Last week, my dad Roger died at the age of 66. He was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2012 and had spent the last couple of years being cared for in a very kind and loving care home, but after a few weeks in hospital he managed to spend his final days in a bed in the middle of our family living room. On Wednesday evening I went to see him, and by Thursday morning he was gone. Since then, our whole family has been together and I feel very lucky – when I think of the possibilities of transatlantic flights or a lockdown hospital ward – that it ended this way.
I want to write something about his life, but I really don’t want to try and write some ‘definitive’ biography: firstly because there’s far too much to say, but also because there are so many different stories here. Like everyone, he was lots of different things to many people. So these are just my memories and impressions for right now. They shouldn’t take precedence over anyone else’s or all the many, many other memories which aren’t here.
My dad was born in the village of Coney Weston in Suffolk in 1954. He liked to point out that this was the year that wartime food rationing finally ended. His father was a bricklayer and a gentle father to Roger and his older brother Derek. My dad remembered one time when he was being naughty and his dad raised his hand to smack him in anger before catching himself, lowering it and walking away instead. Suffice to say, that gentleness was passed down. In the condolence cards which have been flooding our house since his death, some words keep coming back over and over again to describe my dad: witty, intelligent, kind. I would always include gentle in that list too.
I’m a city child, and although my dad came to love London as an adult there are important roots to him from the countryside which will always seem a little awesome and mysterious. He knew the names of trees and what the stars were called. Later, whenever we were staying in the countryside as a family, my dad would always take us on nighttime walks away from lights so we could see the stars which were usually hidden from us. They would have been his only light on the quiet, country roads which he walked alone at an age which would make most parents think twice today.
As a child in the 1960s, stars weren’t just for the sky but were all around too. An older generation had grown up on war stories but my dad wasn’t interested in toy soldiers: it was all about space rockets, Doctor Who and Daleks. I remember finding a book from this era on the solar system at my grandparents’ house which included speculative illustrations on the lush vegetation which ‘might exist’ on the surface of Venus. Venus, of course, turns out to be a hellscape – a parable of runaway greenhouse gases – and my dad never got his space stations or interstellar space travel either. But it fired his imagination. A few days ago we found a folder at home dedicated to the planet Volox which my dad put together with some school friends. It includes a giant map, shown below, along with several handwritten books including an English-Voloxian dictionary, a history spanning several millennia, an illustrated guide to the native animals and weekly Top Of The Pops music charts for Voloxian pop music. It’s really quite amazing.
These early years also set my dad as forever an internationalist at heart. I mean, honestly, if humanity is only a couple of years away from colonies on the moon and intergalactic trade treaties then should we really stay so attached to our nation states? My mum remembers a family holiday to Disney World in Florida, when I was about 5, which started with a very long queue at the airport to get through US Customs & Immigration. When we finally got to the end my dad – tired and fed-up – complained to the border officer that none of this would be necessary if we could only work things out and form one world government. It’s a wonder we were ever allowed into America after that.
At the end of primary school, my dad ‘passed’ the 11+ exam and went to the nearest grammar school in Bury St. Edmunds. Today, grammar schools are much-mythologised by people who lack a real understanding of the momentus social, cultural and economic forces which were at work at the time. It was an era, possibly unique in our history, of rapid middle-class expansion – I say this only because my dad would hate for his memory to be misinterpreted, and he really loved the very different schools which his own kids attended.
With all that said, this was obviously a watershed moment in my dad’s life which would forever put him on a different path to his older brother, his parents and many, many past generations of farmers and farm labourers which he would later trace when he got into genealogy and family history. (If you like the black and white photos in this post, you can thank my dad for scanning, captioning and dating them.) My dad frequently told me the story of his own parents, who left school at 14, sitting him down and telling him that while of course they would always love and support him – and he would always have a home there – at age 11 he had already reached the limit of their practical help for navigating the world of education. He went on to study French, Latin and Maths at A-Level before obtaining a degree in French at the University of Durham. His degree included a year abroad which he sometimes hinted at (a little mysteriously, in my opinion) as a pivotal and important year of development in his life.
