That was 2025...

Yes, it’s another of those year in review type posts, and at some point I’ll look at my Top 10 posts for the year as I usually do, but before that I’m sharing a look back at the past year which I’m hoping should be all the easier for the new series of ‘This is’ posts I started last January. Fingers crossed anyway.

2025 was a year that we saw way too much of hospitals, and I’d appreciate it if 2026 could be much better behaved in that respect please. Both MOH and I made various visits to hospitals here in Newark and further afield in Mansfield and our parents also had ambulances and A&E visits, though thankfully that’s been left in 2025.

It was also the year that I learnt that my HRT was the ‘wrong sort’ and had been for a while, despite me asking questions, but anyway it’s sorted now and I’m grateful that it was eventually discovered and corrected.

Health and fitness was a big theme this year, and I’m sure it will continue to be too. We have our gym in the garage, which I’m a much more frequent visitor in warmer weather, and I’ve been going to regular Yoga sessions in the hall in the village next to us. In October we both started Reformer Pilates, and wow - it’s been a learning curve for us both. We’ve stuck at it though and we are both benefitting from the classes, even if we don’t manage to do everything quite how we should all of the time!

And as I look back over my monthly posts as always there’s things I remember clearly, and things that make me smile - such as remembering the pheasant in our garden in the February sun - and things that jog my memory too.

In January I was inspired by many quilts at the Newark Quilt Show, and spent a Saturday at a workshop starting my Floral Fancy panel, which I haven’t yet progressed any further - oops! I wondered ahead of the workshop if I had the skills required, and over the year I’ve realised that I do and also that the more sewing I do, the more I can do, though I think having the confidence with and in my new machine helps.

In February as well as the running pheasant the snowdrops we’d planted in the garden started to flower, there was a day trip to London where I snuck in a visit and small purchase at Liberty, and we had the most amazing meal out at Sabor, which had long been on our list to visit but we never got to while we were living in London!

Spring started to spring in March and brought with it much more traffic through our tiny village thanks to the roadworks on the nearby A46. We sorted out better wine storage, replaced a failing light on our landing and spent a small fortune on a large piece of art for the stairwell.

There were cute lambs in the village in April and many mornings we woke to their bleating, which given how cute they were never becoming annoying. We went along to the Newark Garden Show leaving with an ornament for the garden, which has stayed in the garage ever since. We needed to source another light for our landing after sending a damaged light back and being expected to wait until June for its replacement - I really don’t think so, so we didn’t.

In May I was back in London at the preview of Unearthed at the British Library, and it was a fantastic exhibition which part of it is now touring the country, or at least it was. We tied this in with a visit to Grand Designs at the Excel and was surprised to see how much reduced the show was, though that didn’t stop me buying a very large pot for the patio, oh and Palace won the FA Cup, which was totally amazing.

We spent two and a bit weeks in June travelling between Chicago, Seattle and Vancouver and this was more amazing that Palace’s FA Cup win. I’ve still not edited the photos, and I really should as I want to share its awesomeness. And as soon as we were back we were off to Gardeners’ World Live in Birmingham again.

In July we finally went shopping for the sofa we were aiming for earlier in the year - hooray! Though our garden sofa which up until now had been an indoor sofa probably wasn’t as pleased as that was to be kicked out when the new one came! We got the high level sockets moved down to a level that suited us and covered the hole temporarily with a piece of A4 paper. We are resourceful if nothing else, as proven by using a liquidiser for our Pimms.

In August I continued to be wowed by quilts, this time at my first visit to the Festival of Quilts, the new kitchen sofa arrived - and it’s only in the last week or so that I’ve cut the safety label off it (it was right at the front so it had to go), and we finally made great strides in sorting out the garage, with new racks arriving too. That’s just as well as it wouldn’t be that long before the garden furniture would be moved in there for the winter.

We had a lesson in how to weekend in September, and it was a refreshing and timely reminder, plus there was new garden furniture delivered which we’ve not been able to use yet - but it’ll be new for this summer, and it was a bargain too.

There was even more progress in the garage in October when we actually made use of the racks we’d bought, but the real highlight of the month was the foraging and preserving. We had some chestnuts and walnuts from a neighbours garden, and picked up some more walnuts from the tree around the corner, and I made some chilli jelly using many of the tiny crab apples from our garden.

November saw a day trip to Harrogate for yet another quilt show (and I’m still not bored of them yet!), and I spent a joyous morning block printing some more patterns to embroider. Plus there was the annual Christmas pudding making and boiling, which always means Christmas is on its way.

And so it was, our Christmas was kickstarted after an early December weekend in Devon where we spent most of a day wandering around the gardens at The Newt, drove through plenty of water and then collected our own Christmas wreath when we were home. I got all of the sheep in Christmas jumpers embroidered that I wanted to, and we had a great Christmas seeing all of our family. Not withstanding a few domestic hiccups with the dishwasher and the heating, it was a great end to the year.

