It's June, and the start of Summer, so what have I been up to?
Well, our two sons are slap bang in the middle of (a) a PGCE and (b) first year Chartered Accountancy exams. Both difficult and demanding courses.
Revising, marking, early starts, late nights, short tempers and the banging of doors were becoming all too frequent.
No more, we said. Us oldies can’t cope. So - luckily, and just in time to save our sanity - DH had a course to attend, so I went with him.
And we had a great old time. In-between dodging the army of cleaners who insisted on battering down the bedroom door, even though I’d clearly hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the outside - three days in Bristol had me typing THE END on the WIP.
Fantastic.
We then went to Bath for a couple of days, where we chilled in the sunshine, lingered on the Georgian streets, and drank and ate delicious food. We almost felt revitalised, until the journey home.
We’d seen a bit of traffic on the way down to Bristol but thought nothing of it. On the way back, the same journey took six hours. Six hours to travel 200 miles! Apparently, replacing the whole of the M6 central reservation is going to take until 2018, so because of that, we crawled, we stopped, we crawled, we stopped, and I’ll tell you right now, we never deviated from that pattern.
What is amazing though - is what you notice when you’re crawling along with the windows down. Ignore the diesel fumes wafting in your face - if you need an idea for a book - then a motorway - I promise you - is the place to find it.
We saw bikers with horns and dreadlocks. Bikers with rucksacks so large (on their backs), they drove leaning over.
Lane-hoppers. You know - the people who perpetually try to save a millisecond of time. Why can’t they stay put?
A barbecue disguised as a steam train - yes, really - and more to the point, where on earth was it going? Caravans that you couldn’t possibly stand up in. Or swing the proverbial cat in. Mmm.
What else? Loud music, of course. A man playing a game on a console whilst driving. A horrid two-tone car (apologies if that was yours) that reminded me of the trousers I wore in the seventies, and lanes so narrow we could honestly see the whites of the eyes of the passengers alongside us. Scary.
DH had a whale of a time. Two of his favourite pastimes are looking at registration numbers and grumbling about other cars, so he was in his element.
Me? Well, I couldn’t wait to get home. We’d had a lovely five days, and peace and quiet is all very well - but only in small doses. Despite what I say, we’d missed the two bread-snatchers.
And from the state of the fridge, I think they’d missed us.
Until next time.
Kim x
