I resign from packing duty

I'm useless at it. When we go away, I am responsible for packing the suitcases, ostensibly because I fold things better than Rob does. But at least when he packs, he gets the things he wants.

Bearing in mind we were going to the walking capital of the British Isles, where even in summer it rains as often as it's dry, here are just some of the things I forgot to bring: -

Rob's walking shoes (although we knew this because we couldn't find them at home, so he reluctantly said he would buy another pair)
Rob's walking trousers
Waterproof coats for both of us
Walking socks for both of us
Walking (breathable) t-shirts for both of us
An umbrella
A rucksack

Plus things like shampoo, shower gel and sun cream.

Fortunately, as we were in the walking capital of the British Isles, there was no shortage of shops selling outdoorsy-type stuff so we could fill in the gaps. But they were expensive gaps!

Monday the weather was beautiful, really hot. We went across to Keswick to meet Jen and spent the afternoon eating apple pie/carrot cake, shopping and playing crazy golf - Rob assumed the title of Crazy Golf Master that I had won a couple of years ago when playing that course with Juergen and Eva.

On Tuesday we went to Keswick again - that was when we realised that we had no waterproof coats, and it was chucking down - and today we went on a 6-mile walk around Grasmere Lake, starting and ending in Grasmere Village, where we felt obliged to buy the fantastic gingerbread on offer. My foot held up pretty well on the walk, but it started to get a bit tired by the end. Here I am not long after we started, and still feeling OK. When we got back to the hotel Rob went for an Indian head massage and I had a pedicure - just the thing for my tired feet. Of course, I ruined the nail varnish by putting a pair of shoes on before it had dried properly, so I had to go back and spend a tenner on a pot of polish to re-do my big toes...

Manchester One Year On

... looks just the same as when we left. Hardly surprising; I didn't expect it to have changed beyond recognition or anything, but it felt nice to be back again, driving on familiar roads - it really did feel like we'd never been away. We drove up from Southampton on Friday and went round to take Rob's family out for a meal, then drove into the city centre to our hotel.

On Saturday I met Catherine from old work and she gave me some pointers about preparing for a wedding - she's marrying Ben next April and was surprised that I hadn't given any thought to a dress, or even bought a bridal magazine, yet. It was great to catch up on all her news - and to get a much-needed kick up the backside where the wedding is concerned. More of that in a later post.

I left Catherine and went for lunch with Nikki, Helen and Clare from another old work. I showed off my ring, Helen showed off her little boy Sam who's now 2, Nikki showed off her growing bump (due at the end of September) and Clare introduced us to Harry, who's now 11 weeks old and gorgeous. We didn't stop talking for at least half an hour after we got there - the waiter kept coming over to take our order and we kept telling him we hadn't opened our menus yet. In the end he just told us to shout him when we were ready to order ;).


I went back to the hotel to find Rob surrounded by a bunch of shopping bags - he'd taken advantage of the fact that Manchester is far superior to Southampton for shopping and bought some clothes to fit his ever-slimming frame. There was just time to get changed before going out to meet Rob's old work colleagues at the cinema. We saw The Dark Knight, which was brilliant, if a bit long - nearly 3 hours including trailers - then we went to Wagamama for a meal and to Kro in Piccadilly for a drink. The weather was great so we sat outside - not something you do very often in the UK. Here's (from left) Aleksa, Marc, Drew, Ani, Patrick, Jan, Rob and Yalitsa.


Today we went to see Grandma and Grandad, where Grandma had put on one of her famous buffets, then drove up to the Lake District for a week's holiday.

Soap-Free

Over the last 15 years, my relationship with the 4 main British soap operas has waxed and waned - at one point I was watching all four regularly, at other points I've been following 2 or 3, and sometimes I haven't been watching any at all. The only thing I can say about soaps is this: I don't miss them when I get out of the habit of watching them. My life doesn't feel any less fulfilled by not following the antics of the Mitchells, Sugdens, Baldwins, Slaters, Kings and Battersbys.

Until recently I hadn't watched EastEnders, Emmerdale or Hollyoaks for a few years but I did watch Coronation Street regularly - I would record the catch-up edition on a Saturday morning and watch it at some point over the weekend. A few weeks ago I realised that I was spending 2 hours of my precious weekend watching something that I could quite easily live without. Now obviously if I take this train of thought to its natural conclusion, I could live without all TV, but one step at a time :). So I decided to stop watching Corrie.

