Kuk Sool Won European Championship 2011

King's Lynn hosted the Euros for Sam's martial art again this year. The Lynn club had won the tournament in the previous two years, and a third straight victory would mean that the team kept the lavishly hand-embroidered, and extremely expensive championship flag forever. Which would seriously annoy the American boss of the franchise, aka Grandmaster Flash.

Above is Sam waiting to enter the arena for his turn to compete.

An unscheduled change to the age groups meant Sam was warming up in a group he hadn't expected to be in. Ho hum.

Here he is starting his "forms".

And finishing them.

Before turning away for the judges marks.

Sam didn't win a medal this time, but King's Lynn did win the title. And Grandmaster Flash has cut his Thai food budget by 50% to pay for a new flag.

Crabbing At Wells-Next-The-Sea

Our first expedition in the world of crabbing took us to Wells harbour. The photo above is one of my favourite shots of Sam, ever! We couldn't decide whether to go for the washing powder bag style, or the dish-net way, so tried both. It cost us a huge £5 for all the kit, plus a quid for some cheap bacon as bait, and we had a ton of fun.


And caught quite a lot of crabs, all by net.

A horde of ducks were doing the rounds, obviously well-used to a diet of broken seafood.

We enjoyed it so much that we went crabbing somewhere else two days later!

First Try At Sausage Making

Nikki gave Dad a great present at Christmas - a sausage machine! It's been a while, but we finally arranged to give it a trial run. Above you can see Sam and the machine, which is a very chunky,"proper" piece of engineering.

It took us a long time to even suss out what we were doing! As you can see, our end product was not regular in shape or size, but they were MADE BY US!

I came home with the four bangers above - Sam took the rest. They cooked up very nicely, but were rather bland. More seasoning and roughage next time.

But for a first attempt I think we did very well.

It was Nikki's birthday on the same weekend. We promised not to tell anybody how old she is....