I’m only just starting to think about what 2026 may bring and what it will bring for my blog, and it may take a while for those intentional posts to surface - I’m always amazed at the number of people that already know when January 1 rolls round. I’ll get there, and most likely in a more relaxed way, which suits me just fine.

Here’s to a really great 2026 for each and every one of us.

This December...

Well, December has been a lot.

The month started with the usual yoga, pilates and massage sessions ahead of a weekend away visiting family in Devon. We’d decided to stop en-route in a new-to-us part of the country overnight, which as it turned out didn’t actually result in any less driving, but never mind.

A few days before we were due to set off we learnt that the hotel we were staying in had had to close which meant we wouldn’t be staying there after all. We’d booked through Mr & Mrs Smith and they were brilliant helping us find alternative accommodation. We were fairly relaxed about the location as long as it was in the general vicinity of the original hotel; they provided three alternatives and we chose Number One Bruton in Somerset, which turned out to be a brilliant choice.

It’s a great little town, and it felt like we got the VIP treatment unbeknown to us arriving on their ‘Christmas evening’ when the town was packed, the shops were open late and Santa abseiled into the festivities, like you do. The hotel and its restaurant Briar was fabulous too, and I’m sure we’ll be back again - it was that good.

We also spotted a sofa we liked in one of the windows and went in to find out more and try it out. As the sofa was in the window, we also climbed into the window to test it out - and added to the live theatre no doubt in Bruton that night! MOH originally pointed it out he says as a joke, but when we looked we realised it was actually rather nice and will go well in our lounge, and be the basis of changing the decor in there. I think he’s partly regretting it already!

A perk of being a hotel guest was entry into the gardens of The Newt in Somerset and no surprises but the gardens were amazing, even in early December. I’ve so much more to share from there, in fact I was part way through writing a post about overnighting in Bruton when life took over, so look out for that soon. Everything at The Newt was done on a grand scale and with no scrimping, I mean this was the Christmas decoration as you entered the main barn, see what I mean?

Travelling on to Devon later that day was ‘interesting’ - I’ve never seen so much water on the roads, and nor have I driven through so much standing water (well standing is a misnomer it was teeming off the surrounding fields with nowhere else to go). We arrived at family safely though, even if we were a tad bemused and bewildered by our onward journey.

While in Devon we visited one of our all time favourite National Trust properties joining in the celebrations to mark 100 years of Coleton Fishacre. As well as the house and gardens, there was the added learn to Charleston sessions, and my personal favourite - the Speakeasy, serving real (but understandably tiny) cocktails.

Preparing for Christmas

It really did feel like a Christmas started that weekend. Back home it was time to collect the wreath for our back door and with so much going on this year I ordered a wreath from the florist whose workshop I would have attended if time allowed. Isn’t it gorgeous?

I think the bad weather must have followed us home though, and the wreath spent its first week or so in the heat pump trellis enclosure sheltering from the winds, and to save me retrieving it from around the garden. But thankfully since it’s been on the back door the weather has behaved a bit more, and we get to admire it every time we go in and out.

I’ve even relented and for the first time ever we’ve had some outside Christmas lights. Well they were the twinkly garden lights we had strung across our old garden which have been in the garage since we moved. I had the creative idea to use them to decorate the green garden obelisk which is also having its first outing from the garage!

When they’re lit at night they look just like a tree might do - in the daylight they look a bit odd, but it is what it is. I also managed to snap a weird reflective picture, which I sort of quite like but I’m not sure why!

The lights have been such a success that we think next year we might get a real tree and have that outside on the patio instead, and instead of having a tree in the house. I think secretly MOH is still hoping for those inflatable kind of decorations, but deep down he knows that’s not going to happen.

I went along to two Sewing Group Christmas evenings on successive nights and both were successful. At the first one of the ladies shared the recipe for her fantabulous Baileys trifle I’d admired and tried to recreate last year, as well as bringing a trifle along for us all to taste - taking her bowl home empty too. At the second we all made a folded Scandinavian Star which, while pretty once it was done, was a bit of a head scratcher!

I’ll probably make some more at some point, but there was no time this month as I’d already decided, fairly last minute, to embroider some Christmas cards - unusually being relatively realistic with the number I could complete, and therefore only block printing a sensible amount.

Embroidering sheep in Christmas Jumpers - on some of those sample fabrics from Harrogate - became my December task, and I’m really not that sad about it. They were all different, and they all turned out fab.

