There was great excitement in the Tutt house this morning. After three weeks of laundromat visits, the Man from Miele was due to attend upon our much-loved, slightly geriatric washing machine. Before packing up over Christmas (inevitably), it had demonstrated a combination of warning signals before finally dying. The very efficient Miele lady had admitted that they were short of technicians and it would therefore take rather longer than normal to send a rescue mission. The Man from Miele turned out to be a Man from Moldova. Clearly their recruitment net had been flung far and wide. I had to admit to the young man that I was slightly hazy as to exactly where Moldova is. After his detailed explanation (it’s a landlocked country flanked by Ukraine and Romania) I wasn’t that much the wiser I’m ashamed to admit, but I know it’s nowhere near Del Monte. It is apparently one of the poorest countries in Europe, with only Brexit Britain worse off. After detailed internet research I discovered that it produces fantastic wines at very reasonable prices. The summer holiday is already booked.

The M from M was disarmingly young, but fluent in English and most efficient. He carried a black box (naturally) of which Dr Who would’ve been proud. It was like venturing into the Tardis, as he produced all manner of computers, test kits, analysis machines, cables and innumerable tools. Very quickly he was able to tell me that the whole thing was malfunctioning because of massive limescale deposits, that it had run for 9,500 hours since it’s test flight in 2005 and was in danger of suffering serious metal fatigue because of corrosion. I could give you a detailed exposition of his explanation, but I don’t want to confuse you. Obviously I understood exactly what he was saying. There were options. He could give it a run through with a nasty chemical that would de-gunge it enough to run for a few hundred hours hopefully. He could give it a service, replacing various rubbers and gauges and stuff that would cost over £400. “How much is a new one” ask I. “They probably start at around £500 from John Lewis” says he. “But I wouldn’t recommend it, because in another few months it’ll probably go wrong again, the bearings will fail, the drum will drop and that’ll cost over £1,000”. For which I could buy two new simple ones or one super dooper hi-tech model that allows you do to all your washing on your smartphone as you drive to work…or  walk the dog…or research the futility of trying to grow grass under tall sycamores. It did occur to me that to repair an old machine was going to cost about £1,500, whereas buying a new one was only £500…..how does that work?!

Mr Dobrovicean departed (having happily tolerated Callie (the whippet) jumping all over him. He has a dalmatian, which made it ok) with a cheery wave and an assurance that all would be well after the flushing cycle was complete. I was relieved and excited.

Forty minutes later the red lights started flashing again and it all came to a grinding halt. Despair might be too strong a word for my emotions at that point but safe to say I was in danger of entering the red zone on the GM. (For the avoidance of confusion, the GrumpMeter has three zones. 1 to 3 is green and happy. 4 to 7 is amber and still under control but the warning signals are flashing and 8 to 10 is the red zone where lava is starting to flow and if it reaches 10 it’ll be a full volcanic eruption. I do spend most of my life in the green zone. (Quiet Oliver.) Time to go through the whole ‘unblocking the filters and exhaust pipe’ routine again. Sure enough, the de-gunge had been so effective that all the exit pipes were now blocked with large chunks of limescale. Being the skilled handyman that I am, I was able to flush it all through with minimal effort and three hours later I was finally able to get a completed wash.

I’m unsure whether we’ll go to the Dalmatian Coast this summer or venture inland to some Moldovian Chateaux but either way it’ll be in Europe. Unlike us…….maybe?

When I was a lad it wasn’t hard to spot a navvy. There was a uniform: heavy steel toe-capped leather boots, designed primarily to prevent the pneumatic drill from slicing a few toes off, (but also as a useful weapon of self defence against barracking bystanders who would pour ridicule on their time-wasting efforts), a well-worn white vest to cover an otherwise bare torso, the purpose of which I never quite understood and a knotted handkerchief to protect the balding pate from England’s piercing sun….or something. There was also, of course, the obligatory spade for leaning on and a vacuum flask and picnic box to ensure there was something to eat and drink during the long hours of standing around talking. For many, a packet of twenty and a windproof zippo lighter were also de rigeur.

