Canterbury - 13th January, 2007

Happy New Year to all.

Our year has started with a bang. Enquiries for rentals are coming in all the time now. Before Christmas it was dead. Now we are up and running again. We are taking bookings for the summer and as far ahead as September. We have had some great long term bookings of 6 weeks or more. We are also getting corporate bookings which are really good as they tend to be at top dollar.

I have also just rented our student house out for the academic year 2007-2008. Students who are in halls of residence for their first year start looking for their second year' s accommodation in January and all the houses are booked by the end of January. We got a good group of 6 girls for the student accommodation and a load more enquiries. Julie suggested we got one of these other groups to come and look at our house, where we are living. Even though it is in a state, they loved it and it is now booked for the next academic year as well! So we have to move again. Oh yes please.

Good thing that we found a house already. Just a few days ago I think we found the largest house in Canterbury that we have ever seen which is at a price we could afford. OK it is 1970s horrible but it has 5 bedrooms and 35 foot long attic room with proper stairs going up to it, a master bedroom with a huge en-suite bathroom (just imagine how much we will be able to rent that out for - and you thought we might take it for ourselves - pah). It also has 2 internal garages (I'm thinking 2 more bedrooms or a swanky granny annex) and off street parking for at least 6 cars. Our offer has been accepted but there is work to do on our house (we are having the front garden converted into hard standing for parking at the moment) with a new kitchen and wiring and re-decoration and there is lots of work to do in the new house: 3 new bathrooms, 2 new kitchens and a redesign of the ground floor to create that King Edwards Gardens kitchen/diner that we hanker after.

At home we have just had 2 Perivian girls move in who are staying for 5 weeks on an english course (it is their summer holidays now) and a german boy who is on a 3 month exchange at the boys school. We also have our long term PGCE student so now we are back up to our normal compliment of 4 lodgers. They completely pay for the mortgage and council tax. We live for free.

Julie and I are doing a little invigilating at the moment as our school is doing the A/S level re-sits. Looks to me like most of them are sitting them again but at least the papers looked as if some work might have had to have been done in order to complete them.

Julie is working like stink. Most not doing her job (finding and matching mentors with refugees who need help) but farting about with the organisation of the enterprise that is supposed to support her. The lottery funded charitable quango would survive for about 30 nano seconds in the real world but it is run by hopeless incompetents who really couldn't organise a ...... Just imagine how this saps her. She is ready to leave, if it weren't for the refugees.

The boys are back in school. Sammy comes home every day covered from head to toe in mud. I suppose it's better than being stuck inside. Julian has made friends with a really nice boy and is pushing out towards teenagerdom with interest. He thought the other day that he would like to go to university. Don't know where he got that from!

Christmas was quite interesting. We had 17 for lunch. Our chinese girls stayed with us and we great fun and mucked in with everything. We had Rob and Suzanne (my sister and her husband and 2 boys) who are about to leave us for Australia - oh thanks alot guys. They are emigrating like. I guess it means that we will have to go and visit at some stage. We never got to Australia on our trip so going there will be an adventure.