Meeting up with friends...

So this picture was taken exactly a year ago when we were off to Paphos to meet up with Jane and John Page and to eat at the now closed Bad Cat restaurant.  The weather last December was appalling - it was wet almost continuously and poor Jane and John got very little respite the whole month they were here.

This is a photograph from this morning at about 9.00am when the sun was beginning to break through a mackerel sky and provide us with a warm day, a warm day with quite a bit of sunshine - enough to generate nearly 8KW of electricity!  It was to be a different Monday for us - I wasn't going to art as we had the opportunity to catch up with our lovely friends Bill and Wendy Bailey (No 1 Stalkers) on their brief visit over Christmas and we are very grateful they managed to find time to squeeze us in before their son Stuart comes out for a well earned rest.

As we approached The Mall, where we hoped to complete our Chrimbo shopping and meet up with Stalkers No1 and Stalkers No2 (Di and Rob), the temperatures had reached 20 degrees at it was not yet 9.30am!  It was so worth getting up early and getting off because when we reached The Mall the carpark was nigh on empty probably because most of the shops open a little later but we really only needed to go to Jumbos and Tiger and so that wasn't a problem for us.

We fair whizzed around Jumbo getting the last few things on the list.  You have to love Jumbo, it has absolutely everything you need for Christmas and at such low prices and if unimaginably you can't find what you want there you can probably get whatever it is in Tiger.  To be fair I dont think anything on the list was absolutely essential but as you readers will have gathered both John and I love Christmas and the more Christmassy the better!!!

We got done so quickly that we even had time for a nice leisurely Costa Coffee outside in the sunshine overlooking what appears to be a monorail system that is being installed so that tourists can visit the antiquities by the Kings Mall and down at the harbour.  I had read it was a walkway but it doesn't look like a walkway it looks like a train track.

We all met up for lunch and John and I managed to use one of our 2 for 1 vouchers that we got from the Esso garage and we had a lovely couple of hours setting the world to rights.  We are hoping that next year we will see more of Wendy and Bill than we have done of late - we will certainly try and make sure that we do.  We then all went our separate ways to do whatever shopping we had left (we had none!) having had a lovely lunch.

I had an email from my old work colleague Gemma when I got home.  Above is the office building where we used to work - the IT department was right up on the top floor - I spent just short of 20 years there.  Since I left this building (which was originally the Central Cinema and quite an iconic building before it was razed to the ground and this modern office block built) has been sold and is being converted into 17 flats - good help us where the hell are they going to park as the parking space behind only managed to accommodate about half a dozen cars and only then if they were careful.  Gemma sent me the details of how it is all being converted which is fascinating and if anyone is interested you can find them here:  Central House Conversion.  How times change!