The last two days have been absolute chaos at my hotel near Heathrow. The airlines have had to cancel hundreds of flights due to freezing fog and the hotels around the airport have been inundated with stranded travellers. Aude and I are crossing our fingers and hoping that the weather lifts in time for us to fly to France on Christmas Eve.

My Christmas cards are sent, and as the year draws to a close, I thought I would use my blog to reflect on the past year rather than send out a “Christmas Letter”. Mostly because I’m lazy and this is easier.

As I look back over the past year (which is easy to do, since it’s all neatly documented online), I’m amazed at how much we’ve managed to squeeze into twelve months – some of it feels like a lifetime ago, some of it feels like it was just yesterday.

At least I can take some reassurance in the cyclical nature of the world. Some things never change. Air travel is still stressful, and nothing ever works out quite the way you planned. A year ago we were waiting for Aude’s parents to arrive. The finally made it, a few hours late, but had to spend the entire holiday in what they’d worn on the plane as their luggage took in a scenic journey of Europe.

Happily, they were reunited with their luggage when they got back home a few days later. Aude and I joined them, and together we rang in 2006 in style in the south of France, this time with all of our luggage and a full complement of family and friends. Minouche, the cat, was still a kitten and kept us all entertained.

Minouche got lost, but thankfully was found several weeks later, looking fairly sorry for herself. Cats will be cats. She’s now doing well and steadily putting on weight – she’ll look like Daisy and Calypso in no time.

Sadly, we had to say goodbye to a number of friends this year including Faouzia and Alain and Julien, who moved to France, Alessandro and Virgine, who have gone off exploring the world, and countless others who have moved to Walton Oaks (!). I’ve also had to say goodbye to most of the friends I worked with on my consulting projects down here, as they’ve moved on to other clients and other parts of the world.

We’ve both moved this year – 100 metres down the road in both cases – to our new place in Canterbury where we’re finally settled in. The back garden has been a godsend and we’ve used it constant throughout the summer for entertaining and barbeques. I can’t believe I lived so long in England without a garden.

I’ve changed jobs, but that doesn’t mean very much as a consultant. I still managed to spend more than a hundred nights in a hotel this year, where I’m greeted more like a long-lost friend than a guest when I arrive. And I still seem to find the most glamorous clients slung around the far side of the M25 – meaning hundreds of miles each week in gridlocked traffic.

In March, I crashed my car. Much to my embarrassment.

We’ve done our fair share of travel this year. We’ve been skiing in France, where Aude did her impression of Les Bronzes and I demonstrated “what not to wear”. I went to Washington to visit my parents. We visited Thailand for Songkran and got absolutely doused. We visited Alsace, Basel, Zurich and saw our friends get married in Nancy. We visited Aude’s grandfather in Orbec. We visited friends in Paris and we went to Scotland to see Mike and Karen getting married, where I was so inspired that I decided to get engaged myself.

We had some visitors, too – Aude’s parents in December, Joan and Joey in July, and my parents, Dasha and Nick in November. And Aude’s brother, Jerome, who has come to see us countless times – although I’m convinced it’s only because he fancies a change from the food in the office canteen!

We’ve had plenty of good food and wine this year. I ate testicles. And frog’s legs. And I seem to have spent most of the month of December in black tie.

All in all, it’s been a very good year, and one I’ll look back upon fondly. To those of you reading this who I haven’t heard from in a while – I’d love to hear what you’re up to, even if it’s only in a Christmas letter.

Best wishes to everyone for a merry Christmas and happy New Year!

Neil was complaining that there weren’t enough updates and pictures on here recently. Unfortunately, my new client engagement has kept me very busy. I haven’t had as much time to update the blog as I would like, and the truth is that my updates would largely consist of “spent more time helping to re-engineer my client’s finance function”, which isn’t really useful for anyone.

I also don’t have many new photos to post, but as a gesture, here are two photos that were taken at Aude’s Christmas party last week.

It has been a while since I last updated my blog, and for good reason. I have just started working with a new client which is taking up most of my time. But I do have time for a brief recap of the past week or two before I head off for my Christmas holidays.

The weekend after my Christmas party was absolutely beautiful – it remains unseasonably warm over here, apparently the warmest year in the recorded history of the UK. I took the chance to take the Corvette out for a good wash and a quick drive to the coast – a plan somewhat flawed by the fact that I didn’t account for the short days. We were halfway to the coast and found ourselves driving in total darkness.

