Springing forward

We're still here!

Dave has nearly, nearly finished his MSc degreee (here's the post from 2006 when he started it all). Just polishing and fine-tuning the dissertation now which is the main reason for the lack of bloggage since January.

We've been enjoying the sunshine. Dave took Owen to Mayow Park on Saturday and they played a bit of football. Owen kept trying to join the boys who have a football training session there every Saturday morning, but he's just a little bit too young for that at the moment. Here's the proof he loves football:


On Sunday (lovely weather) we went to the Horniman Museum a real gem of a place right here in SE23. The views from the gardens are stunning. Here's a picture I took from there last year:


When we get a free evening and haven't fallen already asleep we try to watch an episode of 'Brothers and Sisters.' (we were given the DVDs as a present from Davina and Kevin who are Owen's godparents). It's a really good show, superbly acted and written. Recommended!

Patrick McGoohan

Back in 2006 I blogged about the 60s TV show The Prisoner and how much I have always loved it. It's one of THE greatest shows ever.

So I was very saddened to hear that Patrick McGoohan, The Prisoner's creator and star, died this week. Like the Prisoner himself Patrick was a true individual who passionately believed in the right of the individual to refuse to conform to what passes for 'normal' and I suppose that made him a bit of an inspiration to me.

RIP Patrick, be seeing you...

The View from the Hill

There really is a hill in Forest Hill. Here's a piccie I took today of the view of north London. The white semi-circle on the horizon is the Wembley Stadium Arch - 12 miles away!



And this is the Crystal Palace transmitter which is about 2 miles away. It was very sunny after a long period of rain - the wet tarmac almost make the spicture seem black and white.


By contrast, here is the transmitter mast as seen from our local park, Mayow Park (on a nice sunny day!).

Make an appointment to see The Doctor

If you have any interest in Doctor Who then you really should visit the Dr Who exhibition at Earl's Court. They have a fanstastic collection of props, costumes and monsters from the new series. We went along with Gareth and Jo and their two sons befopre they - sadly - emigrate to Oz!

So, this is of course the Tardis:


Owen met the Face of Boe:


And Dave had a close encounter with a Weeping Angel!


And we said a quick hello to the Dalek creator himself, Davros:

Walking in Joyden's Woods

We took Owen for a walk in Joyden's Woods, Kent in his backpack. The wood is officially ancient woodland and is at least 400 years old.

We started off with Owen wide awake:


But by the end the walk had obviously been too exhausting for him!

A Day out in Dulwich Park

One of the great things about SE23 is that we have lots of lovely places on our doorstep (almost). One of them is Dulwich Park. We went there on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon recently. The direct way to walk there is along the dreaded South Circular but after consulting an A-Z I saw that we could in fact cut through Sydenham Hill Wood to get there and almost completely avoid roads!


This is Cox's Walk which goes all the way from Sydenham Hill down (and it is indeed steep in places) to Dulwich Park. Wikipedia tells me it was cut/laid out by Francis Cox in the 1740's purely for the purpose of getting to the pub at the bottom more quickly!

We walked past this cricket match in Dulwich cricket ground:


Then past this old church:


And onto Dulwich Park. Owen had a great time, and so did mum and dad!

Les Codys dans Le France

A few piccies from our recent holiday in the Loire Valley. This was the lovely house where we stayed:



Dave and Owen in the grounds of Angers castle.



Chateau Mont Geoffrey where we got our own personalised tour in English as nobody else had turned up!


The return across the English channel (or La Manche if you're Francais).

This is my new car

If only! Actually, this is a Porsche Turbo that I drove around the Elvington air field / race track outisde York recently, inspired by watching too many episodes of Top Gear and their 'Star in a Reasonably Priced Car. It was a gorgeous hot day, perfect driving conditions and the Porsche is a fantastic little car. I think I managed to get her up to 100mph at one point...it was of course all over too soon but the accompanying instructor let me stay on for an extra lap as he was about to go on his lunch break and was feeling in a good mood!

There were a lot more supercars at Elvington that day:

They look good, but I genuinley thought the Porsche has a more classic, timeless look. But then I would, wouldn't I?

Next door to the airfield is the Yorkshire Air Museum which we (me, Sara and her dad) mooched around. The biggest plane there, in fact the biggest plane I've ever seen anywhere, was this WWII Halifax bomber ominously named Friday the Thirteenth:

There's some more pictures we took at Elvington and the museum over on our Flickr page.

I mentioned in my last post there's lots of news. Briefly Dave now has a new job as an HR adviser with a local authority....he also successfully passed the 2nd year of his Masters degree course, only the dissertation to go now!....most important of all we now have a new patio and garden! Piccies to follow....

Normality has been resumed (sort of)

OK, where have we been? Well, now that Owen has reached five months old (yes, five months!) and we're starting to get a little bit of normality back into our lives, then hopefully we'll be blogging a bit more frequently from now on.

Here's a recent piccie of Owen which I absolutley love. It kind of sums up his attitude to life!


And he's now starting to eat his (liquified) solids. Rice, apple and carrots are his favourites.


