Happy Easter from all at Bears Unlimited

A very happy Easter to all our readers. What a great day it has been so far. Bris and I were up very early, while it was still dark, to join a group of 10 for a dawn service, followed by a scrumptious cooked breakfast.


It was a special moment when the Paschal candle was lit and it brought home to us the miracle of the Easter Sunday events.

It was lovely to see lots of daffodils brightening the church and they were an excellent tonic to lift the spirits.


While our breakfast was cooking, as well as admiring the spring flowers, we also took a good look at the Easter garden. A lot of hard work had gone into creating it and a great job had been done ...


We came home to discover a huge mountain of Easter eggs and lots of excited bears. How lucky we all are to have such generous friends who understand how much bears love chocolate.


We're not quite as bad as one of our minders' friends who had given up chocolate for Lent, but had a chocolate feast at just gone midnight this morning, when she could eat it again. We're pacing ourselves this afternoon though, as we have lovely leg of lamb slow cooking in the oven as we write, and we don't want to ruin our appetites.

This lamb will be relished even more than usual as we all gave up meat for Lent. We had some lovely creative vegetarian dishes cooked by Chef Oakley, but, after our abstinence, the roasting meat doesn't half smell good.

Lots of love, Gio, Bris and all at Bears Unlimited xxx

Happy Mothering Sunday

A very happy Mothering Sunday to all mothers everywhere, but especially to those associated with our extended family. Lots of virtual hugs and kisses to each of you.

We remembered our Mum today and did her proud with a card, flowers and chocolates (Maltesers, her favourite, no less) as you can see in our picture. She was very pleased with us all.


If you look closely, you will also see Bris and Gio with a delightful posy of flowers that they were about to hand over to our Mum. This posy came from one of our churches and was lovingly made, along with lots more, by one of our young 80+ year olds, who is an inspiration to us all. It had a lovely red and yellow tulip, some daffodil buds and some greenery.

We all enjoyed the Mothering Sunday service and, in the talk, we had fun playing true or false with some of the facts about mothers. Can you believe that it is true that one lady had 69 children! It was just a shame that families were not together in the pews this year. Hopefully they would have been meeting up later.

Lots of love, Ungi, Jimmy & all at Bears Unlimited xxx

Fair Trade Tastes Good

Hopefully we've got our readers so well trained now, that you will all be aware of, and supporting, Fair Trade fortnight, which is now half way through.

We all had a lovely time at a fair trade wine tasting last Monday. If this gives you a sense of deja vu, then, yes, we did attend a similar event last year and report it in our blog. It went so well last year that it simply had to be repeated, hence last Monday's event. While it is always nice drinking wine, what we really enjoy is chatting to other people about what they think of each bottle, and inevitably the conversations take some interesting turns and we find ourselves chatting quite happily to people we may hardly have known before the event.


The lady who organises the wine tasting is our local Traidcraft distributor, so just after the event Gio and I spent a pleasant hour going through the Traidcraft catalogue and placing a big order. It feels good to have a significant part of our Christmas shopping already in hand, as well as lots of lovely fair trade chocolate and snacks on the way for us all to enjoy.

We'll be back soon with another fair trade report.

Lots of love Gio, Bris and all at Bears Unlimited xxx

What to Buy Greenbelt Fans

We hope you've enjoyed finding out about our Christmas presents and got lots of inspiration for present buying. As so much time has now passed since Christmas, we're going to make this the last of the 'What to Buy A Bear' series, even though there were plenty more presents we could tell you about!

The rest of the chaps say they never have any problems working out what to buy me (Gio) and my best friend Bris. This is because we are such ardent fans of the Greenbelt Arts Festival, and going there, over the August Bank Holiday is normally the highlight of our year (last year was a bit of an exception, since, as you all know, I had the amazing opportunity to lead George and Yorkie on pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago, straight after Greenbelt). Anyway, back to Greenbelt, there are so many wonderful speakers and performers that we have a list of their books and music that we'd like, longer than our arm. And the Greenbelt shop also provides great present ideas.


