Fouch Family Newsletter 2017

Well, it really is winter this year. Snow, frost, dark nights. It is feeling like Christmas for a change!

As with most years, it's hard to believe we are at the year end already. 2017 seems to have fairly whizzed past out Fouch Towers, but yet again we seem to have packed a heck of a lot into the last year.

This was the year that Aimie danced in Blackpool, Sam got taller, Hannah passed her exams, Debbi passed another Ofsted and Steve passed the time.

This was also the year that we celebrated Debbi's parents joint 70th birthdays! Yes, Steve and Fi

are now a pair of youthful septuagenarians, and we joined with friends from far and near for a huge, and not infrequently raucous birthday bash in our church.

Since retirement, Steve and Fi have been enjoying visiting Debbi's sister Rachel and her husband Neil and daughters Connie and Bibi in Dubai on several occasions. They have also enjoyed taking several cruises around regions as diverse the Arctic Circle and the African Atlantic coast! Steve has also finally found the time to get back into his great passion - wood turning.

Aimie, now in her last year of primary school [!!], has continued her passion for bending her body into odd shapes.She has moved up to the advanced class in gymnastics, but her real passions are dance and contortion. A big highlight of the year was being in the finals of a major dance competition with the rest of her dance school and performing three dances in the Blackpool Winter Gardens. She and Debbi both fell in love with the city, and now really want to take the whole family back there.

Aimie has also been taking time out to look around secondary schools, and she has her eyes set on a recently rebuilt academy. The fact it has a state of the art dance and recording studio and a growing reputation in the performing arts may or may not have had a lot to do with her interest.

Sam is celebrating having just overtaken Hannah and Debbi in the height stakes, and his big ambition is to beat Dad to become the tallest member of the family in 2018. Hannah is threatening radical surgery to impede him in this goal, so we are having to hide the kitchen knives! Sam is now getting buried in working towards his GCSEs. He continues with his abiding passions of building virtual worlds on Minecraft or in his bedroom out of Lego. A budding career as an architect maybe?

The other career option he is considering is that of detective, having recently discovered the works of Arthur Conan Doyle. He is now a confirmed Sherlock Holmes fan, in all his literary and televisual and cinematic incarnations. So, if in next year's newsletter he appears wearing a deerstalker, you'll know why!

Hannah actually did her GCSEs this year, and was delighted (and somewhat surprised) to find she passed with flying colours, She is now off doing her A Levels, majoring in music technology, media studies and drama. Sound engineering and design for theatre and/or cinema and TV are where her sights are set.

In between exams and hours of homework, Hannah remains a keen knitter, and is developing an encyclopeadic knowledge of film and TV scores!



Debbi has packed a lot into the last year. She and Steve spent some time in Budapest in January with Steve's work, and she did her first, solo long haul to Dubai to spend some of April with her sister Rachel and her family. She fell in love with the food, sights and smells of the Middle East, as well as with her two beautiful nieces (the youngest of whom just turned one this autumn).

Back in Sunny Chatham [!?] she has had a very tough year at the pre-school, with falling numbers of kids affecting every nursery and kindergarten in the area. This, along with falling funding in the face of rising costs is putting pressure on all pre-schools and nurseries in the country, and she wondered if things would still be viable come the autumn. Well, the numbers have gone up, but things are still not fully out of the woods yet. She has built a strong team around her who work really well together. This was put to the test when they faced a third Ofsted inspection in November - which they passed with with a glowing report! She is hugely proud of her team, and is slowly seeing years of hard work paying off as Kings Preschool's reputation has developed. We hope that this will bring in the children to keep things running throughout the coming year.

Steve has seen his role change to focus more on training responsibility for digital and social media and publications with work. Over the course of the year he has managed to get one book published, and is working on a new book at the moment, both focused on the intersection of the Christian faith and nursing.   

He still gets around the country a fair bit, having taken in Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales and a fair bit of the Northwest of England in the past year.

His reading has encompassed everything from Jeff Vander Meer's Southern Reach Trilogy to Eric Metaxes' biography of Martin Luther. He has become a huge fan of Stranger Things on Netflix and is listening to Rag 'n Bone Man a lot at the moment.