We had a great Christmas Day - Lucy and Annette were kind enough to come and help with the horses, and after we had finished we had bucks fizz and smoked salmon in the shepherd hut. As it was such a beautiful day, Doug and I went for a walk and stopped by to visit Hun and Chris who live in the Mill House. They were spending Christmas at home and it would have been rude not to have had the obligatory glass of champagne there...We then walked back home along the river and through the Estate garden, which is just stunning. We got back to our house just in time to see Percy the Pig running up our garden path with the stick of brussels in his mouth. We had left it outside the back door as it was too big for the fridge and Percy took his chance whilst we were away. Doug had to rugby tackle him in the herbaceous border to rescue them and because we were popping to the Holly Bush to meet some friends we had to hang them out of harms way on the door knocker. We got back just in time to watch the Queens Speech, light the fire and put the turkey on for our third Christmas dinner in one week! Very nice too

 A Christmas wreath with a difference!

Yesterday, after Towcester races and doing horses we spent time with Josh, Emma, Archie and India and today we visited Joseph, Sophie, Henry and Jessica. The boys are just at the lovely age where they are almost besides themselves with the magic of Christmas. Last night it started to snow whilst we were with Archie and it was terrific to see the look of wonder on his face never having seen snow before - especially as he had just watched The Snowman on DVD.

Tomorrow we are racing Cloud and Murphy in the same race at Cottenham. Cloud is going with the sole intention of (hopefully) getting Will around in one piece and giving him some experience and as it is Murphy's (Glory Hunter's) first run for us it will be a learning curve to find out more about him. Ideally we would have liked to have had a racecourse gallop with him but Towcester have stopped allowing that since that ghastly greyhound track has been stuck in the middle of what used to be one of the most beautiful national hunt tracks in the country. An absolute travesty, but don't get me started on that one....

Lots to do to get ready for tomorrow so must go