Is There Anybody Out There?

Young Oliver has been quite demanding over his first few weeks. Being such a lightweight he didn't have the strength to feed for too long, so it was a "little and often" regime. Day and night. At about eight weeks we started to introduce some formula milk into his diet, which made it much easier for me to help out in the rota. With the night time feeds taking their toll on Lin, I took over the late shift so that she could get a decent stretch of sleep in readiness for a rude awakening somewhere around 4am.

So I've found myself with an hour or so either side of midnight to fill waiting for Oliver to stir. A few months ago I started a project to archive all my old Hi8 camcorder tapes not DVD; this covers a period from around 1991 to 2000 and includes a whole gamut of holidays, weddings, parties and general malarkey. So I've been catching up on that task, but rather than going straight to DVD I'm capturing onto the PC so I can dust off my Adobe Premiere skills and produce an end product of slightly better quality.

In a similar vein to my last post, this has been an interesting window into my past, into what feels like a previous life now. There is one particular sequence from the Bahamas 97 trip that really brought back how great those times were. We'd all been down to Love Beach for the day, enjoying the snorkelling on the reef just offshore (I think it was the time Martin and I encountered an eagle ray at close quarters; quite spectacular) and we were enjoying a Barcardi Anejo & Diet Coke as the sun began to dip lower in the sky. Martin and I are filmed standing at the water's edge, drinks in hand, with the waves gently lapping around our ankles, gazing out to sea and having a good chat. Watching for that brief moment I realised how simple life was back then and how much more responsible I have to be now. But perhaps more than anything I realised I'm down to the last dribble in my one remaining bottle of Anejo at home, with no prospect of going to the States or Caribbean in the near future to replenish my stocks.

Please, please, please, if there's anybody out there who stumbles across this page and knows how to get Barcardi Anejo in the UK, please let me know. Otherwise, if we get some decent weather I'll have to drink Pimms.