Virginia and I went on a retreat to Quiet Waters, which is just outside Bungay in Suffolk. We liked it so much we went on a second retreat in late August as well. A great ambience of calm. Well looked after by the amiable people who ran the place, it was good to share meals with them. One interesting session with assigning patience and other virtues to fruits, and saying why one had so assigned. Didn't see the kingfisher which was rumoured to be around though. Did see bats flying at dusk. Bungay itself has character including a ruined castle accidentally located behind a tea room, and a secondhand bookshop I had to resist buying books in.

We saw the New Year in quietly in the Ipswich area. I didn't do the homework of finding out what there was to see, where exactly it was, and when it was open. Something to remember to do for any future trips. There wasn't a lot that was open which was a bind. Happily a Pizza Hut was open for lunch and supper on the 1st itself as the hotel was only doing bar snacks. Bought Boggle at a toys R us and played a few games of that as well as some of the puzzles in a puzzle magazine.. We went to Dunwich Heath that day - a coastal area undergoing constant erosion. I remembered having been to when we got there. Quite crowded – we walked along the cliff top heath rather than on the beach. On the 2nd we went to church at Whitehouse Baptist Church – didn't stay for coffee as we could have done but headed to Sutton Hoo. Which got very crowded in the cafeteria after we had done a walk to see the burial grounds of the pagan kings at the dawn of Anglo-Saxon history. Tiny they were – not the large barrows Tolkien led me to expect. But it was a window onto a time of change. Glad we went anyway. The exhibition did its best to bring that time alive, the precious items are in the British Museum.