2005 - Change, Change, Change!
Our year started with jet lag as we returned from a fabulous honeymoon in New Zealand. Having spent over a month on holiday, returning to the routine of work was a real anti-climax! I was half expecting to have been made redundant whilst on holiday because the Rally project had ended as Ford reduced funding, however there was a new position trying to develop race engine work in other fields that he was asked to take up.
We didn't have to wait long before another holiday as we joined our friends skiing in St Anton for a week. It was the first outing for the brand new skis we'd received as wedding presents. This was Clare's 2nd week of skiing and she signed on to ski-school to further improve her skills - by the end of the week black runs were taken with confidence and she's now an 'all mountain' skier, just the thrills of off-piste remain to be mastered!
Over the Easter holiday we managed to test out another of our wedding presents as we cycled our tandem to Stratford for a weekend of camping. All of the necessary equipment was carried in our new 'Bob-Yak' trailer. This was intended to be a test-run for bike & camping holidays as we'd planned a tour in France for later in the year. Clare suffered nausea over the weekend (challenging dashes to the toilet blocks with head torches!) which we were delighted to discover was the start of pregnancy. Unfortunately the cycling holiday had to be put on hold and will no doubt be even more challenging as we will have to tow not only our tent but also the youngest member of the Proctor family! This also meant that Clare had to forego the 'pleasure' of competing in the 'Race for Life' and London 10km running races that she'd started training for!
May and June saw me training harder & harder in order to meet the challenge of competing in l'Etape du Tour for a second year - an amateur cycle race over one of the Tour de France stages. In building up to this, I entered several long distance cycling events in the UK. Some of the results from these are included on "Tim's page". The Etape happened on Monday 11th July, a route of 175km over 3 major mountains in the Pyrenees - I completed this in a 'Gold Medal' winning time of 6 hours 18 minutes (despite having a puncture on the way). The professional riders tackled the same route a week later and it only took them 4 hours and 40 minutes!
The first trimester of Clare's pregnancy passed with relatively little discomfort and luckily she was not afflicted by morning sickness, food cravings (much to the disappointment of me and some of our friends who were excited about making coal & ketchup sandwiches!) or other such common complaints.
Since the start of the year, I had been looking for alternative opportunities for work and after a few false starts ended up with two job offers in close succession. The first was based in London and whilst the role was very interesting (working on low-Carbon technologies), the commute would have been too great a sacrifice so we had to let it pass. I accepted the second position as Chief Engineer, Product Management at Holset Engineering based in Huddersfield starting there on 8th August.
The change in job meant that we had to move from Northampton to Yorkshire and discover a whole new area of the country. Our first house-hunting trip was terrifying, seeing 9 houses in one day left us with blurry images with all of the properties blending into each other! After looking in the obvious locations immediately surrounding Huddersfield, we passed through Hebden Bridge on the way to stay with Kevin & Lucia. Clare had been there for an interview at the Cinema about 5 years ago and had fallen in love with the place, when we found a house we liked and I decided the 15 miles to work was probably still OK for riding to work, there was no point looking any further. Hebden Bridge won the 'best local shops' award in 2005, was tipped as 'a really nice place to live' in The Times and was also deemed to be the country's least homogeneous town all within about 4 weeks of us deciding to live there!
Fortunately the house we found was newly constructed a ready to move in. We agreed to rent it whilst the purchase was going through to avoid the hotel living we'd both been dreading. The story of the house purchase is long and messy; there are more details elsewhere on the site so we'll gloss over them now!
Clare gave up her job at Johnson Underwood in Northampton and had intended to temp until Christmas and then set about full time baby preparation. It turned out that Holset had a short-term contract suiting her skills and so Clare was able to join me there over the 4 months or so between moving and the end of the year. She even got to build a turbo of her own as part of her introduction to the company!
My job at Holset is proving to be challenging and a welcome change from the familiar territory of Cosworth and the racing industry. Learning about a new organisation and the process of engineering to automotive industry standards is keeping him very busy!
Since moving up to Yorkshire our lives have been dominated by trying to sell the house in Northampton (finally achieved at the end of November), trying to actually buy the house we're living in (not yet achieved, quite!) and preparing for our new arrival.
We had planned a week off to explore our new surroundings towards the end of November and this break would also mark our first wedding anniversary. By coincidence this week of holiday collided with our house sale completion and the need to pack & move all our possessions from Northampton - hardly the restful break we'd planned! After three exhausting days of packing, lifting and partially unpacking (not to mention two, yes two, trips to Ikea) we took an overnight break in Harrogate, staying at the Hotel du Vin, a sister hotel of the one in Bristol we used the night after our wedding. The week ended in the Lakes as we joined in the celebration of Ken & Jackie's wedding at a favourite haunt, the Bridge Hotel in Buttermere.
We joined the National Childbirth Trust and attended a weekend of 'lessons' about giving birth, parenthood and all of the excitements that lay ahead of us - as well as being informative, the biggest benefit of this was meeting 5 other couples all expecting babies around the same time and all in the local area. This coupled with Clare joining two yoga classes has led to us having quite a community of pregnant friends who we've enjoyed meeting up with to share stories & expectations. It will be quite strange to see all of the girls without bumps!
That just about brings us up to Christmas. We have divided the time up into resting & growing a baby (Clare) and more sorting things out in the house, such as shelving (Tim). Neil and Di visited us on Boxing Day and then we travelled south to stay with Cilla and Derek for a very relaxing 3 days.
Clare's finding it increasingly difficult to find a comfortable position in which to sit or sleep for any prolonged period of time so travelling around the country is broken up by additional comfort stops and nights are not the completely restful time they should be. Our transition into 2006 will be a quiet one.
We'd like to wish you all a very happy new year!
Tim & Clare
