30th December - First day of New Year Weekend away at Pentrenant Hall

I met Charlie at Piccadilly Station this morning and we started off on our journey by catching the train to Shrewsbury. During the journey, he showed me the Christmas "present" he had treated himself to - a small remote-controlled Dalek. When we arrived at Shrewsbury, Phil was waiting to meet us. Despite the weather, we had a good journey to Pentrenant Hall. I found out on arrival that I'm in a room with 5 others, three of whom I know well (Julie, Jenny and Rachel).
Also found out that Phil and I are responsible for cooking tonight's meal along with a new girl called Debbie who is from Coventry. Therefore, when Anya returned from shopping we started to prepare the meal. Dinner tonight was salmon with a pesto and parmesan crust followed by apple crumble and custard - all absolutely delicious. I was pleased to see the crumble was well received as I had a major hand in making it.
By dinner time most people had arrived. There's quite a few new people on this weekend - I think they're very brave spending New Year with a group of strangers.
In the evening we split into teams for a series of quizzes and memory games. I was responsible for the general knowledge quiz and I was pleased to find I hadn't made it too easy or too hard.
Unfortunately our team came last again. I would say that this was partly due to the fact that Ian dropped out after the second quiz due to some misunderstanding with Marie - it's a shame he's so sensitive.
After a short coffee or wine break (!), a few of us stayed up to play "Articulate" - a fun describing game similar to Taboo. Even though we used every opportunity we could get to move our opponent's piece backwards our team narrowly lost, but we still had great fun. I was the last person to go to bed tonight in our room ( at about 1 am), but managed to do so without disturbing anyone.