T.E.Hall




From: IrenePenney@aol.com
Date: Thu, 11 Feb 2010 03:47:43 -0500
Subject: (no subject)
To: tehall@live.co.uk

Hi there Ted,
How are you? You're christmas day lunch sounded lovely with Mary. It would be lovely to get out for a wee change eh? Oor Brian and I are very well and enjoying the spring sunshine. How about you ? Has the weather improved at all? Over Christmas when you were getting a terrible bashing with all the snow, we got battered with rain and high winds. You certainly had plenty of snow hadn’t you? We just huddled down for the winter and now we are definitely out the other end of it. The last few weeks have been glorious and sunny although sometimes the wind is still a bit cool. Today has been really warm and the summer stuff came out of the wardrobe again. My poor legs were blinking in the sunlight. I hope the glare of them isn’t too much of a shipping hazard!!
We’re getting quite excited as the new sea charts for the Med have just arrived, so we’ve been poring over them and looking at places that we’ve talked about visiting. We plan on setting off from here around mid March when we’ll head for the Algarve, where we have family visiting and from there stagger our way across, with the idea of wintering next year in the Greek Islands. I’m really looking forward to visiting Malta and exploring the underground hospital from WW2. They might keep a hold of me as an ancient relic!!
Brian’s busy getting the hull scraped off for the new anti-foul to go on and a couple of lads from the boatyard are repainting the bootline and then they’ll clean and polish the body of the boat so she’ll look really posh. It’ll just be the owners that look a bit jaded, but then that will be all the work she will need for the next two years. Meanwhile I need to start looking at re- provisioning again since the supermarkets are so good here. I started today off by blitzing our cabin and decanting all the books we’ve read this winter. There’s quite a few but we’ll hang on to them until we get to other marinas where we’ll be able to swap them. As well as reading a lot we’ve got into the habit of watching a video sometimes after tea. So far we have watched all of the series ” Mash”....all 110 episodes!! At present we’re on series 4 of “ The West Wing” which is good, you feel it could be fairly true to life..gawd help us.
I’m in the middle of sewing the George Cross on a red and white flag that happened to be spare. We haven’t got a Maltese courtesy flag on board hence the sewing. Thank god for the internet otherwise I wouldn’t have had a clue what I was doing ( nowt new there then...)
Pity you aren’t here to see the fab hairdo! I was at the hairdresser 4 weeks ago and as she doesn’t speak English I was reduced to drawing what I wanted done!! I think something got lost in translation... I wanted my blonde highlights toned down as they were so bright ( apparently it’s the sun...Sorry ) and a wee cut here and there. Well, I started off looking like Marylin Munroe (in yerr dreams Rene) and by the time she had finished I was more like Daphne Broon...Sob,... I particularily like the challenge of styling the lop sided fringe that she left me with in the mornings. One of my sisters is in the middle of knitting a balaclava, maybe she’ll send me it when she’s finished!! I’ve got another wee partner for my daily walks. She’s called Teresa and she and her partner called Ulley are from Basle and have just got back from visiting the family. Teresa is quite funny. She goes to the swimming pool too now and has bought flip flops as she doesn’t want “ mushrooms of the feet”. Made me giggle.
Anyway we shall be really sorry to leave Lisbon. It really is a beautiful city and the people are so friendly. Having said that, we are really looking forward to setting off again. I shall have to keep my peepers open when we get to the Straits of Gibraltar for the tuna nets which are numerous. That would be all that we would need getting the prop tangled up with fishermans netting.
Anyway, I think that’s all our news for now. I hope that your health is okay Ted. Keep warm in this weather much love to you. Bye for now. Irene xxxxxx