There's some more pics of Owen on Flickr and I'll upload some more over the next week so take a look.

Also we have finally given up our luddite fight against social networking and have put ourselves on Facebook. Look us up under Dave's name and you'll find us lurking over there too...

Lots of news to tell you but as there's quite a lot I'll save it until the next post. In the meantime, here's a treat for our foreign readers. Despite being tales from SE23, I have posted precious little about Forest Hill itself. So, here's a little flavour of what you're missing:



Forest Hill Day at the Horniman Museum - lovely!


Power sub-station fire at the end of our road - no electricity all morning!

London Mayor Elections - the candidates show their true colours

This was on Have I Got News For You last week - hilarious!

Owen and Dad chilling out

Owen Cody!

Only one piece of news really - Owen Samuel David Cody was born on 14 February (Valentines Day!) at Lewisham Hospital weighing in at 7lb 7oz (only 6 days late in the end). Samuel means "God has listened" and we do believe he is the answer to many prayers and a real gift from God. David is a bit of a family name, but we chose the name particularly thinking of Dave's grandfather who he was named after.

Unfortunatley the labour didn't go entirely to plan so Sara ended up having an emergency c-section. They were both in hospital until a few days later but we're all home now and enjoying our new life as a family.

Many, many thanks to all of you who have already sent cards and prezzies - Owen loves them!

By any other name...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7114699.stm

Wow...will this ruin the tear-jerking end of series 2 or not?

Ah, who cares, Billie's coming back! Yay!!

California Dreamin'

I have uploaded onto Flickr a job-lot of photos from our American holiday. For most of the two weeks we stayed with Sara's wonderful American cousins and other family members.

Take a look!

Southend Awayday

Look who's top of the League! I went to Southend yesterday to watch a thrilling match that Tranmere won 2-1 taking us to the top of League 1. The atmosphere was great and of course it was lovely to be beside the seaside...


Southend's ground, Roots Hall, is a bit old and small but it has quite a lovely charm that many modern stadiums lack. Nevertheless, I was very envious of Sara who went to Barcelona last week for a work conference and managed to squeeze in a trip to Barcelona's Nou Camp ground! As you can see, it's a bit bigger than Roots Hall...


Between us, we've both now been to the two biggest football stadiums in Europe (the other being Wembley), something that I'm tragically quite proud about!

Moving On

We've moved house! This was our really big summer project and we needed the big truck in the above picture, which somehow managed to squeeze into our old cul-de-sac in Camberwell, to do it. It was hard to leave SE5, but now we're living in sunny Forest Hill and it's terrific.

Of course, the only problem with this is that Forest Hill is in SE23 - I need to change the title of this blog!

Our new house has been pretty chaotic over the last few weeks as we've had windows replaced, new doors put in and even a brand new staircase built. But the end of the building tunnel is now in sight, we love the house and hope to see you here soon!

Checking in!

We're still here, just been too busy to post. Lots of things are happening, I hope to post some more details later this week.

In the meantime here's a couple of piccies from one of the things that we've been up to - two weeks on the west coast of America!

San Francisco...


Seattle...

More to follow soon!

An evening at the BBC

Last week we went along to the BBC TV Centre in West London with Kevin and Davina to be part of the audience for an episode of the comedy series 'That Mitchell and Webb Look.' It was good fun - the show is very funny! - and a fascinating glimpse into how sketch shows are recorded. They had four sets in the studio although we, the audience, could only see two of them so we had to watch the sketches in those sets on a monitor. We were sitting opposite a Newsnight-type set which they got round to last and used for three different sketches.

The series will probably be transmitted around autumn. Look out for the Welsh padlock art show in particular!

Here's me at the BBC:


and here's a rather random picture of me and Kevin with a Dalek. You never know who you'll bump into at TV Centre!

So long Harry!

Sara and I have both avidly followed the Harry Potter saga and so at midnight on Friday, along with our friends Emma and Will, we went along to the bookshop in Dulwich Village to buy our copy of the final book Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

We arrived at 11.30 but the queue already very loooooongggg....the shop opened up at midnight (prompting cheers from some people in the queue) but we didn't get into the shop until nearly 1am with so many people ahead of us. Despite the long-ish wait, it was actually good fun. Lots of kids were dressed up as wizards and witches and we had to cover our ears as people would lean out of passing cars and shout out the ending! But we eventually bought our copies and Emma read the first page out loud to us as we drove back home.





Sara finished reading the book on Saturday evening and approves ;-) I'm still in the early chapters so don't tell me what happens!

By the way, Will's wife Clare went to the Natural History Museum in the early hours to get her copy and meet JK Rowling herself. Cool, huh? But that's another story...

Excuse the mess...

No doubt you will have noticed we've revamped the look and layout of the blog. Still a few things to work on, especially the picture at the top - St Pauls' isn't in actually in SE5, but it's close and anyway I took the picture and wanted to show it off! It'll do for now...

What do you think so far?

Edit: Obviously, I've now changed the picture from St Paul's to a new piccie of Ruskin Park which really is in SE5. Hurrah!