Probably the best way to sum up both the micro and macro view of our world in 2009 is manic depressive. Both our little world and the wider planet had enormous ups and downs. But since the wider world is better chronicled elsewhere, here's our summary of the micro view of 2009 from our small flat in central London.

January saw Peter get properly started in his new job. In his first month there, he took over a project that had been running very late and pushed it out the door on February 2. While the southern part of England was snowed in, www.b2bprospector.co.uk went live. Since then he has spent much of the year working on a series of improvements to the site, and a major release is due to go live in January 2010. He commutes up to Nottingham most weeks for a day or two and spends some time at another office in Slough, but is officially based in Holland Park.

February brought the death of Peter's father at Mount Sinai hospital in his sleep. He had been in and out of hospital over the past year with a gradual weakening of heart and lungs. Peter had spent a week in Toronto visiting him in hospital, had returned to the UK, and Shelagh was just in the process of setting out when the news came. At 89, he had lasted longer than anyone could have expected and went peacefully. Both of us still store up things to mention the next time we have a telephone call with him, and then realise that there won't be a call.

Spring brought some fantastic sailing weather from our new location on the Hamble River, Southampton. The pain of moving the boat from the East Coast was forgotten with the addition of some new electronics. We are now the proud owners of a new electronic chart system which includes a very important safety feature for longer passages. Our little boat now squawks its position to all the big ships nearby and also picks up their course, speed, distance, etc. So it is much easier to cross the shipping lanes and keep out of the way of the larger vessels. We really enjoyed visiting familiar harbours and discovering their joys over again. Portsmouth, Cowes, Lymington, Beaulieu, Yarmouth, Chichester and Poole were all weekend visits and it was fun to remark on things that had changed as well as how familiar the basic sea and land marks were.

The end of May took us back to Boulogne sur mer, and a concert organised by Bernard Haye at their home.  It was wonderful to see so many people there, and to catch up with French friends from the area. The weather also co-operated so that people could stand outside after the concert and enjoy a glass of something cold in the sunshine. We produced a little booklet to commemorate and you can preview it online to have a look at more pictures. As you can tell, Peter has discovered Blurb.com which is a great place to design and print small quantities of very high quality digital books. (You don't need to buy any of them, just take a look at the pretty pictures)

Good friend Claire invited us to taste champagne earlier this year and at the same time we learned how to open a champagne bottle with a sabre. So we are now officially "sabreurs". Peter was a little over enthusiastic and his cork ended up landing over 15 feet away at the bar in the middle of thirsty patrons lining up for a drink.

Shelagh has spent a good deal of time this year changing her working patterns on AIP, the quarterly periodical that she proofreads. AIP has been through some big changes this year including a new design for the newsletter, a redesign of the website, and some signficant changes in the production process. Shelagh now does both proofreading and layout in InDesign, so this tends to keep her busy in bursts during production. She also proofreads from time to time for a small North London publisher when they have short deadlines. From time to time they call her to bail them out at the last minute. She continues to teach the Alexander Technique and has just relaunched a new version of her website at www.atinuk.com with some fine videos, pictures and a wealth of information.

About the middle of the year we decided to get serious about either redeveloping our small flat to make it more usable or moving. As this is written, we believe we have cleared most of the hurdles necessary to start the work in early 2010. It has taken about six months to negotiate the necessary permissions, mostly due to a completely incompetent managing agent for our building. The plan is to completely knock out all interior walls, then redesign the flat to transform it from one bedroom to  two. This will give Shelagh a dedicated work area in the second bedroom, and a better use of the space. Very exciting, but incredibly frustrating and draining so far. Christmas will be spent trying to get final drawings and choices made so that we can put the work out to tender in early January.

Our big summer sailing trip was to the Channel Islands. Gregoire Haye came along as extra crew for the two weeks. We crossed from Poole using our motor because there wasn't much in the way of wind and arrived at Alderney. The books stress the strong tides, the need to be extremely careful navigating all the rocks in the area, and a variety of dangers. These aren't exaggerated, but good charts, sensible passage planning, and judicious use of our engine to keep up average speeds meant that we saw the benign side of the waters. We did get storm bound a couple of times during the trip, spending longer in port than we expected, but managed to enjoy both the sea and the land. It is definitely an area we will go back to and hopefully next time will manage to spend more time and hopefully visit some of the many nice French ports just south of the Channel Islands. Our new chart plotter meant that avoiding the traffic in the English channel was easier and gave us a lot more confidence to hold our course, knowing that the big stuff would pass us by.

We also had some dolphins pop up and play when leaving St Helier. They escorted us for about 15 minutes and then carried on their way.  Our final stop was on the French coast so that we could avoid customs hassles on our return to the UK (also to make Gregoire happy that he could speak French again). For various bureacratic reasons if we returned from Alderney we had to notify and deal with customs. If we returned from France then EU rules applied. Madness. More pictures can be seen by previewing our souvenir book.

We are just back from Copenhagen where we had a lovely long weekend. We love the city. It is clean, with a great public transit system, fantastic architecture, and some wonderful culture, but food and drink is just as expensive as everyone says, though the restaurants are wonderful. We continued our quest to see opera in all the halls in the world with a visit to the Copenhagen Opera House. It is new, magnificent and has great acoustics. We decided that Richard Strauss is an opera composer worth paying attention to. The Opera House itself is magnificent and is part of the regeneration of the waterfront.

We also went in and out of galleries, museums and jumped on and off the buses and trains using a 72 hour pass. We didn't pay a single museum entrance fee or bus fare. Brilliant. The highlight had to be a visit to the Louisiana museum on the waterfront about 30 minutes north of the city centre.

Their collection of modern art was extremely representative, very well chosen, and situated in a wonderful set of buildings where the natural landscape and the sculptures outside were part of the experience.

Finally that day, we made a short visit to Elsinor of Shakespeare fame and didn't get to the castle but did discover a huge crowd of people waiting to greet the arrival of Santa Claus or Yuleman as they call him. Yuleman apparently arrives by fishing boat there, nicely painted red and white for the occasion. Not a reindeer to be seen. Great fun.

We also saw a chamber concert in a brand new hall at the University. We wish we had attended that university. Beautiful, modern, clean with fabulous students residences overlooking the canals.

We wish you a very safe and happy holiday season and look forward to hearing your news. Our address and telephone numbers haven't changed this year. Old friends will be grateful they don't have to make more space in their address books. We trust that your world in 2010 is less manic, less depressive and we hope for the same.

Peter and Shelagh