This Christmas's presents were spot on. Firstly we got one of Amy Wadge's CDs, called 'No Sudden Moves'. Amy is a very talented singer/songwriter and we love everything she writes and sings. It's just a pity she lives in Wales so doesn't get over to the East of England to perform too often. It's worth going to Wales to hear her though!

On the book front, we received 'Eternal Echoes' written by a Greenbelt favourite, the poet and philosoher, John O'Donohue. Very sadly he died suddenly 2 years ago, so we won't have the experience of hearing him speak at Greenbelt again. However, he lives on through his amazing writing. He was an incredible wordsmith and we know exactly what a writer in the Guardian meant, when he referred to his 'dazzling vocabularly'. You would have to read some of it to see what we mean, perhaps that's not such a bad idea!

We shall treasure both these gifts for years to come, but we're also already looking forward to Greenbelt 2010 with the promise of lots of new experiences.

Lots of love, Gio & Bris xxx

More Moose News

Bris has received a new post card from his friend Travelling Moose with all Moose and his family's news from over the last year, since his adventure in Greece - reported in our 300th post - and our get together at Greenbelt last year.

So we will take a break from our Menorcan adventures to share Moose's news with you.

We hope you enjoy it as much as we have.

Love Bris and all at Bears Unlimited
xxxx

Hi Bris,

I’ve been a bit busy recently, and I see you too. Here’s a quick postcard before I go off on this years holiday.

Last summer we all went to Austria, It was hot and sunny when we arrived, but the got colder every day, and eventually it snowed! but to be fair we were 3000m up visiting a very interesting hydro-electric dam. it reminded me of the land where moose are free to roam amongst the trees and snow, with just the occasional cross country skier to steer clear of. By the way, how is your cross country ski practice coming along? You can see me here feeling very at home in the trees and snow.













Remember our night out at the local Quiz Night? The star of the show was surely Grommit, well here he is pondering over one of the questions – I think we caught him wondering if smoky bacon crisps go well with the local brew!


















But whatever was in that brew worked wonders, as we cleaned up on the answers and narrowly won first prize!













It wasn’t long before I had to go away for work, but this time I made sure to keep off the hot cakes (which always seem to disappear very fast) and had healthy breakfasts all week long.













Which was just as well as I needed something to make my bones grow big and strong, on our day off we went to try out some car racing, and this time I got through the height limit (with a little help) !


















But none of this was as exciting as welcoming a new member to the family, Saabrina has a new sister, with a rather comfy bonnet. New Saab has no official name yet, but seems happy with New Saab, although she answers to 2T also.













But we didn’t stop there, with new-sab came Amma and Emma, with their rather groovy socks.

And there’s more …. you may wonder why the Elks are in a baby stroller, well they’re running it in for our next scheduled arrival later this year!

Watch this space....

Love and Wishes

Moose and the (expanding) clan.

Final Reflections

We've blogged a good few words about this year's Greenbelt and we're sure you've read enough to know what you missed if you weren't there with us.

We'd like to finish with 2 of our favourite photos, which we think sum up, more than words, the spirit of this year's festival.


The first is of me (Gio) with a rather lovely sunflower. As this year's theme was 'Rising Sun' this picture had special significance for me and it will remind me of all my happy memories of my first ever Greenbelt, every time I look at it.

My second picture shows our tent lit up at night with Bris looking out for me as I came back from a final visit to one of the indispensible Andy Loos ...


With so many tents in the camping ground, having a lighted window and a friendly face looking out, was so welcome and stopped me getting lost.

This picture also reminds me, that there is so much going on at Greenbelt, that late night returns to your tent are very much the norm. Once back at our tent we would would sit up for another hour or so, relaxing over a glass of wine and talking over the events of the day with friends Travelling Moose and T5 Wilbur. We didn't get a lot of sleep but we got enough to fully enjoy the next day.

