A Guest Post from Carol Bridgestock - SMILE AND WEST YORKSHIRE SMILESWITH YOU

Big smiles and a big thank you to ‘everyday folk’ who went that extra mile for us and others, on our ‘Snow Kills’ two week book launch tour of Yorkshire November 2013! 

Remember ‘When You’re Smiling the whole world smiles with you!’ ‘What you give you’ll get back ten-fold’ and ‘Treat others as you wish to be treated...’ Some of my wise grandmother’s favourite sayings and the one thing I always remember about my grandma was she was always smiling...

Come with me and meet some of the most generous ‘smiliest’ people we met and we thank you all from the bottom of our hearts!

Jake & Peter with 3yr old Thomas!

The Huddersfield Giants – Jake Conner and Peter Aspinall who presented the prizes at our children’s drawing/writing competition event which we organised to encourage youngsters to read and write, and to raise money for ‘The Forget Me Not Hospice’. Thanks guys, we raised £80.

The happy, smiling winners with actress Sharon Holland Taylor who also gave up her time to read out the winning stories/poem!

 Many times Sue battled the tumulus weather in West Yorkshire during Bob’s thirty year police career, to report on the crime scenes Bob was called out to attend. Great to meet up with her and glad to report she is a little warmer in her role in the Calendar TV news room nowadays and still smiling! I was on telly and still smiling! Thanks to the lovely Christine Talbot & Duncan Wood .

   

DI Dylan fans are the best! Phil and Yin Johnson, who also happen to be Inter-national P.I’s travelled from Portugal to be with us at our book launch at Prego, Brighouse, West Yorkshire and Karen Ebdon and Sam Gouldthorp took the opportunity to visit some of Dylan’s haunts whilst there for the weekend from Portsmouth.

On the night of the launch we also auctioned a Manchester United shirt signed by Rio Ferdinand that was given to us in aid of Help For Heroes. Thank you Man Utd – THE only club who came up trumps when approached for an auction prize. £180.00 was raised on the night for the charity .

Thank you to my ‘little brother Stephen’ whose smile always reaches his eyes!

The first time out of London and we were asked to be compere at The Evening of Remembrance at Huddersfield Town Hall. In the style of Gareth Malone Military Wives at least 150 ladies of the Kirklees Mass Choir as well as The Yorkshire Band of the Royal British Legion were on stage and all in good spirits. I can’t say there were no tears as well as smiles that night but we all bursting with pride!
   

And at the BBC Radio Leeds Studio here is one of the the lovely smiley ladies behind our morning host Wes Butters. The gorgeous & smiley Katy Lambert who makes lovely hot chocolate to go with the Isle of Wight goodies we took.

    

The staff at Prego  looked after us wonderfully whilst we were on tour, even going as far to wash some of our clothes. We couldn’t have done it without you! http://www.waterfrontlodge.co.uk/
 
And here is the lovely Kelly! We miss you too guys but we will be back soon!

And the ‘boys in blue’ – although these were  ‘girls in fluorescent’ came out to see what all the fuss what about at Huddersfield Waterstones book signing. Hello! Hello! Hello! Not quite an arresting incident hence the smiles!

And the children had fun too.... 

£1,300 was bid at the HSBC Ball from a DI Dylan fan to be a named character in our next book ‘Reprobates’ - All in aid of The Forget Me Not Trust – Wow!    

We were privileged to be given a tour around the Hospice. We took signed books that I had been collecting from friends who are children’s authors, for the library. David Walliams gave me seven including his latest as well as a signed picture for them... what an absolute gent! I have to sadly report J.K Rowling couldn’t spare one of hers...

Bob and I here with the ‘thrilled’ Jason Costello, Partnership Development Manager. 

