We had a great Christmas here at Langton House – cold but lovely, in fact as I write this in early January 2009 it is still unseasonably cold at -2C and it is almost mid-day! Lucky for us it starts to warm up tomorrow to the usual temperature of about 7C which will be a lot less painful!

We don’t do this sort of cold here in the UK, and we have even had a small amount of snow, but as usual it never lasts long here, usually gone but lunchtime.

I have been using the slow period to get some decorating done about the place. A bit of fresh paint in the hallway, but I started and had forgotten how much paintwork there is about the place! The Victorian door take forever to do…I had to rope my nephew in to help me!

It was a shame that this year we did not have the outdoor ice skating rink, but we have a permanente rink in Slough just down the road, so really no excuse for not going onto the ice, and we have plenty of frozen ponds around here right now…but I guess tomorrow that will be the end of that.

This coming year looks like it may be more difficult (in a business sense) with the slowdown in the world economy, but at least the exchange rate is going to favour the rest of Europe and North America.