Well, here we are well into 2012 already.
Having had a really good break over the Christmas & New Year it has been wake up time getting stuck in to client work and seminars.
At least we have not had the huge amounts of snow as in the previous two years in the north east, although the -8 temperature in Rothbury last night was a reminder that winter is not done with us yet!
My daughter Charlotte celebrated her 14th birthday on 1st January, and no sooner had she returned to school when she got Glandular Fever 
This resulted in 3 weeks off school, mostly spent in bed with nasty headaches and with no energy at all.
To cap it all off, my wife Alyson was diagnosed with shingles!
The house was like a hospital, with me crossing my fingers that I wouldn’t catch something. So far so good.
I particularly wanted to avoid illness as I have recently taken up two new forms of exercise.
Having sensibly vowed never to try to play football again, and squash being a bit hard these days, I have taken up Real Tennis.
It is a very unusual game, with lots of weird rules, roofs, side nets and a lop sided racquet! But very enjoyable.
There are only 20 odd courts in the UK, and we are lucky to have one here in Newcastle. It also has a very sociable atmosphere, and a good system for arranging matches with a handicap system that ensures that it a challenge even for the really good players.
See the history of the game here.
The other type of exercise I have started is using Power Plates. This involves doing various exercises on a machine which vibrates at 30 times a second.
This means that a normal workout such a lunges and push ups becomes enhanced, and works the body far harder. Having tried this a few times now I can certainly vouch for this!
The first time I tried it on a 40 minute workout it felt like Mike Tyson had used my torso as a punch bag!
Also, an unfortunate side effect of standing on the plate for me is that bit makes your nose itch!
Trying to boxercise while scratching your nose is not easy.
On the subject of football, Ray and I, being Sunderland supporters, are getting used to seeing our team actually play well and win lots of games 
Of course, this is quite a shock. We had hopes that the new manager Martin O’Neill would work his magic, but he has exceeded all expectations with the team dominating games and scoring goals for fun.
Still, early days eh?!
In January Ray and I attended the New Model Adviser Awards Ceremony in London. Now you may be asking what on earth is a New Model Adviser?
Well, essentially these are the financial advice firms who have transformed themselves from what we would call the old sales world dominated by commission, into proper fee based planners who work for you the client, and not a product provider.
It was good to mix with likeminded folk and there were some excellent speakers, including a retired England international rugby player you may remember called Martin Bayfield.
Martin also presented the winners of the various awards with their trophies, and it was amusing to see them walk onto the stage to shake his hand.
It is at this point that you understand how huge this guy is! At 6 feet 10 inches he dwarves anyone else around him, even if they are reasonably tall!
His speech was delivered brilliantly, and of course was based on his experiences as a rugby player in the 1990s.
Suffice it to say he was excellent. Using no notes he had us all in stitches, with the bottles of wine no doubt helping.
I will not repeat the jokes here, since as you can imagine they were a bit risqué, but one bit caught my fancy in particular.
He was describing how rough some of his rugby team mates were. One player he remembered “was so way out that he was the only man he knew that seriously considered marrying outside his species!”
Needless to say the evening didn’t end early, with the bar doing very well I seem to remember.
I was very well behaved, even managing to find my room, and retired well before 2.
There was a mystery however, as much to Ray’s amusement the following morning I had developed a limp! With no memory of how this happened, I was at a loss to understand how on earth I had managed this!
