I'm always a bit nervous about surprise birthday parties as the person whose birthday it is has a lot of time to think "has everybody forgotten my birthday?" when the event passes almost without comment. So when our daughter Sarah's partner Duncan told us that he had booked a holiday house in the borders to celebrate her 30th I hoped that the small gifts that we sent and the apologies that we couldn't see her as we had to be at work for stock taking would not be too much of a letdown as, let's face it, 30 is quite a milestone in your life. Fortunately everything went well and a group of thirteen of Sarah's friends and family had a very pleasant country weekend in the ancient town of Melrose. Above is Sarah cutting her cake.
Duncan booked a private room in the local Burt's Hotel for a formal dinner on Friday (above)and on Saturday it was home made pizza, strawberries and birthday cake.
And speaking of the cake, I have to make a special mention of Jan Harbon who once worked here in the Instanta office before taking up her new role as a full time foster parent. Jan has always enjoyed making celebration cakes and she kindly made this one for Sarah to our brief. Being a summer baby Sarah has always celebrated birthdays when strawberries are in season and we spent many happy hours with her as a toddler at the local pick your own farm where strawberries would find her basket and her mouth in roughly equal quantities with her trademark saying of "that one's a booty daddy" before it disappeared. We possibly should have weighed her in with our collected fruit. Jan captured this theme with this wonderful celebration of summer and strawberries (and the beautiful fruit cake beneath the decoration tasted as good as it looked). So thank you so much Jan and please put your prices up.
As one of Sarah's birthday presents we made up a photo book of her life for her using the website BobBooks.co.uk (highly recommended - great service) on the Internet and had a lot of fun digging out and scanning ancient photos to go in it. Here's a photo of us as teenagers about forty years ago that we used to start the book. Son Paul says that he doesn't want one when he is thirty but that's not going to stop him getting one.
The visit to Scotland meant that I missed half of the World Cup final but "missed" is probably not the right word. As I said on the blog on Friday, the match was almost guaranteed to turn out as it did and my only regret is that I didn't put my money where my mouth was and put a bet on the nil nil full time scoreline. For me the highlight of the World Cup was this stunning save from Rob Green in the very first England game. Strange how time plays tricks with the memory.
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