I have been privileged over the past few months to have a real insight into the modern wardrobe for ‘traffic flow improvement operatives’ employed by the local council to make half a dozen junctions in our immediate environs rather safer for pedestrians, many of whom are either too young to comprehend the dangers of stepping off the kerb or too old (and therefore slow) to make it across to the other side before a white van looms into view intent on taking no prisoners. The work has involved making each corner of the junction stick a little further into the road and implanting some sturdy, but elegant stanchions. This means there have been temporary traffic lights on each junction for an average of about three months, as it’s only possible to do one corner at a time. The Council thoughtfully put up notices beforehand warning the local residents of what was happening, but nobody took it seriously as even those with minimal civil engineering experience knew it couldn’t possibly take that long….

However, we had not been issued with the “How to Make One Week’s Work Last a Month’ manual. According to which, it is clearly illegal to work for any longer than ten minutes in any sixty minute period. To ensure that the operatives don’t suffer undue hardship whilst standing around doing nothing, there is now a Welfare Unit. This is a large white van/minibus that’s fully kitted out with kettle, fridge, microwave, comfy seats and a hotline to the local Shop Steward just in case the extremely respectable and respectful locals finally tire of THE ‘TEMPORARY’ BLOODY TRAFFIC LIGHTS and take matters into their own hands. (Philosophical thought for the day. At what point does ‘temporary’ become ‘permanent’?!).

Anyway, back to the sartorial bit. The boots still seem to be the same, however the singlet has been replaced by large dayglo yellow jackets with a white fluorescent strip making them easily confused with aircraft handlers, traffic control officers or planning inspectors on a building site. The natty white hard hats which have replaced the knotted handkerchief, limit the confusion, these clearly being an essential safety precaution whilst using a shovel to dig up the road. The chances of a tree falling on their heads or a passing lorry driver opening his door at 30 mph must be quite considerable. Any possible concerns about their identity though are finally removed as they stand in groups of three of four for extended periods of time watching a colleague do all the hard work with that good old spade. The final change is that the Woodbines and Zippo have been replaced by one of those electronic fandangles than produce more steam than The Flying Scotsman. (I have just consulted the dictionary to ensure that I was using fandangle correctly. It seems it’s a ‘useless or purely ornamental thing”, so actually I got it wrong. I should’ve used that to describe the aforementioned operatives).

The good news is that it would appear that there are no junctions left to modify. The Welfare Unit and its indolent inhabitants can move on to pastures new. With those jackets and hard hats they could surely help out in the search for mysterious UFO’s at Gatwick, or rest up until required for traffic duty at Airborne in August. They must be exhausted poor loves.

P.S. Just had a seriously good afterthought…..they could practise their spadework in my garden!….?

 

 

It was only a few short weeks ago that we were singing about the Holly and the Ivy and how when both are full grown the holly bears the crown. It also has a white lily flower blossom, a blood red berry, a thorn-sharp prickle and gall bitter bark. Not one verse mentions ivy’s ‘qualities’. I now realise why. Ivy is a pain in the arse. Destructive to trees and walls it’s like an iceberg; the bits you see are a mere fraction of the yards and yards of rhizomes that burrow like badgers into every available nook and cranny. In fact 21st Century ivy is even worse….it stretches for metres and metres. I’ve always known that ivy was a lot less beautiful in reality than it can at times appear, but its voracious nastiness has only fully dawned on me now that we have a garden that has been unloved and untended for at least four years.

Part of the contractual agreement of living in our College grace and favour home, (I’ve met Grace but no favours as yet) is that we will maintain the very desirable garden to a good standard. I enjoy gardening, even if my unreliable spine doesn’t, but the Herculean task that’s facing us does seem a little unfair. The lack of recent love and attention means  it looks more like Sleeping Beauty’s castle shortly before Prince Charming arrived. Sadly I am lacking any royal blood and am probably rather too short on the charm as well, but it is upon my sloping shoulders that the burden has fallen to rectify this horticultural catastrophe. Where are bloody Alan Titchmarsh or Monty Don when you need them?

The first cruel, but essential decision was to spray the whole, beautifully walled garden with a vicious herbicide; not once, not twice, but three times over a period of a few months last summer. Whilst we waited for the eagerly anticipated, but somewhat sluggish grow back I did my best to restructure the lawn areas; the aim being to transform the ratio of weeds to grass so that they could be mistaken for lawns and not ‘grass’ or any other form of dodgy, habit-forming addictive substance. Success has been limited on that score so far and, even with the help of Green Thumb, the moss is making a spirited comeback. Spring is going to be a crucial time. The good news is that practically everything else did suffer a nasty and seemingly lingering demise; with the exception of the …… ivy. The extremely well-informed executioner who performed the spraying reluctantly admitted that “ivy is hard to kill”. Too right it is. Apart from the odd slightly brown-tipped leaf the whole tropical rainforest of creepers is still in place and thriving.

