Christmas Collection 1997

One of a series of pages this with our Christmas Card designs from 1991 onwards.

For a Full 110K JPEG of the front of the 1997 Card Click here

Front Cover
The Card shows a Polish Narrow gauge Steam Locomotive, which is now relocated onto the Munkedals Jernväg in Bohuslän on the West Coast of Sweden, north-west of Uddevalla. The 'spare rail' is not an error - this branch line to a small harbour was recently converted to 600mm gauge from Standard Gauge.
To seasonalise the the picture, a Tompte and a Santa were added to the scene.

The main picture was made from two Hi-8mm frames grabbed from an MJPEG sequence  recorded on disk using Videodesk from Irlam Instruments.
The images were combined using Photodesk2 from Spacetech before combining with the images and text for the back cover using Artworks from Computer Concepts.

These applications were running on an Acorn RiscPC with 200MHz StrongArm Processor (DEC/ARM), and printed onto various glossy or matte coated papers using an Epson Stylus Colour 800 Printer. A 'PC' version of Artworks is available called Corel Xara

Back Cover

Sherlock is very keen on Computers, and always takes an interest whenever the keyboard is in use. Tiggy likes reading papers - any papers that we were thinking of reading, and they both like occupying their chairs etc - after all, they are at home more than either of us!

Pictures sumarising our travels this year are enclosed with the card:

A Relatively Quiet Year!
Phil's travels started in February with a trip to Dublin. This was closely followed by a trip together to North Wales for a weekend around Betws-y-coed, including a windswept Snowdonia, Welsh Castles, and some 'Little Trains', not forgetting a visit to find 'Number 6' and a large white beachball at Portmerrion.

Phil's globetrotting continued with visits to Helsinki (Finland), Kiev (Ukraine), Montreux (Switzerland) and to Japan, before Lin caught up with him again on the annual summer holiday to... guess where...

Sweden.
This year it was southern Sweden; beautifully warm weather with the occasional afternoon thunderstorm. Lake temperatures up to 20C encouraged daily swims, and a little investigation found many steam railways.

Cropredy, Oxfordshire
Lin attended the annual Cropredy Festival (Fairport Convention Folk band) with Amanda on a scorching August weekend. Phil made a second trip to Japan in September, and there were two separate 'off-roading' days- one wetter than the other; both organised by local groups on military land in Hampshire and Surrey.

Phil's final trip of the year was to Moscow in October, since then time has been spent keeping the cats company, and catching up on some of the more mundane chores!

Children in Need gave Phil and colleagues the opportunity to dress up as a Pirates to extort monies from the remainder of their colleagues.