it's only 4.5 inches, but I'm hoping it'll go hard overnight

Couple of photo galleries for you, in non-chronological order, just to mess with your head. Firstly, everyone else is doing it, so I thought I'd better get in on the act - here's some photos of the snow in Newport. I gather other places have had 8-10 inches - we've only had four or five, but it is starting to come down again quite hard again now, so who knows where it'll end.


Secondly, here's a few photos of some Christmas and New Year antics. We hosted Christmas for various family members without any major mishaps (I overcooked the turkey a bit, but lashings of gravy took care of that). No Christmas Day pictures in paper hats, I'm afraid, but:

• On Boxing Day we went for a walk around the Newport Wetlands nature reserve, which I visited back in May 2008. Less birdlife flocking about at this time of year, but apparently there were some dunlins and redshanks down on the tidal flats. Not that I'd know a dunlin if I was pissing on one, but luckily my Dad is a bit of an amateur ornithologist.
• We visited Doug and Anna in Reading for New Year, as well as Doug's sister Pippa and her husband Mike, and two cats and two chickens. The cat and chicken combo sounds like a disaster in the making to me, but I am not an animal behaviourist or a zoologist, as you know.
• On New Year's Day we went down to Alton to meet our fellow Munroists Jenny and Jim. I didn't take any pictures, but we did manage a nice mini-pub-crawl round Alton. The Eight Bells is probably the pick of the bunch, I'd say.
• Then on Saturday we went down to Bournemouth to see our friends Hannah and Mark. On the Sunday we went for a bracing walk up onto Hengistbury Head, where there was a convenient trig point to be bagged, which was nice.