The last few days spent attacking the remaining detritus reminds me of my early days in sports broadcasting. I was a cocky, relatively young thing who knew it all and quite a bit more besides. It was only when one came to commentating on Centre Court alongside Virginia Wade and Ann Jones that you realised how ill informed you really were. I guess it’s true in many walks of life; the more you learn the more you realise how little you know. Horticultural clearance is the same. The more you clear the more you realise there is to clear. That ‘five minute job’ becomes an hour, a day, a whole week and now it’s clear that professional spade-wielding help cannot be avoided.

Whilst the cordon of multifaceted trees that surround our patch are a delightful sight in summer, the effects of Fall present a whole new problem. A few years ago some well-meaning but ultimately misguided soul decided that the three sycamores that rule one side of the garden should have a Preservation Order placed on them. Why?! They’re just giant weeds. Now they are very giant weeds, producing an extraordinary number of very large dead leaves, which have created a seamless carpet over all the flower beds. It’s while I have been raking up this mounting tonnage that I’ve realised the full extent of the problem. It’s not just the miles of rhizomes and metres of wall-wrecking, tree-strangling ivy, but beneath this brown carpet there are hundreds of green shoots breaking through, waving two impertinent fingers at the lashings of herbicide and the herbicide applier.

This, I fear is a story to be continued…..

 

 

Fortunately yesterday’s morosity (moroseness?) has passed. The black cloud that enveloped Eastbourne has magically drifted North, against the wind, and is now curling its polluted tentacles around the Village of Westminster where tomorrow, the world as we know it might well come to an end. For “might” read “May”. Theresa would appear to be in the soup right up to her elegant choker. But the vicissitudes of parliamentary democracy can wait for another day. I’m much more worried about the Black Cloud.

My wife (Alison) and I left a very comfortable lifestyle in Hong Kong two and a half years ago mainly because of the severe pollution there that was furring up my tubes and was very likely going to do the same to our young children. Via a short stopover in leafy Surrey (why is Surrey ALWAYS leafy? Come and have a look at Grange Road, Eastbourne if you want to see leafy. I spent most of November doing the Council’s job for them, shifting gazillions of rotting embers of the Fall.) we arrived in Eastbourne about seventeen months ago, mostly because Alison (my wife) had secured a splendid job at Eastbourne College, but with the added bonus that we would be inhaling the ozone rich, clear and life-giving sea air that city slickers can only wheeze about. Coincidentally it was also returning to my familial roots. Numerous cousins lurk amongst the rolling South Downs and, by chance, the leader of the Conservative group on the Council is a Tutt. But back to the air. We have walked Callie (the whippet lurcher) almost every day across the stunning Downs eulogising about the wonderful variations of light, the ever-changing vistas, inland and out to sea and most importantly, the particulate and impurity free air that is such a delight to suck deep into the complicated network of pipes that were rapidly becoming limescaled and imperilled in the Orient. Imagine then my absolute horror, my soul-destroying despair, when told a few days ago by a friend and long time resident that Eastbourne is not only ridiculously over-burdened with charity shops but it also has some of the worst air in Britain, according to EU inspectors. HAH, I knew there was a good reason for leaving that mob across the Channel! Being a well-trained journalist I had to verify/disprove this atrocious example of “fake news” and where better to start than with contemporaneous reports from The Daily Telegraph of late 2017. Sure enough the damned party-pooping Brussels bureaucrats had detected supremely dangerous levels of the really nasty particles that bury themselves deep in your lungs never to be seen again, except by the Coroner. It seems that some meteorological quirk means that all the nasty gases travelling south from London, run into all the equally nasty vapours heading north from France and they coalesce and congeal over Eastbourne. Not Brighton, or Hastings or even Bexhill on bloody Sea, but right here, over the Grand Hotel, the expensive new Devonshire Quarter and Eastbourne College’s massively impressive 150 project, the £35m development that allows privileged children to swim, dance, act, play innumerable different ball games indoors and dine in the sort of five star luxury that Jamie Oliver would have orgasms over.