Sunday night I drove back to London to get ready for a series of client workshops on Monday and Tuesday with my new client. We’d had no notice of them (contract signed late on the Friday night) so it was a case of “turn up and wing it”. Luckily that seems to be one of our core strengths. The rest of the week was primarily made up of me forgetting the names of the 40-or-so delegates.

I hosted a dinner for a number of new graduate recruits on Wednesday night at our offices – the highlights of which were a stunning meal in an amazing setting (our 9th floor boardroom overlooking the river, with one of the best views in London) and seeing the genuine excitement and enthusiasm on their faces as they enter the job world for the first time. The graduate market is becoming more competitive, and my company puts on a pretty impressive show to try to win the best talent. It’s fun to be part of the process, even if it meant dragging myself in from Heathrow.

Having dragged myself in from Heathrow, it seemed only right that I accepted Mike’s invitation to go out for a few Christmas drinks with several of my old colleagues – cue 2am taxi back to Heathrow and working the next day on about 4 hours sleep!

Friday night was Aude’s Christmas party at the University of Canterbury, where pleasantly we witnessed no assaults at all. Saturday we went to Whitstable for a friend’s birthday party – and despite being in a harbour with some of the freshest fish in the UK, I managed to order a fish that had been flown in from Australia.

Woke up on Monday morning to discover that winter had finally arrived – for the first time this year, I had to scrape the frost off my car before driving up to London.

Six more days until Christmas. I suppose I’d better pull my finger out and get some shopping done.

After all our excitement on Friday night, we decided to take things easy on Saturday. After spending the morning with the police, we went to Oriel for brunch then headed out to the Kings Road to do a little pre-Christmas shopping. Later in the afternoon, we met up with Aude’s brother, Jerome, and grabbed the train back to Canterbury where we had a quiet dinner at our place.

Now that Thanksgiving is behind us, we took the opportunity to put the tree up on Sunday and invited a few friends around to help us decorate it. The cats did their best to help out as well, Calypso supervising from the corner while Daisy jumped right in the middle of things. She spent her day alternatively sleeping in the box of decorations and being pissed off with Jerome (why, we’ll never know).

Mulled wine, Christmas carols on the stereo, and a fire burning away on the TV (hey, these are modern times and I don’t have a fireplace) – just what we needed to get into the Christmas spirit. Just a reminder: three weeks until Christmas!

Matthew and Jerome begin the annual “struggle of the lights” as we try to get the strings around the tree. Note the concentration on our faces…

A crowd of onlookers come to cheer us on!

Not quite like Christmas past – this year it’s all about “Fireplace: The Movie”

Is it just me, or are Anne-Laure and Neil kissing in every photo of them I take?

Is there anyone more excited about Christmas than MG? I doubt it!

MG hangs an ornament on the tree

Aude joins in the fun

Since Jerome’s mother claims that the only updates she gets about her son come from my blog, we’ve decided to start photographing him ‘ransom-style’ with a current newspaper to prove that he is, in fact, still alive.

Another year, another Christmas party, this time in an enormous marquee at Embankment Gardens in London. I’ve been wearing black tie so much recently that I’m beginning to feel like a waiter.

Matthew prepares for his first day at Vesuvio’s Restaurant

The party was pretty much your typical big corporate Christmas event, and was actually one of the better Christmas parties I’ve been to, but the entire night was overshadowed by the fact that we came out to witness a serious assault as we waited for our taxi. Basically, it was drunken partygoer vs. homeless guy, with drunken partygoer being pushed over and cracking his head open.

So instead of a nice, leisurely start to Saturday morning, we were woken up early by a Detective Constable wanting to interview us about the events of the previous evening. No doubt the staff at the Sheraton were not too impressed to see the boys in blue turn up at the door just a week after the whole Litvinenko polonium scare, thinking to themselves that another suite would be out of commission for a month!

Our witness statements prepared and our civic duty done, we decided to head out into Belgravia for some shopping. A block from Sloane Square (one of the most affluent parts of London), we came across this:

Not what you want to wake up to…

Canterbury may not be paradise, but there’s not a bone in my body that misses living in London.

They’ve just sent out the pictures from our corporate function in Brighton, so I thought I’d incorporate a few of them here. After all, how often do you get dressed in a tux? (Answer: about once a week this time of year!)

Quite busy getting a client presentation ready for tomorrow morning, so this will be a short blog entry — I’m meeting a friend for a drink here in London after work, so I’ve got a real incentive for finishing on time!