Thursday, December 15, 2011

Grant, my husband has just written this Christmas round robin letter: thought you may like to read it...

Well what a year of magic and wonder 2011 has been...
Tom is nearly 12 now and has continued to progress academically this year. He constantly amazes his fellow professors at Cambridge University with his intuition in the finer points of Eastern European fiscal law. He really enjoyed conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra in the Royal Albert Hall in the summer and intends to spend this Holiday transcribing 'War and Peace' into Arabic and Cantonese.
Gill had a very busy year. In between her work as Archbishop of Greenland and Senior Partner of Apple (Europe), she introduced a line of children's novels and hand made active-wear. She remains occupied with Tom and has introduced him to Yoga and hang gliding this year which will come in useful on their expedition up Everest next summer. We are particularly proud of Mum in her role as a fly-half representing England in the Women’s Rugby World Cup.
Grant was immersed with his Graduate School studies, and managed to co-author a paper on Multidimensional Customer Attribute Analysis by Conjoint Survey and accept a Nobel Prize for his discoveries in Quantum Physics. We are proud of his work serving on the Board of Directors of IBM, Coca-Cola, and Walt Disney. Dad was also active with Tom teaching him Classical Ballet and helping to lower his golf handicap to 5.
We were able to squeeze a little travelling in this year. We started in Aspen, went to Belarus, the Congo, Denmark, Ethiopia, the Falklands, Greenland, Holland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, Venezuela, and Zaire. Our trip sailing our new boat around the world was a great experience for Tom; we all learned to communicate with Dolphins and discovered a new region of deep water volcanoes which are now named after us in recognition of our services to marine science.
Whisper and Mittens, our cats, learned to speak Ancient Hebrew which will make reading the Old Testament so much more meaningful for them.
Christmas will be a particularly happy time for us as we have just heard that Grant’s mother has been given a Royal Pardon by the King of Thailand, and will be released by February. Apparently, she thought the powder the man gave her at the airport in July was icing sugar.
Other than that, it’s been a very quiet year.
So from our household to yours, all the blessings of the season and may your New Year be prosperous.
P.S. We found out yesterday that we won the Euromillions Lottery, and we didn’t even know we had entered!
Yours in great love and humility,

Grant, Gill and Tom