So, what to do? Move the children yet again to another brilliant job for Alison in the untarnished but midge infested Scottish Highlands? Send the children away to a boarding school that we can’t afford in the Yorkshire Dales and accept that we’re going to die quite soon anyway, relatively speaking? Or contact the local Army quartermaster and indent for four respirators (gas masks in civvy parlance) that will only make us look faintly ridiculous as we scale the heights of Beachy Head whilst sucking in even more air than normal….albeit well filtered and sanitised?

Nah, I think we’ll just ignore the findings, which probably got muddled up with Tower Hamlets anyway, and just go on believing that we really do live in a pure and saintly seaside town full of pure and saintly people……

My mood is somewhat morose, so apologies if today’s missive is devoid of humour. According to The Times yesterday, nearby Bexhill on Sea has more charity shops per head of population than any other town in England and Eastbourne (my new hometown) is in the top five. Does this mean that we are particularly charitable people, or so broke that the only shopping we can afford is that available at Oxfam and Dr Barnados? Or does it mean that we are an unusually diverse society? For charity shops to flourish presumably it needs quite a lot of reasonably well off souls to provide the raw materials for quite a lot of the less fortunate to go and buy from the bargain basement? I guess that probably does describe Eastbourne, with conspicuous wealth interspersed with tragic homelessness and poverty. When I was growing up in the post-war harshness of Fifties Britain, I can’t remember seeing a single beggar on the street or helpless and homeless people camping in shop doorways. Now it seems to be a common sight in practically every town. Where have we gone wrong. I’ve been touched in the last few days that both my (teenage-ish) children have given their own money and food to such folk, totally of their own volition and without prompting from me. Perhaps there is yet hope in our  self-centred, materialistic, class conscious, money grabbing world.

With the Grumpmeter (GM) very firmly in the red zone and the humour-well almost dry, I must turn to my gorgeous eleven year old daughter for help. She and friends were laughing hysterically, in a slightly self-conscious manner, at something on a friend’s iPhone as we drove home from hockey. From the odd word I caught, it sounded a bit suspect, but they said “no, it’s ok, it’s Scottish Peppa Pig”….as if Scotland made it both strange and acceptable. (As I contemplate my navel I wonder if that’s a good description of Scotland?) I then heard the odd ‘F’ word and realised that it was something totally inappropriate. It transpired that it had been posted by an unnamed friend on some communal site on some unhelpful ‘social media’ outlet. All of which is, of course, totally unfunny and so any last vestige of humour flows down the plughole and I am forced to retire into my boots and fire through the laceholes.

I remain confident that a new week will bring great good humour and not a little cheer. It is the 13th…..

It’s 9pm and I am sitting down for the first time today, so this may be more of a snack than a full repast. The day started badly when I slept through three alarms on my phone. It was to be a complicated Saturday with Alison (my wife) working all day at school, son playing squash, golf and hockey away in Hastings, (thanks for the ferry service Mark), daughter “Treading the Boards” at school followed rapidly by an away hockey match in Hove ( accompanied by moi), Callie (the whippet lurcher) desperate for a frolic on the seafront (provided by obliging father immediately on return from daughter’s match in Hove), and finally umpiring duties for a now somewhat labouring old man under lights at Eastbourne Hockey Club. On conclusion of which, the now seriously knackered old man returns home to find wife son and daughter lolling in front of some “really interesting” tv programme and not remotely interested in discussing the disparate activities of the day, but merely waiting for the now seriously knackered and distinctly unamused old man to cook them supper. With unfailing good humour and considerable culinary skill he achieved this with minimal effort and even less thanks, before falling asleep in front of Michael McIntyre.

Had an interesting experience yesterday, whilst driving along the beautiful Beachy Head coast road. Spotted a car car coming towards us driven by a man with a woman (wife?) beside him. Clearly she was totally inept at practically everything because whilst He was driving, He was also filming the road ahead on his iPad. He was probably also talking on the phone while explaining to his wife how to best cook the roast, but I was too busy taking evasive action to be certain about the last two bits. As someone who never, ever, ever, (quiet Oliver) uses the phone whilst driving, how can people be SO irresponsible? Perhaps once the whole Brexit debacle is finally resolved and we are back where we started in the European Union, the European Union will come up with some suitably draconian punishment for such anti-social behaviour and we Brits will be the only people in 28 countries who actually apply the regulation to the letter of the law.

