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Newsletter 2002
Dear Family and Friends, Chers Amis, Haverim, and other hangers-on
and layabouts,
Home News
Since our last missive our 'temporary' address has become permanent
and we finally completed the purchase this summer, five years after we came
back from France. We are now contemplating extensions for a studio/granny flat
and other growths and additions to make it more ‘Racher’ friendly.
Peter occasionally emerges from his computerized primordial language soup to
check if there is other life on this planet. He just turned 60 this year and
didn’t want anything to mark the event. But alas, some of us had other ideas
so a jolly good party was had by all. One of his more interesting birthday presents
was a title, presented to him by our kids. He is henceforth to be known as the
Most Honourable and Noble Sir Peter Frederick Racher and has a certificate
of title to prove it. Now, we have to tug our forelock whenever we bump into
him in the bathroom.
I [Claudia] am so busy teaching guitar that my feet barely touch the ground
and I love it! I’m teaching over 100 children in small groups of up to six
and each and every one of them is different. My methods are somewhat unorthodox,
somewhere between Montessori and Summerhill I would say at a guess. It forces
me to stretch my boundaries every day.
Zamira is now a practising teenager. Practising on us. She has
grown into a beautiful young lady with a mind of her own. She has started to
prepare for her GCSEs but this does not seem to interfere with her very active
social life with her best friends Martha and Sarah, otherwise known as ‘The
Supernoodles’ as they are very noodlish and get up to all sorts of monkey business
together.
Tammy went though a hard time adjusting to being in England and the different
cultural attitudes. But she has finally landed on her feet. She has an interesting
job and a fella she’s really taken to, called Scott. Together they recently
went to Sharm-el-Sheikh to scuba dive in the Red Sea. She now works as a Research
Coordinator for a firm of real estate consultants.
Our big event in 2001 was Aviva's wedding to Marcus [the boyfriend in 1997 who
showed such remarkable strength of character under scrutiny from "the clan/mafia"].
She had this extraordinary humanist wedding ceremony on a Devon farm, officiated
by Marina (now known as Ocean) which was absolutely beautiful.
Aviva completed her MSc and is now working at The Royal London
and St Barts Hospital, which by strange coincidence has amalgamated with Peter's
alma mater, Queen Mary, Univ. of London. She is still hoping to get back to
her parasites, but in the meantime has settled for family life and doing biopsies
on other people's bits and spare parts. Marcus has left the robots to their
own devices and is now [very] gainfully employed on software programming contracts.
Unfortunately the housing market in London keeps spinning out of control just
as they get enough beans together to make a heap and build a nest of their own.
Roni has been here, there and everywhere, seeing the world through the eyes
of a sound engineer. One minute in Los Angeles, the next in Paris, Madrid or
Manchester. But despite the moans about conference [dis]organizers, he seems
to be enjoying it, especially now that he has branched out into a whole new
field - electronic voting systems.
Time seems to be speeding up and the world seems to be spinning
faster. We can't discuss, deliberate, consider and generally mull over things
any more before making decisions - just press the button and vote. You find
instant polls on BBC News websites, interactive TV etc., maybe some day we will
be able to change governments this way. Instant "democracy".
Website
We are also trying to keep up with the digital-web age and have
our own extended family website - http://web.onetel.net.uk/~unclepepper
- those on the Net please bookmark. The title of Uncle Pepper's Family Website
comes from nephew Hendy's rendition of "Uncle Peter" when he was a
squidgeling [Hendy that is]. This is a good way to keep in touch. I [Peter]
try to keep it up to date by uploading the latest news and photos from the family
- meaning the "Racher-Eichner" clan plus the Arthur, Baker, Dodd,
Graham, Higgins, Herrmann, Humphreys, Klein/Maly, Lawrance, Wyant families,
friends and connections abroad
PRAWNS
For those of you who didn't get to hear the main news of the Millennium,
P.R.A.W.N.S. or the People's Republic of Ashurst Wood
- a Nation State was born on January 1st 2000. (Ashurst
Wood is our local Village). One evening, late in the year 1999, after a particularly
good dinner where the wine flowed freely, we were wondering what to do for the
New Year as, after all, it was going to be the only Millennium bash that we
were likely to see. Peter took it into his head that we should declare unilateral
independence. Instead of dismissing this as one of his usual aberrations after
too much wine, Mark, who happened to be stuck at home with a knee injury and
nothing else to do, really took to the notion and, as a result, UDI was declared
on New Year's Eve. The bleary-eyed locals woke up to find frontiers and passport
controls around the village, assumed their hang-over was worse than they thought,
and went back to bed.
It was only ever meant to be a joke. Mark ( also known as King Prawn) had sent
a small piece to the local newspapers, it was then picked up by some agencies
and syndicated around the world - not only in newspapers, but also on radio,
television and the Internet. We received communications from all over the world,
some of them scarily serious, others good fun. We now have a number of sister
communities in such places as Russia, the United States, Europe, Australia
and New Zealand. The passport controls and frontiers are long gone, but the
echoes are still with us.
We had a ‘Prawn Ball’ on 1st April 2000 and a ‘Prawn's Other Ball’
the following year. We did manage to use the whole episode to raise funds for
the community. If you have Internet access you can see some of the reactions
under "Links" on the website.
So that's our news in brief, hopefully it won't be so long until
the next newsletter.
So, over to you - how are YOU ? And what’s YOUR latest news? We’d
love you to keep in touch. If you can, please let us have some photos or news
etc. that's fit to print or put on the website.
In the meantime,
May we wish you all
Season's Greetings
Happy Christmas
Happy Hannuka
Happy Id-el-Fitr
and all that you would wish yourselves for the coming year,
with Love
and Affection
Peter and Claudia
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