We were soon on the last leg of our tour and over at Media City in Salford, Manchester where we were at the read though of the new BBC 1 TV series for 2014 ‘Happy Valley’! Sitting around the table and seeing the familiar faces of celebs and being introduced to the head of drama from the BBC was so exciting – my jaw was permanently dropped! Here we are at the Granada Studio – caught out being a complete tourist by actress Amelia Bullmore! How embarrassing!

And here is the person who is my inspiration and always makes me smile. Bob, my husband, co-author and best friend! Here’s to the next DI Dylan launch in April 2014 Bobby!

Carol Bridgestock & her co author in crime (RC Bridgestock) husband Bob can be found @ www.rcbridgestock.com Facebook RC Bridgestock 

Twitter @rcbridgestock and Linkedin Carol & Bob Bridgestock

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London, New York and back again

Well a happy 2014 to all and sorry this post is a little late, but between myself and everyone else having the flu lurgy the last few weeks there hasn't been much time to sit in front of a computer.  But late or not, a smile is a smile is smile!

So take your mind back to before Christmas, and the man and myself were taking a quick trip to New York to visit the family.  I was organised, I'd bought our train tickets, our plane tickets, organised cars, apartments, dinners, lunches, nothing was left to chance but, thank you Heathrow Connect, you managed to put a spanner in the works before our trip even started.

To get to Heathrow Airport now from London most people get the Heathrow Express from Paddington Station but it's much cheaper, if you get the ordinary train which takes about five minutes longer and makes some  stops along the way, (a similar operation to getting the alternative train to the Gatwick Express).  We were at Paddington in plenty of time for our train, but there seemed to be a lot of confusion among the staff as to where our actual train was.  Then we were told to run, it was coming in to platform 12 now and leaving almost immediately.  We ran (with our bags) only to find no train.  Twenty-five minutes later, (we're now getting anxious about our check in time at Heathrow), and we're told there is a fault on the line and not only is our train cancelled but so are all the others.


We run (again with our luggage....) to the booking hall to try and change our train tickets to Heathrow Express ones, (you can't do this on the train), and it was here, meeting Brian, that everything started to go right.

Brian managed to take the stress of it all away and deliver our upgraded tickets with a lovely smile to send us on our way.  So Brian, a big thank you and thumbs up.

Now we only had five days in New York and 99% of our time was taken up with friends and family which was lovely but we wanted to do one NYC thing; since it was fairly sleety and snowy, it wasn't going to be a wandering around thing so we decided on the Metroplitan Museum of Art.

This museum is incredible in its collections but, because of its sheer size, you have to be quite organised, (there is that word again), about what you're going to see.  We only had a couple of hours so using one of their half day suggested itineraries that looked fabulous, I took about one third of the suggested rooms and mapped out a route for our visit.

Upon arrival, because of a Christmas tree in a hall, the "route" didn't quite work but thanks to the lovely, helpful and smiling Gina, not only did we get back on track but she was able to "edit" our itinerary to make it even better.

So, Gina, thank you (from the British tourists around the 9th of December) and our thumbs up .

Then it was back to London, and the madness of work and life in the run up to Christmas. 

Now, for the presents, I hadn't been that organised and so come Christmas Eve, I had to go out shopping as extra family were coming and it was my first chance between the office etc.

Swiss Cottage was mad that day, with shoppers behaving like it was the end of the world and food was never going to be sold again.  Staff in shops were frazzled and barely able to keep up with the tills but, among all this frenetic behaviour, there was Hollie in Boots.

Hollie was totally in the spirit of the moment and was having fun whether people were ready for it or not.  She was a ray of sunshine on a truly horrible weather and shopping day.  So Hollie, thank you and a thumbs up  from me and the other shoppers you made laugh.

As I said at the beginning of this post, apologies for the lateness of these thank yous and we have a guest post that's been waiting to be published for a few weeks now but for the same reasons is also running late.  Watch this spot and you should be getting something soon from a lovely lady, half of R.C. Bridgestock, the author.

Thanks again for reading, may 2014 be kind to you and if you come across any nice smiles or service, do please send us a post.