“Have the last two years been a complete waste of time?”. Discuss.

Early rising and your correspondent are like downhill ski racers and klister wax…..they don’t go together very well! (For the uninitiated, klister is the stickiest of waxes, that cross- country skiers apply to their skis to gain traction going uphill in warm conditions…it doesn’t glide so well going downhill!) In my case “early” is anything before 08.30. Having studied the intricate contours of my ceiling for two very early hours this morning, a slightly longer lie-in would have been much cherished. The gentle but unrelenting sound of the telephonic harp, with its accompanying vibrations, at 07.00 was therefore mildly irritating. It was my duty though, to take the indolent son and heir to early morning training for his attempt at a Sports Scholarship to Eastbourne College, the tests for which are a mere two weeks away. Imagine my delight therefore to discover that for him another thirty minutes between the sheets was far more attractive than running round a cold rugby field. Five minutes of persuasive argument from Alison (my wife) proved fruitless, but the damage was done, any further sleep a pipe dream. Safe to say that I was nudging 9 on the Grumpmeter (10 being the full-on volcanic explosion), but it was one of those morning where all four Grumpmeters (GMs) were in the red zone. Few words were exchanged on the short run to school.

Time then for my daily dose of the Today programme on Radio 4. There was all the usual guff about Brexit, interspersed with various highly emotional reporters reporting the demise of the highly emotional Andy Murray. He was, probably rightly, proclaimed as Britain’s finest ever tennis player (although Fred Perry did win three Wimbledon singles titles in a row) and various experts went on to suggest that he might even be Britain’s greatest ever sportsman. What tosh! How can you even consider that when you have the likes of Eddie the Eagle and a raft of England footballers bidding for the title?

More seriously, it’s a discussion my broadcasting colleagues and I have often had over dinner. Scottish colleagues cannot look beyond Murray, but we’ve had so many great cricketers, rugby players, footballers, athletes etc, etc, etc., how can you possibly say that a man who has won (only) three majors and Olympic gold (in a sport that’s not convinced about the Olympics) is better than all of them? What about Sir Steve Redgrave winning gold in rowing, (the most arduous of sports) in five consecutive Olympics? Or Lord Seb Coe, or Sir Mo Farah, or Sir Ian Botham (one of cricket’s greatest all-rounders ever) or Sir Bobby Charlton or Sir Nick Faldo (with six major championships) or…….and so on. Murray’s achievements are impressive because he’s done it in a sport where we had been reasonably pathetic for generations and it was largely down to his own immense fortitude, determination and never-say-die attitude that he succeeded. The argument also goes that he was competing against three of the best players of all time in Federer, Djokovic and Nadal. Were Laver, Rosewall, Hoad, Emerson, Santana, Newcombe, Roche, Borg, Connors, McEnroe, Sampras etc, “only average”? Comparing generations of sportsmen is frankly fairly futile, but in my book Sir Andy has been over-hyped by a Wimbledon-infatuated BBC and a press long starved of tennis success.

Sliding my soapbox back under the table, Callie (the 15 month old whippet lurcher) is gnawing at my ankles. Exercise can no longer be avoided. Squirrels of Butcher’s Hole be warned, Nimrod is about to be unleashed and it’s not your nuts she’s interested in….well not the beech nuts anyway.

 

These are the voyages of the Star Ship Enterprise…..

Actually it’s my first attempt at writing something interesting that will appeal to everyone or no one. I’m doing it because my wife told me to….well she suggested I should do it, which is really the same thing. If you become a dedicated follower of my fashion, it’s important that you know that her name is Alison. That will allow me to talk about “Alison”, without constantly also calling her “my wife”.

We, along with our two children, have been living in Eastbourne for about sixteen months, having previously been close to Bath for many moons. Eastbourne and Bath have virtually nothing in common. Bath, in my very humble estimation, is the most beautiful city in England. Eastbourne isn’t. (A city that is!). Nor is it beautiful in the way that Bath is. Our move here brought insanely witty comments from “friends” about how I would lower the average age of the Town by at least a year or two. I should confess at this point that I am an incredibly youthful (if not useful) sixty seven years old. It’s true that Eastbourne does have a higher than average geriatric population….it’s a wonderful place to retire to….but it’s also a youthful community that is rapidly rediscovering it’s former Victorian and Edwardian glory. Alison (my wife), is not yet fifty and my two children are barely teenagers, so our move here has in fact lowered the average age quite considerably. The themes of Bath and Eastbourne will no doubt feature on a regular basis in my future witty mental meanderings, but for now I want to tell you a story…..