I’m not going to try and trace the next steps where my dad moved to London, fell in love with my mum, bought a flat in Willesden, got married and had three children. But I told his childhood story because it always explained so much to me about how and why my dad was the person he was. He wasn’t showy – in some ways, he was a little shy, and he got really nervous before parties – but his curiosity about the world always won out over fear. He really genuinely loved the idea of his own children going out and having their own adventures, which would be different to his own, and then bringing back their own stories to the dinner table to share. This was part of what made him so popular with so many people – he was great to talk to, because he was more interested in hearing from other people’s lives than trying to impress them. And, overall, even without the space rockets, I think he was continually surprised and delighted by the many good things in his life and the world around him. One of his most famous catchphrases was “Life is good, isn’t it?” – usually after a pint of beer in a pub or on holiday, and always delivered in a tone of happy realisation, as if one shouldn’t necessarily expect life to be good but – by good fortune – it was.
He was also a fount of knowledge about so many things, and a total thumb in the face to people who try and impose an Arts vs. Science divide onto our lives. He loved classical music and linguistics and Proust and Nature magazine. He also loved Star Trek – particularly The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine which we always watched together – but he was a bit cold on the Original Series, and that was partly because he didn’t like the dichotomy of Spock vs. McCoy as ‘logic vs. emotion’. Unlike me I don’t think my dad read much of Scottish philosopher David Hume (his favourite was Jeremy Bentham) but I always think of my dad when I read Hume’s most famous line:
Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.
My dad respected reason, and thought reason made the world a better place. But he also taught me something which is totally foundational to the way I think about the world, which is that human beings are an animal species – clever primates – and ultimately what’s important to people is important because it’s important to people and you don’t need to go looking for a better reason than that.
A tangent about reason and parenting: I distinctly remember being quite young and doing something stupid (like breaking a glass) and my dad was upset because I couldn’t give any good answer to his question: why? To say “I dunno, I just did” was aggravating – it was “irrational”, to use his exact word – because it made no sense, and my dad definitely did not believe that you should patronise children by treating them as inherently unreasonable beings.
He was way ahead of his time in his freelance working arrangements, going into the offices of his biggest client two days a week but working from home for the rest of the week. (This also made him an early adopter of dial-up internet – one of my earliest internet memories is watching images from the surface of Mars load very very slowly from top to bottom in Compuserve.) This routine meant we had ‘mummy days’ and ‘daddy days’ when our respective parents picked us up from school, and sometimes dad worked late into the night to make it all work. If in the middle of all this we were being brats, and he lost his temper, he then felt bad in the same way he would regret getting angry with another adult. I remember he would come up to my room later in the evening, apologise and explain that he had lost his temper because he was tired, even when I’m very sure it would have been my own misbehaviour at fault.
As a result I grew up thinking it was totally normal for parents to apologise to their children, just like I thought it was absolutely unimaginable (and still do) for a parent to sneak through an older child’s personal things or open their post. This was my dad’s liberal, individualist streak and he never wavered from it. Amusingly, he also thought grounding children was nonsense on the basis that it was silly to trap yourself indoors with someone who was being unpleasant. Once, when Tash and I had been bickering for days, he sent us outside to walk round the block and resolve our differences before coming back again. It worked much better.
As I feared, I have too many memories to cram into one short post. Dad did the weekly shop with us after school, and he used to pacify/reward us by buying us each a jam doughnut from Sainsbury’s for the ride home. He made really great scrambled eggs. He was exuberantly cheerful whenever he came home drunk and red-faced from drinks with friends or colleagues. He once accidentally covered the three of us with the contents of an exploding ketchup bottle. And when I was young he used to make up stories about two rabbits, Rag and Tag, who lived in a warren and a state of semi-permanent war against the weasels. I recorded some of these stories on a cassette tape and I still have them today. At some point, my dad loses track of whether the magician rabbit, Narla, was male or female. The following is a word-for-word transcript of how he recovers:
“…and Narla waved his magic wand… her magic wand… sometimes Narla is a male and sometimes a female, because he changes from one sex to another. I think he might have been a male in this story. But he goes from being a male rabbit to a female rabbit, because he’s both. And the rocks tumbled down…”
The whole thing is casual, and unplanned, and clearly the result of making up a story on the spot. But he just goes with it, because why not? The world is big and full of life of every kind, and life is good. An important corollary is that life is also finite. Of course I wish my dad had lived longer. So would he. But not at the expense of living a lesser life, because he really was happy with the one he had. And he certainly never wanted to live forever. He told me, from a very young age, that asking about life-after-death was like asking about your existence before you were born. If you’re comfortable with your own absence in the past then there’s no need to be afraid about not existing in the future.
