Post Christmas Post

Happy New Year! Thanks for all the emails, Matt D. your one was especially good, very detailed!!

It feels like this is the first time I’ve sat down at home for about three weeks but I think that is actually the case! Just before Christmas kicked off we went down to Tower of London ice rink for a little ice skate around! I’m not very good at ice skating but it was still good fun and I did not fall over once! I even managed to get off the edge of the rink and go around in the middle, sometimes at speeds. My skates were the standard ones you get from the hire place so I blame them for not being as agile as I could be (like you would).

I worked over the Christmas period to make up for holiday days needed for the trip to ‘stralia so I made a trip up to my parents house for Christmas where we had a night out with the boys down town, it was good to see them all as usual and a good night out, especially with Gin having to juggle time between all of his disparate group of friends that he hangs out with!

Christmas was great and I got all the presents I could ever have wanted, including, money to spend on events, subscription to Carve magazine, Sniper game for the XBOX, Surf Mug, Surf DVD, Surfing Towel you name it! It even snowed a couple of days after Christmas day –

New Year’s Eve was spent in London and was fairly quiet, mostly because the next day was ‘big sunday’ or so it seemed. We went out to Tower Bridge at midnight but were not able to see the fantastic firework display that was going off just around the meander of the river! The tube strikes on NYE meant we had to walk from Waterloo to my flat which is no short distance! I managed to snap some nice Thames shots on the way though –

The next day we took the drive down to the SE Coast, Boscombe to be precise at the surf forecast was “3ft glassy conditions” – the three magic words for winter surfing for me. It’s a good 1.5 hours drive to Boscombe on a good day (New Years Day has no traffic in London) so unfortunately it appeared I had missed the best of the morning incoming tide. However I did get out there and attempt some of the waves, but it is amazing how quick the cold gets to you and the weight of the 5.3mm wetsuit really takes the energy out of you, so not much surfed, however, a good reason to get a new board!! Wooo!!

Every now and then a great wave would come through that would break left right by the shed in the distance, however, these were very few and far between and the English channel doesn’t seem to have any understanding of the phrase ‘set’ as a good wave would come and that would be it for 10 minutes!!!