Once upon a time, there lived an incredibly handsome and well-bred miniature poodle called Hermann. Whilst not exactly Aryan, Hermann certainly possessed a Kaiser-like poise and bearing that was widely admired and respected around the neighbourhood. Next door to Hermann lived an equally beautiful and aristocratic collie by the name of Bethsheba. With her long, gleaming locks and healthily wet nose Bethsheba cut quite a dash. All the boys on the street took a shine to Beth, but, for the most part, she remained irritatingly aloof. Hermann grew up in a house with no mirrors. In fact it had no reflective surfaces whatsoever. He, therefore, had no concept of the physical differences between himself and the voluptuous collie. They quickly indulged in social interaction, that soon evolved into social intercourse. One day Hermann detected that Beth was experiencing that stage that women go through that arouses boys’ interest. Hermann was intent on turning “social” into “sexual” but realised the height difference might be an issue. No doubt with the help of a passing stool or perhaps a downed tree it didn’t remain an obstacle for long and the seed of a future generation was sown. A few months later (not being a breeder, my knowledge of canine confinement is somewhat sketchy) a brood of coddles was introduced to polite society. One of these less-than-pure-bred mutants went to a good home where he was christened Matthew. Matt the Mutt quickly discovered the lie of the land and became known as a bit of a lad amongst his peers. He certainly wasn’t averse to the doggie equivalent of a one night stand or three, but from an early age he’d had his eye on a gorgeous, pure-bred whippet who lived on the nearby farm. Matt too grew up in a house with no mirrors, but it was a liberal establishment where inter-racial relationships were positively encouraged. Matt, a wire haired mish-mash of colours and features was not exactly Daniel Craig in appearance, but he loved to think of himself as a latter day Bond….James Bond. Curiously, his hirsute hunkiness seemed to work with the elegant upper crust and one day Matt finally had his wicked way with Lady Fenella the farmer’s whippet.

A few months later…..Fen gave birth to twelve bonnie, bouncing pups who wouldn’t have looked out of place in a liquorice all sorts bag. No two were the same, with blacks and whites and tans and combinations thereof, smooth-haired and wiry ones, some with short legs and some with long.

For more than a year prior to this happy occasion, my two children and Alison (my wife) had been growing ever more persistent in the need for a puppy. Having had labradors in a previous life I knew the commitment required and resisted, until resistance became futile. Held in a Vulcan death grip I was dragged along to examine this “sweet” collection of distinctly non-pedigree, but nonetheless expensive, chums. Only one little darling remained unclaimed and yet curiously the genuinely cute little smooth-haired tan number is the one we would have chosen anyway.

This was over a year ago and the sweet little midget has developed into a high class and nimble athlete who shows glimpses of every aspect of her heritage. She’s much smaller than a standard whippet, but has incredible acceleration and a top speed to make Usain Bolt jealous. She can round up sheep like a contestant in One Man and his Dog, kill rabbits and rats faster than you can say Jeremy Corbyn (should you want to) and still draw admiring comments from her two-legged friends. All, that is, except skateboarders whose ankles she obviously thinks are rats. So far she’s only actually maimed one, but it’s only a matter of time……….

Note to wife: Please train Callie, the whippet, collie, mini poodle mix, to realise that skateboarders are in fact human (aren’t they?) and should not be chased and molested.

Callie is even now champing at her imaginary bit…..time for “walkies”. Needless to say the youth who were so adamant that we couldn’t survive without a dog, never actually WALK the “oh isn’t she so sweet” one, or take responsibility of any kind for her.

So, it’s her reluctant “father” who must promenade along the Prom, a mere three hundred metres as the gull flies from our front door, whilst Callie terrorises the local gull population, romping along the shingle beach, leaping from ten foot high breakwaters and chasing anything that moves like a leopard running down an impala.

Elements of this fairy tale may blur the border between fact and fiction, but Callie and her antics are very much fact! To be continued……

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton