in what is essentially an airport cafe – which was really lovely, and very different!