And enjoy the adventure.
I’ve barely blinked since my ‘snow day‘ post a month ago and now, suddenly, it’s a warm and sunny spring day. Warm and sunny enough, in fact, to saunter down the Waterlink Way and have lunch by the banks of the little man-made stream which runs through the middle of Ladywell Fields.
Of all the cool things we’ve found in this area so far, the Waterlink Way (and specifically our section, the uninspiringly-named River Pool Linear Park) has been the biggest and most delightful surprise. During our one and only viewing of the flat we did ask the estate agent about this promising-looking patch of green on Google Maps but she was unenthusiastic and pointed us in the other direction instead. But since moving here, we’ve slowly realised that it’s basically the perfect path: Cator Park in one direction, Ladywell Fields in the other on a route which ultimately runs all the way to Greenwich. During the day it’s filled with families while at night it’s a peaceful and soothing post-work walk, well lit enough to see where you’re going but not so much to obscure all the stars. And what better than to walk between a river and a railway, with all cars and roads banished from sight and sound? Basically, it’s a little like walking-through-the-wardrobe and expect to be dragged here if you come visit.
Meanwhile, the biggest advance in our indoor living (and let’s be honest, 99% of living is indoor living right now) was the arrival of our dining table. This was a big deal since we haven’t actually had a dining table we could eat at since the last flat’s table was pressed into service as an office desk back in March, so sit-down dinners with a table and chairs are very exciting and we celebrated by ordering a massive Indian feast, drinking bourbon and finishing the last of the Christmas crackers. (Look, we can’t have been the only ones with the ‘leftover crackers’ problem this year.)
The table also expands out so we can host people (one day) and/or play Carcassonne for the first time in a very long while. We’ve also played two games of Watergate which arrived in a bumper post-Christmas gift package from Katie along with a crossword and some other bits and pieces. Watergate is a two-player board game where one player plays as Nixon and the other plays as the newspaper ‘Editor’ trying to take him down. It should perhaps be promising that Tricky Dicky was defeated in both of our games, although Randi did point out sadly that the equivalent Trump board game would be a multi-day affair where you tried every conceivable path to impeach the President and nothing ever worked. We’ll stick with this one.
Finally, it was great to catch up with Jan from Groupon days a few weeks ago… and when I say Groupon days, I mean Groupon UK days, which is (a) a very long time ago, and (b) still my most promising source of material for ever writing a sitcom. (Some days I think it’s gone but then everything comes flooding back.) We also hopped over to Penge to wish Sam a happy birthday from her doorstep. To be honest we hung around for long enough that any normal person would have invited us in already, but Sam is clearly rude.
Fair warning: this post is just an excuse to post a bunch of cheerful snow photos from this morning. Randi and I had just finished wishing my cousin Alix a very happy almost-birthday on her surprise Zoom birthday brunch call (sadly brunches are all bring-your-own these days) when we decided that Beckenham Place Park would be the perfect place to go while it was still snowing before it all melted away again. And we were right!
I know, I know: if you’re in Chicago you’re probably rolling your eyes at this brief flurry of snow, but we’re still in lockdown so you have to take what you can get.
Otherwise we’ve been hanging out indoors (obviously), taking a break from work along with the rest of the world to watch Biden’s inauguration and trolling Matt and Laura with an aggressive posting schedule of catching-up-with-your-lives greeting cards. We also really enjoyed ActionAid’s Stand Up With Women comedy night (hosted by national treasure Jo Brand) on Thursday evening, eased amiably into the right spirit by Randi’s ginger beer bourbon drinks.
Also, last weekend Simon organised a truly wonderful Friday night group call to play Jackbox games, draw terrible drawings and interrogate Ellie on her mysterious life. It was a lot of fun, at least once we actually got Zoom working, and we ended up nostalgically looking at photos of us all from New Year 2013. It scarcely seems credible that so many people once occupied the same living room of a Mile End flat with so little regard for 2 metre distancing or the rule of six, or that we were once young enough to go to parties with – as Oliver put it – “more people than chairs”. One day!
Welcome to 2021, where you find us back in a national lockdown and watching news footage which veers between incredibly grim scenes from hospitals and the inspiring, hope-inducing scenes of the vaccine rollout. And, once we’re done with that, the new series of Would I Lie To You?, David Attenborough’s somewhat loosely-themed A Perfect Planet and (of course) the Doctor Who special Revolution of the Daleks on New Year’s Day which reminded me how much I’d missed Captain Jack. More, please!
This week Randi and I went back to work from our shiny new desks in our shiny new guest bedroom home office, completed our bedroom furniture construction (no more sleeping on a mattress on the floor) and finally felt the tide starting to turn in our battle to recycle cardboard boxes faster than they can pile up on our kitchen floor. On New Year’s Day we also managed a walk with my mum – who came bearing Christmas gifts – around Beckenham Place Park and, later that weekend, arranged an outdoor prisoner (OK, present) exchange with Tash and Cormac at a mutually-agreed location somewhere between our two camps.
At most other times, though, you could have found me perched on the kitchen counter opposite our amazing Hanukkah present from Randi’s parents: our very own railway departure board!
Yes, to everyone who has asked, it really does display actual live data for any railway / Tube / bus stop you desire, which means I can safely indulge my deep desire to travel by train again from the comfort and safety of my own cardboard-filled kitchen. Chris at work suggested I work on setting up tannoy announcements next…
Oh, 2020. This is the year which really breaks my ‘Annual Review’ format since everything pre-Covid will read like a drinks menu from the Titanic. I’m very lucky and fortunate to have had a more positive subplot, however, as (spoiler alert) this was also the year we managed to buy our first home…
January
As you could have read about on the newly rechristened dom.blog, we celebrated New Year at home with Randi’s parents and a thrilling Doctor Who season opener – so good that Randi’s mum kept watching the series on her return to California until being kept awake by too many behind-the-sofa moments! In January we also flung ourselves into flat-hunting with visits to far-flung places like Rayner’s Lane, Turnpike Lane, Kingston and Pinner… before we eventually had an offer accepted on a flat in Norbury, i.e. the flat that was not to be. I also watched Hunt for the Wilder People with Katie and Kim, started playing one of my favourite Dominion expansions (the very trashy Dark Ages) and saw the unconvincing play Leopoldstadt with my mum and Alix. There was also drinks with Matt and Clark, a Windsor work outing and – on the evening of Brexit Day, 31st January 2020 – I made my way to Gatwick Airport in soaking wet shoes, ordered a pie to the wrong Wetherspoons and boarded a plane to a happier, sunnier place.
February
Oh, Barcelona! In retrospect it should have been a more disturbing sign that more and more countries kept pulling out of the international health conference Randi was working on. At the time, it was just a great opportunity for me to join her for a brilliant post-conference weekend of sun, food and the beauty of the Park Güell. My final overseas trip of 2020 was actually a flying work visit to Dublin later in the month (my first time in Ireland!) which included an extravagantly good dinner at which I was the only one to order dessert (whoops). Back in London, Randi and I made the foolish decision to book a week-long staycation (“since we’re about to go on a big US holiday”) which did at least include the excellent Parasite at the Peckhamplex followed by amazing burritos, a trip to St. Albans and a wonderful night seeing Tabi and others perform at Soul Stripped Sessions. This month I also made my first and only platelet donation, attended the QPCS Celebration evening, saw Vice, attended an Amnesty International screening of The Personal History of David Copperfield with Tash and Cormac and Armando Iannucci (I just like running those names together) and enjoyed a bespoke tour of Walthamstow (from Sodo Pizza to Spar) from Randi’s colleague Vici. And (even more socialising!) we also celebrated Pancake Day with Matt and Laura and multiple pancake styles. Truly the month before the storm!
March
Like everyone else, my memories of March are a vivid sequence of escalations. I remember the news stories about the cruise ship. I remember the phase of trying not to hold the handrail on the escalators at Brixton. I remember bumping into Nathan Godleman (former History teacher, now rabbi) on the platform, shaking hands and then both remembering we weren’t supposed to anymore. On Randi’s first day of working from home I went to the office as usual but then watched the Downing Street press conference from my desk that afternoon and suddenly office life was all over. “The worst thing is going to be working from a laptop screen” I said to Eric. “Take the monitor!” he replied – and I have been grateful ever since. Over the weeks that followed we gradually assembled the missing pieces of our new home office. The novelty was tinged with a bit of a “war on the Home Front” vibe: this was the era of lots of impromptu Zoom calls and games, the beginning of Katie and Kim’s lockdown quiz and the claps for carers. As it happened I already had an appointment to give blood in the West End, which meant a surreal Tube journey and sight of a deserted Oxford Street. But my favourite memories from March are the two ‘final’ things we did, pre-lockdown. One was a London Loop walk through Happy Valley, culminating at The Full Monty café where I devoured their eponymous breakfast. The other was our deep-dish pizza outing at Japes with Simon, Fleur and Steve. It was such a silly, fun, happy evening with friends and is now permanently etched on my mind as the ‘last one’.
