We live very close to Devonport – one of the Navy’s main bases here in the UK. We rarely see anything of it though – I get a view down from the train into the dockyard, when I pass through but that’s about it really.

Today though, we’ve been much closer, after a trip to Plymouth to buy “stuff” – storage boxes for the new larder, yards of speaker cable and towels for the new bathroom. It’s all a bit exciting, that we’re now so close to finishing off a couple of rooms so we’ve splashed out on new towels if you’ll forgive the pun. We realised the other day that we have a right old mish-mash of towels that are mostly other people’s cast-offs. In fact, this is much like a lot of our “stuff” when we got together.

We’d both come from broken homes in as much as we both lost most of our stuff to our exes in the separation process. David did badly out of his break-up and when he moved into his new home he was given a load of other people’s cast offs and I had a nearly empty house after my ex moved out too. My parents and friends rallied round and basically furnished my place from their old stuff in a series of wonderful magnanimous gestures. I was so grateful for the kindness and generosity of them all. I remember coming home from work one day, when there was nothing much in the house other than one bed, a table and chairs plus sofas. Jo had cleaned one of the spare rooms and made it cosy, using cardboard boxes covered in fabric for tables and a newly-donated bed from Claz. I was so touched that I was moved to tears.

So all of this is a roundabout way of saying that despite being grateful for the stuff given to us by parents and friends, now is the time to paddle our own canoe and invest in new! Couple this with a need to buy speaker cable to go under the new carpets and this all meant a trip to Plymouth.

The shopping done, DM said “shall we go home via the ferry for a change”. Ooohhh yes. So, here we are crossing the Tamar by the best route and shooting pics of “battleships” while we’re about it. He tells me they’re probably called “frigates” or “destroyers” and certainly not “battleships” but I don’t suppose it matters much in the grand scheme of things. At least not to me.

Last year, I was photographing "foreign sheep"!