And I don't miss it.

Plus I have an extra two hours to spend on something else! This weekend I spent it on sleeping, and it was most welcome... My next challenge is to wean myself off the internet. I think the internet is great, but I've got to the point where I find myself sitting with my computer on my lap, reading the same pages over and over. I lived without t'internet for the first 20-odd years of my life, so surely it shouldn't be too hard to cut back a bit???

Getting Back On

I cycled to work and back today for the first time since my accident. I set off quite early this morning in the hope that the traffic would be light - and it was, but I took things really slowly so by the time I got towards the end of the journey the traffic was building up. I was quite nervous this afternoon before I set off, because there's more traffic in an evening, but again I took it slowly and I was fine - although one Land Rover did decide that the best time to overtake me was when I was riding along a stretch of road with a traffic island between the two lanes, giving him less room to get past; he was so close I almost banged on his passenger side window in protest, but I didn't want to lose my balance. Still, apart from that, home in one piece!

The Package Has Arrived...

and has been opened by the recipient, so I can post a photo of it here without spoiling the surprise. Keith took it back to Florida with him when he left yesterday and gave it to Keri as an early birthday present from this side of the water.

The finished article was based on this photo: -


and looks like this: -


I used a bit of artistic licence when it came to the greenery, and decided to omit Keith's lime-green Saab, but Keri still likes it ;). Of course, it doesn't look like that any longer, because they're in the middle of having an extension done, but Keri said it will remind them of The Barn Mark 1 before the renovation.

Bad Blood!

I got a call this afternoon from a Doctor Something-or-other from the National Blood Service, calling to discuss my blood donation three weeks ago.

He said he could see from my records that my blood type was A-positive. He then said that the positive antigens in my blood (that make me A-pos rather than A-neg) were very weak - in the five years he'd been working for the Blood Service I was only the second person he'd come across with such weak antigens. He said it was very difficult to determine whether the positive antigens were even present, and my blood could well be mistaken for A-neg instead of A-pos. Because of this, he said I shouldn't give blood again because it's too difficult to tell what my blood type is and the risk of it being given to the wrong person is too high.

So that's the end of one of the few good deeds I do. I'm quite disappointed actually. Maybe I could donate a kidney or something instead...

Great Weather Today for a Barbecue...

Unfortunately our planned barbecue was yesterday, and it didn't stop raining all day. An inch of rain fell before lunchtime and it didn't get any better after that.

It's the face-to-face meeting this week at work, where 20 or so people fly in from their various places around the world for 3 days and meet with our guys in the office to talk about tech stuff I don't understand. Last time we went to a pub in the middle of nowhere and played skittles (see Keith's post for the full story), and this time we decided that as it was summer, the chances were that we would have good weather so we booked a barbecue pit in a local country park so we could have a ball games evening. Fortunately we checked the weather forecast at the beginning of the week and found out that it was going to be wall to wall rain all day, so we made other arrangements. We took over a couple of rooms at a local pub and had a meal and played a quiz that Clare and I put together on Tuesday afternoon.

To say that Ben was annoyed that the winning team was using a mobile phone to get their answers is an understatement (in fact, three of the seven teams used their mobile internet access to help them out). We didn't have a prize to give out, but when Ben's team lost by one point to a team that had cheated, it was like they had lost out on a million quid. His argument was that no one remembers the team that came second; I pointed out that no one will remember the winners either - the only thing anyone will remember will be Ben harping on about how they were robbed... Still, everyone seemed to enjoy themselves and it made a nice change - I haven't taken part in a pub quiz for years.

Shame we couldn't have had the barbecue, but this is the Great British Summer after all, so we should have known. I heard that we've effectively had the best of our summer weather this year - there was a week in April, then a week in May (when I was in Turkey and it was warmer here than there), then the two weeks I was housebound after my accident, and that's it. The rest of the 'summer' is going to be rain, rain, rain...

Free Theatre Tickets!

I got home this afternoon to find an official-looking letter on the doorstep. I turned the envelope over and saw that it was sent by HM Revenue & Customs. I wasn't optimistic when I opened it, but it turned out to be a cheque for £349.50! When I set up my company, I signed up to make voluntary National Insurance contributions by direct debit, then I forgot to cancel it when I started full-time with SpringSource. So I've been paying just over £2 a week for the last 2 and a bit years and it only just came to light recently that I should have stopped, because the company now pays my National Insurance contributions from my gross pay. So they sent me a refund!