I can't wait for next year and Greenbelt 2009.

Lots of love Gio, Bris and the Greenbelt crew xxx

It's our 300th Post!!!

The Blog goes from Strength to Strength - 300 posts, 624 days, 611 photos, 3 video clips, 84,000 words, 195 published comments, and now our own domain!!! www.bearsunlimited.org

The Banner headline says it all - but how we asked ourselves could we celebrate this memorable achievement? We put our heads together and decided that we would like a permanant reminder of the fact that we had hit 300 and so our teckies Jimmy, Fred and Ungi got their heads together and decided to go for our own domain www.bearsunlimited.org

As we were wondering what we were going to say to you on such an important day, Bris received an E-mail from his friend Moose who was off on another of his business trips, (Perhaps you remember his last one) This time his trip was to Greece and we thought what better way to celebrate our 300th blog that to publish a E-card from a friend who is such a great writer and has a wonderful outlook on life. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

Love all at Bears Unlimited
xxxxxx

P.S. our canal boating adventures will return!

Moose asks ‘what’s a Greek Earn?’

Hi Bris it’s travelling Moose here, and I’ve been on some exciting travels again.
It all started one very early Sunday morning at the new Terminal 5 at Heathrow, but I wasn’t taking any chances with my luggage and hung on to it as long as I could.

Then I tried out the new check-in assistant - I must say I preferred the smile’s I used to get from the old models!

I soon got to grips with this one, and managed to change to a nice window seat where I got an excellent view of the London rain and the new double-decker aeroplane.

We were soon on our way, and I found a new friend in the shape of T5-Wilbur, a very helpful bear indeed and on a mini break after all his frantic activity over the last few weeks at T5. Wilbur, being on the BA crew, was able to show me the proper way to strap in and reminded me to always read the safety manual, even if I had flown before – I didn’t know that BA are the only airline where you have to tie your life-vest in a double knot (all the others use fasteners or even Velcro !)

It wasn’t all serious safety lessons, and soon Wilbur was off duty and enjoying monitoring our progress, the old fashioned way with a map an looking out of the window. I did wonder just when Wilbur would take off his work jacket.

Once we arrived we set about enjoying some of the Athens life and I took a dip in the roof top pool, Wilbur looked on from a safe distance and I wondered again if I’d ever get him to come off duty and remove his reflective jacket !

After all that wet water I needed to dry off, but being a moose from Northern territories (and without a hat) I had to stick to the shade, while Wilbur was able to bask in the sunshine – with his jacket undone!

It wasn’t all play and we did a bit of moonlighting, filling in at the hotel helpdesk - I hope those guests managed to follow our directions and get to see the famous marbles.

It wasn’t; long before we got invited out with some of the locals, and met up with Saabrina’s cousin Izy (can you guess which one she is?) .

and experienced some of the local spirit.

Soon it was time to go home, but not before we followed our own instructions and went looking for those Elgin Marbles …. but I’m not sure these are what we were looking for ?

And of course found some time to keep in touch with Mrs Moose who had to stay at home this trip. All too soon our aeroplane arrived and it would soon be time for Wilbur to get back to his day job.

But not before a farewell drink and then it would be time to say good bye to Wilbur.

But all is not lost, in the time it’s taken me to write up my trip Wilbur has managed to find a new job at the docks and has moved in to become one of the moose household [with Mrs Moose’s blessing].

Hi to all the family up there and hope to see you soon
love from Moose and Wilbur.

Norwich Cathedral & Bris Welcome the A B of C

It's been quite a week for rubbing shoulders with the Church hierarchy. After meeting Bishop James, the Bishop of Lynn, last Sunday, today I was down at Norwich Cathedral with my minders, to hear a talk given by, none other than, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The talk drew a huge crowd, hardly surprising, given the important figure Rowan Williams is. I don't think I'd ever seen quite so many people in dog collars at any one time and I began to feel a bit underdressed. By the time we arrived the centre of the cathedral was full, so we had to find seats at the side. We could hear perfectly and could watch the talk thanks to a video relay to a big screen. The man himself was hidden from sight behind some very old and very big pillars.

