Monday, December 29, 2014

Day one. The very beginning.

I'm sitting in our living room, on a freezing cold late December evening. Suffering from cabin fever. Its been two weeks since we last got out to play in our beloved Hobby Motorhome. We bought the Motorhome in September, a present to ourselves on our retirement after working, man and wife, together for twenty five of our forty one years together. She is a Hobby Premium Drive 70GE. Measures 7.44 metres long, is 2.45 metres wide, weighs 4.25 tonnes. She sits on a Fiat Ducato 150 chassis. She is gorgeous. A treat to drive and own. Normally in our house, Margaret, my long suffering wife, gets to name inaminate objects. At least since the children up and left. But this would be my roll this time. Sometimes in life, a mans gotta do what a mans gotta do. Helga was christened while sitting overlooking Lough Neagh at Oxford Island. It obviously had to be a Germanic sounding name, my friend Lawrence had been talking about a colleague of his from Germany, Holger, Had to be the female equivalent, hence Helga. We were having our first ever meal, sausages chips and beans from the nearby chippy. We bought what we thought was fizz, but alas it turned out to be some meaningless plonk from Italy, and it had a cork. We'd no corkscrew. That was day one, in what I hope will be a long and happy relationship with the lovely Helga.