Clare & David Bewick

I’m writing this in a hotel room in Seattle, on a visit to Boeing.

Last year we had recently been taken over by two Burmese kittens – Talisker & Cardhu. They are now two fully-grown but still daft cats. Cardhu is the friendliest cat I have ever known, with a purr you can hear across a room. They both sleep outside our bedroom, and a few seconds after the alarm goes off the secondary feline alarm also goes off – Cardhu meowing outside until I let him in, when he’ll roll over onto his back to have his tummy tickled. Talisker – or Tali – is a bit quieter but still a very soft cat - unless you are a small mammal, as he unfortunately has turned into an expert hunter. Tali broke his leg in mid May and had to have it pinned (luckily we had insured them) which resulted in 6 weeks in a metre cube cage which nearly drove him – and me – up the wall. He’s now fully recovered except for a small scar, and still will turn in amazingly small and fast circles for anyone who will play with him. The two of them are great friends, who change from playing tag to mock fights to grooming each other (they both have lovely silky fur) to sleeping in a tangled heap – usually in a basket or hammock designed for 1 cat. Tali is the dark brown one.

At Easter we went on a 3 week diving expedition to the Pacific. This was organised by two of the team, who did a great job getting 19 of us to Chuuk via Los Angeles, Honolulu and Guam – with a huge pile of diving equipment. We had a week in Chuuk, diving in Truk Lagoon which is one of the world’s most famous wreck sites. Many Japanese military freighters were sunk, with all their cargo, by American air attacks in the second world war, and these wrecks are still largely intact. David & I were doing our first major trip using closed circuit diving equipment after training in January – which means no bubbles, so closer views of the fish.

The visibility was a bit variable in the lagoon, but at its best the diving was superb – amazing to see a ship some 40m below you. Some of the ships were huge so you could only see one part; others were small enough to see all over. The local guides were good, and lead us through the interiors of some of the ships to see intact engine rooms and some amazing cargo – including intact zero aircraft.

 The fish life was rather disappointing in Truk, but this was redressed in the second half of the trip. We went back to Guam and then to Palau, which is your classic south sea island paradise. It’s an atoll with lots of small islands, covered in lush green vegetation. The water was amazingly clear, and the islands are famous for their strong currents and large schools of fish. The trick is to use a reef hook – a metal hook on a rope with a clip on the other end, you go to a corner of the reef before the current reaches its peak, hook on to some rock or dead coral and wait for the current to build up and the fish to show up. There were huge schools of snappers and lots of sharks. The coral was also very good, with lots the smaller colourful tropic fish. The only downside of the trip was the three consecutive nights on aircraft to get home!

In the summer we had visitors – David’s brother Peter with his wife Steph and their 4 children Lachlan, Sophie, Tim and Josh, the last two of whom we’d never seen. The house seemed very full all of a sudden! David & Peter took the elder 3 to London to watch the Lion King musical, and they also explored some of the local countryside – and played with the cats, who turned out to be pretty good self-propelled soft toys. I’ll be surprised if Sophie doesn’t acquire a cat within a few months! They were with us for David’s 40^th birthday party, complete with bouncy castle. For the first time we got all our god-children together in the same place – the picture shows me with Tim, Nessi, Josh (not a godchild) coming to see what’s happening, Oliver, David & Lizzie. As nephew Tim lives in Australia, Oliver (son of one of David’s Navy friends) in Portsmouth and Lizzie & Nessi near Derby so there’s not much chance of getting them all together again. Last year I taught Lizzie how to dive, and this year Nessi, as their respective fathers felt that family concord would not be improved by teaching their daughters to dive!

A few weeks later Mum came with us to Shetland – another diving trip. The water was almost as clear as the Pacific but a lot colder! The first dive we did was on a first world war RN submarine (we needed permission to dive it) sunk by a German mine. The sub is on white sand in 34 and we could see her end to end from 20m above. The diving was a mix of wrecks and scenery, with lots of seals and birds to watch when we were above water. There was a lot of wildlife underwater too – much of it larger than we normally see elsewhere in the UK – although the photo is of a very small fish. We also managed to do a bit of above water exploring, including a trip to Jarlshof, a settlement with iron age and later Viking dwellings that was covered in sand until Victorian times. Shetland is beautiful and everyone was very friendly, but I suspect it is bleak in winter.

David is still a “Whitehall Warrior” planning how to run a war on 20 year’s time, which seems to involve lots of trips to Washington DC and Norfolk Virginia. He’s just bought a motorbike (a 2^nd hand Triumph Sprint, which has a 955 cc 118hp engine) on the basis that his next job will be at Northwood in north London where a bike will be a sensible form of transport (or at least that’s what he says!). It will also be a more immediately relevant job, looking at likely trouble spots round the world.

I’m still working on the Trent 1000 for the Boeing 787 “Dreamliner” – hence writing this in Seattle where Boeing are based, listening to CNN and wondering if I’ll ever hear any news about anywhere that isn’t either in the US or Iraq. I still have some involvement with the Trent 900, which is currently flight testing on the Airbus double-decked A380. RR is working on more engines at the moment than it has since I started there, and we’re recruiting new people. I’m now involved in assessing new candidates, either for our training scheme or direct entry, which is proving to be quite interesting.

At home we’ve made some progress on the house, we now have a civilised hallway (and eradicated the last of the white gloss paint over wall-paper) and a stairs carpet. The cats now consider the stairs to be one huge cat toy, and race up and down them at very high speed. A few skirting boards are all needed for us to have finished all the rooms (at least the first time through). The garden is also getting more sorted and nettles are now a rare sight, but I still need to sort out the area planned for a fruit garden, currently under a mosaic of plastic sheets.

Wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from us both.