It couldn't have come at a better time, because today I've just shelled out a fortune on theatre tickets for Jen's birthday trip to London in September. So it's like the tickets (and lots of other stuff I've yet to buy) were free!

UPDATE Thursday 20:00 - Got another letter today, again from the Revenue, but this time from the Income Tax Department. Apparently I've overpaid on my tax for the last year and they're sending me a refund for £111.15!!

A Different Side of London

My parents were in London this past week, so I went up to see them yesterday and came back this afternoon. The trip served another purpose as well: I took my ring in to Tiffany to get sized. The three of us walked down Piccadilly from the tube station to Old Bond Street this morning, and we thought we'd probably arrived at the right street when we saw De Beers on the corner. We turned down the street, and boy did we feel out of place. Between De Beers and Tiffany, there was Gucci, Alexander McQueen, Armani, Ferragamo, Chanel, Joesph... and us, in our scruffy jeans and t-shirts.

The ring will take a week to size, plus a couple of days for them to post it back to me. At least half a dozen times since I gave it over this morning I've felt for my ring, panicked for a split second that it isn't there, then realised it shouldn't be. I've put another ring on that finger for the time being, so I don't give myself a mini heart attack a dozen times a day for the next week or so. Mum suggested I ask them for a courtesy ring to wear while mine's in for maintenance. I didn't think there was much of a chance they'd say yes, so I declined to ask them ;).

Mum & Dad were staying in a flat near Warwick Avenue, in an area of London known as Little Venice. I had no idea that part of town even existed! It's really lovely, with beautiful 5-storey houses - mostly split up into flats now, though, like the one we stayed in. Yesterday evening we went to a restaurant that's on a bridge over the canal, and the canal boats disappeared into, or emerged from, the tunnel beneath us every so often.


Today it poured down between about 09:00 and 10:00 but after that it was nice and sunny. After we got back from Tiffany, we took the canal boat to Camden and had a look round the market. Camden Market is world-famous but I'd never been before - and never really had any desire to go, but it was great! There was a fairly serious fire in one of the market buildings in February, and in fact what's left of the building (a few outside walls and not much else, all scaffolded pretty heavily) was clearly visible from the boat, as the building is right on the canal, but there were still lots of other market buildings and stalls to see. We didn't have very much time to look round as we had to get back in time to catch our respective trains, but we had a bite to eat and a quick browse around the stalls before getting the boat back to pick up our luggage from the flat. I'll definitely spend more time in that part of town in future.

I think I overstretched my stride at one point when I was walking back to the flat last night, because I woke up this morning with a pulled muscle behind my left knee (my injured leg). If it weren't for that, I would have been walking almost normally today, but the pulled muscle did slow me down again. It didn't spoil things at all - but I'll be spending most of tomorrow resting and elevating my foot!

Every Cloud...

Whilst I would prefer that my accident hadn't happened, the fact that it did meant I've been unable to get about and have therefore seen a lot more of Euro 2008 and Wimbledon than I otherwise would have done. Even though there were no home nations in Euro 2008, I still followed it quite closely and thoroughly enjoyed the matches I watched. The Turkey v Czech Republic match, where Turkey came from 2-0 behind to win 3-2 in the last 15 minutes, was a particularly good match, as was the quarter-final match between Netherlands and Russia, which Netherlands were widely expected to win but lost 3-1 to the youngest and most inexperienced side in the championship.

Tennis is a sport that I can take or leave - last year I didn't watch any of Wimbledon, because there was a massive thunderstorm that knocked our satellite dish out of position in mid-June, but seeing as we were moving on 6 July we just lived without TV for 3 weeks, so I missed the entire tournament. This year, however, because I worked from home a couple of days last week, I've had the tennis on in the background and have really got into it. I watched Andy Murray come back from 2 sets down to win 3-2 last night, in a really exciting match, what is probably going to start being referred to as that match against Richard Gasquet. Murray plays Rafael Nadal tomorrow, but I'm not confident - sorry Andy!

Next up - Formula 1 British Grand Prix from Silverstone on Sunday. Come on Lewis!