April
OK, so here’s where time starts to fall down. We stayed at home, obviously. I kept filling up the cupboard with new deliveries of classic Doctor Who DVDs – taking lockdown as a good moment to finally complete the collection I started 20 years ago. I showed Randi The Usual Suspects and thoroughly enjoyed seeing it again with foreknowledge of the plot. We watched The Dawn Wall and, if I remember, every single mountain-related documentary on Amazon after that. We played more games (including Codenames with Christian and Erika!) and had more calls (including with Toggolyn!) and I even went for a virtual walk around Logan Square with Robert, Bernie and Willow. The highlight of April, though, was waking up to Randi’s amazing in-house Easter Egg hunt and brunch. Not the Easter we had planned (sniff, lost American holiday) but a great one nonetheless.
May
By May our quiz team had grown substantially in size and competence, rebranding as the New Kinglanders to respect the dominance of the lovely King family. As it happens, Erin (King) was also the first person in months we hung out with in real life when picnic weather arrived and we could lunch by the Serpentine in Hyde Park. I enjoyed a brief ‘Coffee with Bill’, marvelled at the SpaceX rocket launch and celebrated the one-off return of Charlie Brooker to our screens. This was also when lockdown birthday season began in earnest: I exhausted my lung capacity blowing up balloons the night before Randi’s and we both got into semi-costume for Tash’s exceptionally well-organised multiple Zoom room festivities. And it was a big month for me work-wise too, with some team changes which would reshape the rest of the year. Randi and I also watched Argo (still the tensest, most stress-inducing climax to a film I can think of) and Portrait of a Lady on Fire (slower paced) and Eurovision sorta-but-not-really. Maybe next year?
June
Undoubtedly the best part of June was my birthday, which stretched out over a long weekend and included knocking over beers with Sam in Crystal Palace Park, a pigata in Amy and Adam’s garden, a big surprise family picnic to play Throw Throw Burrito, a beautiful replacement Dominion box and a wonderful Chicago Zoom catch-up. It was only a week or so before that we’d first discovered the fire-pit delights of Amy and Adam’s garden in the first place, and being able to ‘walk home’ in 60 seconds after an evening together was an especially joyous thing this year. This was also the month that Katie first addicted me to 80s remixes, the whole giant Glamily gathered on Zoom for Lori’s birthday, Randi and I loved watching Onward and the first and only time our team actually (joint) won the weekly quiz when special guest hosts Mairi and Sami were in charge and really rewarded knowledge from Jay Foreman videos.
July
In early July I reached an oddly emotional milestone: my first haircut since the pandemic began, complete with temperature checks, masks and hand sanitiser on the way out. As things opened up again Katie and Kim hosted their final quiz, and for Katie’s birthday Randi and I produced our own ‘Film Plot Acted Badly’ in tribute as well as joining the family picnic in Victoria Park (at least once Randi found the right canal). We also really enjoyed watching The Devil Wears Prada. The most amazing part of July, however, was our week away in Church Stretton! After a feverish attempt to find some self-catering accommodation which met our requirements we were rewarded with the perfect getaway and a chance to do lots of outdoor walking, pub gardens and some (brief!) swimming after being cooped up in our flat for so long. It was perfect timing for the perfect 2020 holiday.
