Christmas letter 2013!

Greetings from Joy & Eric and the Foxley clan at the end of a rather different and sometimes difficult 2013.

First, everyone else's news. The wonderful Joy has been kept busy this year acting as my carer, but still finds time for her regular Aquafit sessions (and I enjoy the visitors who come round for a fresh bread brunch afterwards, they are a wonderful and impressive group of active "elderly" people), and Kathak dance lessons which she gives at home in our dance studio to friends.

The family gets older. There was a big celebration of a 160th birthday party in Frankfurt in August. 160 = 49 for Karen + 51 for Angus + 21 for each of the twins + 18 for Suzi. Jean and Rory did most of the driving to get Joy and me safely there and back (our first car trip through the channel tunnel) with musical instruments, home-made cakes, biscuits ... The party was a wonderful evening of assorted music by Angus's different bands and, of course, English folk dancing lead in pseudo-German by Joy with our band. The twins are now in their last year of volleyball, German and mathematics at Swansea and doing well in all three. Suzi has started at a German university, Oldenburg (up north inland from Bremen), doing English and history.

Anita celebrated her 50th with a holiday in Turkey. Jenna is in her GCSE year and swatting hard. Sean continues with his football team, who do win occasionally. Hamish plays in more bands as time goes on, and acquires more coloured trombones.

Jean & Rory continue with the usual activities. Jean has been wonderful, and came up to help Joy while I was in hospital. Rory's team at work have won two international prizes for their work (the prizes involved prestige and posh dinners as well as cash), congratulations are due all round, we await the Nobel prize one day! His description on the Horsham Folk Club website reads "Rory Foxley is the lead fiddler in our house band and an outstanding exponent of the folk violin. An experienced barn dance band and Broadwood morris player (and dancer) Rory's driving style is exciting and tuneful. From dazzling jigs to intricate Welsh harmonies there'll be plenty to enjoy in his Spotlight sessions.".

Our life at Nottingham has been dominated by looking after me! My chemo treatment lasted without break from October until April, and was augmented by daily radiotherapy during last December and January (3 days off at Christmas!). Knackering! After the chemo was over, 8 days in hospital for surgery in May, when Jean came up to help out. Since then I have been scanned and declared clean and pure (I bet not many of you have that!), all the treatment has been successful. It's now several weeks since the first anniversary of when I was declared terminally ill, it was pretty numbing at the time, but now it's a wonderful feeling and life is even more appreciated. I survived everything and have recovered my strength brilliantly since then, thanks to the support and encouragement from Joy, the family, and a wonderful host of friends. Without that fantastic level of support I could have been very depressed. I decided (selfishly) early on that if I was a miserable old git no-one would visit or contact me, so being miserable was off the agenda. After the surgery I have ended up with a stoma bag, requiring an adjustment to lifestyle! Four messy accidents so far, not bad really. More details to anyone interested! I'm now awaiting more surgery to put my insides back in the right order and get rid of the bag, perhaps in January.

For obvious reasons we couldn't have our usual camping holiday this year. With Jean & Rory's help we went to Frankfurt briefly for their celebrations. Then later Joy and I drove to Brittany for a couple of weeks and stayed with various of our wonderful friends out there. We were really well looked after, and through speaking French all day every day our French improved in leaps and bounds.

The Foresters Morris and Greenwood Clog dancing have continued pretty well, although I went through a phase of having to sit down to play. The first standing playing was for some visiting American morris dancers. I first played accordion three weeks after surgery!

Our weekly walks have been severely curtailed, although I've done as much solo walking as possible to get my body functioning again. We're lucky to live next to Highfields and Wollaton Parks as well as the university campus. And positively NO CYCLING at all yet, but I look forward to testing my balance later.

I've kept up the pottery as much as possible, it is certainly very therapeutic, and the new kiln is wonderfully easy to load.

The new Nottingham Tram line has created noise, dust and diesel fumes for the whole year, with no sign of real progress. The temporary wooden fence at the edge of the land they've taken was quickly covered in a wonderful mural which many think was painted professionally. All painted by family & friends!

Other photos: we have general household photos of the year.

Use www.chezfred.org.uk for the website, where you will find lots of up-to-date photos of all our adventures. And keep up-to-date with news on Facebook. Phone is still 0115 9786858, snail-mail is chezfreD, Dunkirk Arts Centre, 31 Greenfield Street, Nottingham NG7 2JN, UK.

See here for Eric's cancer progress.

Last year's Christmas letter is here.

This copy edited Friday 01-Nov-2013