Who are we?
We are Tony and Gill Cooke. We live in Petersfield, near a nice lake, on the Hampshire - West Sussex border, in Central Southern England in the United Kingdom, north of the naval and ferry port of Portsmouth. We have lived in the same house for more than 50 years and in September 2019 we celebrated our Golden Wedding anniversary and got a card from Her Majesty. We have a family consisting of two children who each have two kids, so we have four grandchildren.
We have travelled to around 80 countries either on business or play. Including some places that you probably can`t even find on a map of the world - like Paraguay, Bangladesh and Kiribati. Even though I am now retired and no longer travel for work we have continued to travel the world and recently added cruising to our portfolio and have so far hit the Caribbean a couple of times and three Mediterranean cruises, also one down through the Suez Canal, Djibouti, Somalia, Yemen and Oman - but ONLY through their territorial waters - to Dubai. And somehow in recent times the site seems to have evolved into a sort of personal travel blog - hope you enjoy some of the stories!
Our hobbies include keeping and showing cavies (guinea pigs) and we also managed to introduce two new missing breeds (Tans and Foxes) that were lacking in the UK after identifying the missing gene when judging in Switzerland and arranging importation and quarantine into the UK. We have enjoyed major successes over the past 25+ years including winning Best In Show at the National show in 1995 from 840 pigs and more than 100 Best In Shows all around the country at local club shows. We used to keep mice - Tony wrote a hard-backed book on them and we also introduced Satin mice to the hobby world. It is our intention to have the full text of my mouse book here on the site so watch this space. We have a good range of birds in our garden, both visiting and nesting plus a wide range of mammals, butterflies - our Oak tree has a resident population of Purple Hairstreak butterflies, etc. We do not have a dog now but we have had in the past.
Tony is a long term Portsmouth Football Club follower, season ticket holder and was a member of the Pompey Supporter`s Trust when it saved the club from administration in 2013. He was had the pleasure of visiting Wembley stadium mutiple times both when Pompey reached the FA Cup Final in 2008 and 2010 (winning the Cup on the first occasion) and again when winning the EFL Trophy in 2019. They returned to Wembley for a second successive final in 2020 but unfortunately after playing out a draw failed in the penalty shootout.
On this site the pull-down menu is the route to all our content. The current number of dedicated pages stands at 49 but more are being steadily as time (and memory) permits. Please come back regularly to check what has been added.
Links to my pages on these social media sites
Browse through the picture galleries below relating to this page and you will get a much better idea than just reading my words! Each page has it`s own set of relevant images - where possible taken by us.