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Happy New Year!

We had a lovely Christmas here at Bay Tree Farm, not exactly a white Christmas, more of a wet one. It rained rather a lot, but not enough to dampen our spirits and with no visitors to worry about it was a perfect excuse to sit around the fire and do nothing.

Changing the habit of a lifetime CG and I decided to have our Christmas feast on the evening of the 24th in the Portuguese fashion instead of the usual Christmas day itself to give us time to visit Vila Natal and see Father Christmas on Christmas day. We have done this for the last couple of years and it has now become a lovely tradition.

The problem was that when we got to Obidos, Vila Natal was closed due to the rather fierce storm a couple of days before. What a let down! However, never one to give in easily the Boy King insisted that we go into the castle, and we ended up sitting on huge, comfortable sofas in the warm and toasty hotel bar in the castle drinking glasses of Ginja (warm milk for the Boy King) while the rain lashed down outside. It was really Christmassy and made the trip to Obidos worthwhile.

We are planning to try Vila Natal again on New Years day with a group of friends, so let’s hope that is a success, if not I know where I will be going!

The Boy King was a cockerel in the Christmas play this year. Due, once again, to my woeful lack of Portuguese I didn’t even know there was going to be a school play until the day before, so the costume was made in rather a hurry late in the evening. With the Boy King in bed I had no choice but to model parts of the outfit on CG, he looked a picture! The comb was made from a bobble hat and red crepe paper and the feet were yellow rubber gloves stuffed with tissue paper. The rest was just feathers cut from card and a big fluffy tail made from ribbons of yellow, red and orange crepe paper. I had to wait until the actual performance to see the outfit as a whole and have to say that I was rather pleased with the result. The Boy King was superb in the role, I’ve never heard a cockerel crow with such gusto!

Roly the pregnant pig is looking a picture of health – if a little muddy what with all the rain. She is beginning to out grow her house now. CG had to do a repair on the gate the other day, the problem was that he was a little over zealous with the cement and actually managed to cement her into the sty! Well, that solved the problem of her escaping for a while.

She is due to have her piglets at the end of January so I have begun nagging CG in earnest, as I can see the time slipping away before she will need to be moved into the new state of the art pig pen. The problem is that being a Creative Genius means that he can’t just build 4 brick walls with a door and a roof. It has to be more complicated than that……

At the moment he is considering building two spacious semi-detached pig sties with a store room at one end, a small concrete yard accessible to both sties and a paddock at either end. Phew!

He has one month and no cement mixer, let’s see what happens……..

Tiger the kitten is doing very well and taking a keen interest in the mice in the barn but has yet to actually catch one. They must be getting worried though, Tiger and Jake the dog are becoming great friends and seem to be working on a strategy to catch the pesky rodents in serious numbers. 

Well, that’s it for this year, I hope you all have a wonderful New Year, apparently Sao Martinho or Nazare are the places to be, so they tell me - although we’ll be back in front of the fire with a glass of something fizzy.

Feliz Ano Novo!

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