August
August was the high point of freedom and social interaction during the pandemic: a combination of long summer days and a relative lull in cases. This was the time we were joined by Caroline in Matt and Laura’s amazing garden, ate fish and chips in Brockwell Park with Amy and Adam and even had Erin over for a Mamma Mia pyjama party. Our biggest venture was our trip up North (London) via Cat’s fancy birthday brunch, Regent’s Park, catch-ups with colleagues around Queen’s Park, dinner with my mum and Alix and finally lunch the next day with Josh and Anna. I guess this was probably the least useful time to be randomly selected for a Covid test! This was also the month of Eat Out To Help Out (thank you, Tulse Hill Hotel), some really excellent film recommendations (My Cousin Vinny and Waking Ned) and a certain flat on Zoopla which Randi got really excited about and then passed the enthusiasm bug on to me. After a quick viewing confirmed the love was real and then some nervous bidding we soon had our second accepted offer on a home this year…
September
After being stopped in our tracks since Covid, in September we resumed our London Loop walks before continuing at a steady clip to try and finish while we were still allowed to travel about. We also went on a great out-of-London walk around Oxted with Erin and had a raclette + receipt printer night at Katie and Kim’s before they left for Glasgow, but otherwise everything started to turn inward again. Randi posted her US election ballot, Thameslink refused to sell me a merchandise mug (so I made my own) and we had a lovely night of virtual board games courtesy of BoardGameArena. This was also the month that I started muscling in on Randi’s HelloFresh cooking box subscription, something which (after a few battles with our whiny smoke alarm) I’ve really enjoyed doing for the rest of the year.
October
To continue the London Loop theme: in October, we finished! After a succession of doubling / tripling-up the sections and learning more about the Grand Union Canal than I ever expected to know (it’s actually pretty cool) we wound up back in Hatch End where we started in April 2019. I genuinely really miss the London Loop now that we’re done. We also got to meet baby Cora for the first time, which was magical, along with a quick trip to Chelmsford to see the Osbistons and a “last hurrah before Tier 2” comedy night at the Tulse Hill Hotel, which felt like a delightful interlude from another era if you ignore all of the jokes about Tier 2. (This seems very quaint now that I’m writing this from Tier 4.) Also in October: we stumbled across the excellent Knives Out and I learnt that if you email the Office for National Statistics “to settle a bet” about the modal average age in the UK they will reply, promptly and courteously, with a full data set and a summary of the answer. Amazing service, much appreciated.
November
If time wasn’t broken enough in 2020, November was when we really fell down the rabbit hole into the timeless twilight of the US election. We both took the week off work, scarpered to Seaford for a hopeful dinner at The Grumpy Chef (we love you) and spent election day itself on a beautiful walk along the Seven Sisters. But after we got home it felt like one long endless day of CNN’s John King’s touchscreen patter until the election was finally called and the Trump era was (almost) over. Of course, by then the second national lockdown had begun but I did enjoy a virtual Caius history event, a long-awaited reunion with Jason, Carrie and their jiu-jitsu doll and the start of the fantastic second season of His Dark Materials.
December
December in two words: we moved! Some days it seemed unlikely, but after a tense few weeks (with distractions provided by The Heat, sofa shopping and trying to explain to the Tulse Hill Post Office that Belarus was a country in Europe and not a region of France) we got everything packed and moved to our shiny new home in Forest Hill just before Christmas. While an in-person family Christmas would have been lovely, of course, we did at least open our presents (or rather, each others’ presents) virtually with my family and played Tash’s amazing Christmas Day Zoom Quiz (go Team Badgers!) with a delicious homemade pie feast in-between. Since Christmas we’ve been enjoying two weeks off work by going on lots of exploratory local walks: Horniman Gardens for the hot chocolate, Blythe Hill and Hilly Fields for speculatular views, Beckenham Place Park for mulled wine and woodland and Greenwich Park to come within striking distance of the Thames. We also went through cycles of marking out furniture purchases with index cards before collapsing onto our bean bags to watch the traditional Christmas Eve The Muppet Christmas Carol, a Christmas Day Love Actually, the conclusion to the struggling season five of The West Wing, a nostalgic trip back through 30 years of HIGNFY, an accidental stumbling across of Rob Brydon acting in The Best of Men and spy thriller Our Kind of Traitor which is a disappointingly one-note film apart from the standout character of Dima. TLDR: we moved!
So that’s where you leave me in 2020: very ready for a gradual return to normality, but with an optimistic feeling of fresh starts and new beginnings too. It’s been a much more difficult year than that for so many people but I sincerely hope that, whatever your circumstances, you find something to hope for in 2021 too. Until then, stay safe and thank you to everybody who worked miracles for us all this year. 🌈
Jeff DuBowe on Haarlem globetrotters: “One of our favorite spots. Super walking city. I think we were the ones who told your In-Laws about it…” Oct 14, 15:15
