AFTER our Christmas visit, we came back to the UK in mid-January to celebrate a friend’s 50th birthday. We organised our trip so as to return to France with our newly-purchased (and insured) car, and also for Ellie to receive some dental treatment.

The French health system is rightly deemed the envy of the majority of countries and it is generally accepted as the best in the world, but applying for dental treatment is fraught.

There would appear to be a shortage of dentists. Those in business are very, very busy and appointments often have to be booked several months ahead. Such is the backlog, a friend of ours has spent three months attempting to find a dentist who will accept her.

So, the opportunity to book ahead in the UK, have some treatment over Christmas and then in January, was worthwhile. The French health cover does not cover that much dental treatment in France and so paying in the UK was no big deal anyway.

We have tended to fly on most of our visits to the UK because the distance from our new home to Calais is a little daunting at 650 miles, and more than a little boring as we have undertaken it so many times.

However, having bought a new second-hand car, we were able to load up with some UK goodies, such as joints of pork, because crackling is very hard to find in France, and, despite having lived in Limousin for seven years, the home of famous cattle, we prefer British beef.

We left Sarratt in our new-to-us-car just after 4am on a Friday and travelled down to Dover, only to note there were long delays on the M20. We also noticed in passing that the M3 was closed for “stacking procedure”. Somehow we had missed out on the fact so much more security work is involved since the fire in the Channel Tunnel.

It took us about 40 minutes to get down the hill into Dover and so our hopes of catching an earlier ferry died, but to our surprise, our scheduled ferry was underway, less than a third full but on time. Just over ten hours after arriving in Calais we were unpacking our goods, with Ellie having taken a three-hour stint at the wheel midway through the journey.

It had all worked out well but we vowed we would not leave the house, shopping apart, for a couple of months. The older you get the more travelling and late nights seem to take it out of you.

The birthday celebrations in the UK had been novel but very enjoyable. Karen opted for a weekend in the Cotswolds with her friends and extended family. They had rented out a large barn-like building, which had been converted.

We had an en suite bedroom downstairs, as did the hosts, and upstairs there were sufficient bedrooms to house ten people. Karen’s parents stayed in a house next door, so we had 16 for dinner and the house boasted a big enough table to accommodate us all.

We had arrived just outside Stowe on the Wold a little weary. Having landed the previous night, we drove up to Brackley the next morning, collected our new car, drove back to Stansted and dropped off our hire car, and then headed back down the M11, M25 and then the M40.

Then we peeled off the motorway network and became involved in a horrendous traffic jam south of Oxford, around Witney, and finally limped into the hamlet an hour or so later than intended.

It was quite fascinating seeing kids you have known since infancy, now maturing. They had all grown up keeping in regular touch, so eight of them, ranging from 17 to 25, related well.

On the Saturday the January sun was shining and 14 of us headed out for a lengthy walk, which by-passed the Slaughters and ended up in a pub in one of the Sewells. Now I am used to doing much more than three miles or so, back in the days when I tried to play golf, but this was much more tiring.

Ellie bravely set out but after about a mile and a half, was struggling: not so much with her new hip but the terrain. We were fortunate in that it was snowing in south west Herts but was fine in the Cotswolds, but clearly they had experienced much in the way of rain.

The fields and pathways were sodden, rendering the walk even more tiring and for someone who likes to stride at their own pace, I found it quite exhausting forcing myself to walk slowly to keep Ellie company.

Some of the party had already reached the pub, where a late lunch was booked, so Karen phoned ahead and a friend duly arrived as the footpath met the road and took Ellie to the destined dining table.

They said she looked so relieved to see a friendly face but Ellie admitted; “You could have been Dracula in his coach. I would still have been glad to see you and climbed aboard.”

We spent a large part of Sunday in Stowe before heading off for Sarratt in the evening, just as the snow began to fall in the Cotswolds.

Sometimes you forget how nice the buildings are and how pretty the countryside can be in England. The grass looks greener, they say, on the other side of the fence – in our case the Channel. So seeing the Cotswolds, sampling real ale and lunch at a hostelry, reminded us that the UK still has an appeal.

It was nice to visit, and the problems of ISIS and the other worldly issues seemed far removed as we purchased some sherbet lemons, and a few other sweetshop delicacies from our youth, during a spree in Stowe. Nice as it is, without the tourists, you wonder how much of a community there is during the winter.

It was akin to a brief holiday with good friends. Yet the trip also served as a reminder of how many times I have been to the Cotswolds over the past 70-odd years. Sitting at dinner the first night, my eyes alighted on a painting of a bridge. It was one of the Slaughters. My mind went back some 65 years and I could see me standing on that self-same bridge with my Gran, when I was in short trousers.

I was glad to wake up the next morning. I thought for the moment the Great Reaper might have decided, with my spotting the painting: “That’s it: you’ve completed the circle.”