Not all plain sailing though

Which given the amount of water we’d driven through in Devon feels entirely inappropriate, but as a turn of phrase it’s a good summary. The utility company from our previous house (yes, the one we moved from in the summer of 2023) decided that this month was a good time to send us a final bill. In fact it was the third final bill we’d received from them - the first we were expecting and paid as you would; the second was a surprise and due to an error on their systems so they waived the majority of it. So a third final bill felt a tad unnecessary, especially as it covered a period of some 16 months when we weren’t the legal owners of the house - and it took them over a year to present it.

Calling them to discuss it didn’t solve anything, in fact the line went mysteriously dead when I asked them to explain why ‘back billing’ wasn’t relevant. It wasn’t an insignificant amount either, and was clearly not right and paying it wasn’t right either. In the end we got some great advice from our local Citizens Advice Bureau and raised a complaint with our previous supplier. I filed that on Christmas Eve and by the final Monday of the month it was all resolved, the bill cancelled and our previous account closed as they said they would do back in July 2023.

And the reason given for cancelling the bill? Back billing, which I’d asked about in that first phone call - it’s all so unnecessary, and has caused unwanted stress and paperwork. I’m sure we aren’t the only ones either, and I’m also sure that saying that unless it was resolved satisfactorily we would raise it with the energy ombudsmen didn’t influence things at all. But anyway it is sorted, which is a big relief.

And then our dishwasher and our heating decided to join in with both of them having a hiccup or two. The dishwasher stopped mid cycle and said ‘no more’ and so we need to call out an engineer. In the meantime it’s washing up for us - which reminds me daily of why we’ve had dishwashers for the last twenty plus years!

The heating decided to join the fun and have a blip on Christmas Day, thankfully we weren’t hosting Christmas this year as no dishwasher and temperamental heating would have made it ‘fun’. We do have an engineer booked to look at the heating for early next week as that’s our priority to be fixed as you’d expect. It is working kind of and we do have hot water, it’s just the system isn’t very happy and isn’t right and I have more photos than I ever thought possible of the messages and status of the main thermostat. But at least it is no longer alerting us every 46 minutes (yes, I timed it) which meant that neither of us got a whole load of sleep on Monday, so that’s something!

Shaken not stirred

There was more gallivanting before Christmas too with a night out and subsequent shopping day in London. For the past few years we’ve been out for a pre-Christmas steak at the Hawksmoor in Air Street, and it’s one of those things that has fast become a favourite thing to do. This year we stayed over near Kings Cross and headed back towards Regent Street the next morning to secure our traditional mince pies from Fortnum & Mason and check out their Christmas department, and their windows. London was busy though and we were glad to get back home, but not before we tried the new Martini Bar in the Hawksmoor’s newest venture in the St Pancras hotel.

That too was very nice, and somehow I think we’ll be back there before next Christmas as it’s a very civilised way to wait for a train!

If you want to read my ramblings from previous monthly updates then please check out my ‘This is’ series.

My garden in November

I didn’t get around to sorting out my bulbs while the weather was still mild, even though that mild weather lasted a good couple of weeks into the month. Realistically it’s unlikely that I’ll get to them this year, so that means this season but it’s definitely a job for once they’ve finished flowering. I think they’ll flower ok this winter, but would benefit from a repot and some attention.

With the end of the more tropical November weather ending our focus was getting the garden ready for winter, which meant moving a lot of pots around. Those which I’d dotted around the garden to test out locations have now mostly moved back into the shelter and additional cover of the established border, but I was pleased to spot the burgundy Mottisfont rose trying with another bloom. It’s still trying and I’m not sure if it’ll succeed or not, if it does I’ll nab a photo. But that attempt did secure it a spot where we can just about see it from the window!

My succulents are now overwintering in the gym, as they did last year. This year they’re in larger pots and have been joined by the bargain chilli plant (20p and not a chilli in sight yet!) and two young Amaryllis plants from my dad.

There’s actually nine pots in there this winter, and without it feeling overrun with plants so that’s something. I’ve made use of our new garden table and some surplus gym flooring for some of the pots, others are alongside the windows - and most importantly I must remember to set a reminder to check on them and water them, though much less than in the summer months.

Elsewhere in the garden things are growing, or not growing as you’d expect. The small crab apple has shed its leaves but not yet all of its fruits, so it looks a bit like a strange Christmas decoration - I need to look into and potentially make time for pruning this, as the poor thing really did have its work cut out with all the fruit this year, and some of the branches are twice as long as they were.

In, what I deemed the ‘sick bay’ both of my once yellowing bay trees have recovered brilliantly and are so much more healthy than they were back in May. It’s amazing what some light, regular watering and a bit of a feed can do isn’t it?

What I didn’t realise though until I moved this one into the gym, is that it’s had babies or extra blooms at least under the main growth (next to the blue mat in the picture), when it was on the patio we only looked at it from the other side so it just goes to show there’s benefits in many different viewpoints, and more specifically it’s a reminder to rotate my pots!