The talk was entitled 'Being Christian: Finding and Keeping Faith in Today's World'. It was a very interesting and helpful talk and I discussed what had been said with my minders during the coffee break.


I sat in my travelling rucksack as there were so many people around that I didn't want to risk people not seeing me and treading on my paws.

After coffee, the Archbishop spent 45 minutes answering questions that had been submitted during the coffee break. I thought his answers showed true wisdom and a great intellect. He didn't try to skirt round difficult questions but met them head on, and offered what insights he could. This earned him my respect.

The talk was well worth hearing and is available as a download on the Norwich Diocesan Website. I'm certainly very glad I went, even if it did mean I didn't get my Saturday morning lie in.

Lots of love, Bris xxx

Wheat, Wine & Mini Marrows

So far this year I've been to 3 harvest festivals. That's not bad going is it? I've also been to one harvest tea and one harvest supper. The food at the harvest supper was very nice but I didn't linger over it as I was eager to get back home to watch the rugby with the rest of the Bears Unlimited guys (the harvest supper took place on the same night as England's semi-final match against France, which was, after all, essential viewing).

The harvest celebrations have been a bit subdued this year as it's been a tough year for the farmers, what with bird flu, summer flooding, foot & mouth and blue tongue. We're lucky though, and a bad harvest doesn't mean we have to go hungry.


As you can see from the first of today's pictures we managed to accumulate a wonderful selection of harvest produce at one of the churches. I couldn't wait to try the scrumptious looking harvest loaf but was disappointed to learn that harvest loaves don't make good eating as they contain a lot of salt to keep them looking their best. Please note also, that the wine to the left of the picture has is Fair Trade - strangely enough I wasn't allowed that either.


See what I found decorating the top of the font. There were some really cool mini marrows as I called them - they were probably small squashes or gourds to be really precise. Perhaps I look a bit girlie though with those flowers decorating my ears. I reckon that if I'd draped that wonderfully coloured cloth round my shoulders I'd have looked just like Joseph with his coat of many colours.

Lots of love, Bris xxx

Final Greenbelt Highlights

The success of Greenbelt is largely down to two very important groups of people. The first is the huge band of over 1500 volunteers who work cheerfully over the weekend, and indeed the whole year, looking after every aspect of the festival from fire watching to serving in the beer tent. We admire them greatly and they truly deserve the biggest of bear hugs.

The second group are the angels who safeguard the festival by regular financial giving. Their giving now provides 15% of the festival's income which means, above all, that it's a certainty that Greenbelt 2008 will be able to go ahead (yippee!) In fact we've already bought our tickets and are counting down the days already!

As this was our third year of attending we thought it was about time we signed up as Greenbelt angels. One of the immediate rewards was the 3 free bars of Divine (fair trade) chocolate we were given. It was scrummy and easily in the same league as Nutella!

Bris marked the occasion of becoming angels with an angel photo - we always reckon he's the most angelic out of all of us. Hope you like it.


Another Greenbelt marvel was the fantastic animal kites which were flown by professionals on the last day of the festival.

These were simply huge kites and the air was full of them. They were really colourful and realistic and above all extremely characterful.


We were quite simply entranced and would have stayed there all day watching them if there hadn't been so many other interesting things going on. They were so big that we didn't have the strength in our arms to have a go at flying them ourselves but we enjoyed chatting to the men who did.


Our favourites were the giant lizard and the turtle. Unfortunately the turtle had just crash landed as we took our photo, but don't worry, he was soon back up in the air.

We were sad when it was time to go home, but we're sure the year will fly by and we will be packing for Greenbelt 2008 before we know it.

Lots of love, George, Yorkie, Bris, Chelmer, Rocco, Randolph & Benji xxx