A weekend of cross-country travel
While M+D swanned off to Switzerland for the weekend, I wasn't to be left out and went on a general tour of friends and family. I've been wanting to go up to Hull to see 'the family' for ages but somehow hadn't got round to it this summer, so on Thursday I headed off to the frozen north.
Along the way I made a quick detour to Leeds to meet up with Claire, as we hadn't seen each other all summer and had a lot to catch up (read: rant) about. Leeds was great. I haven't been up there since a trip to the Armouries with Grandma and Grandad about ten years back, so it was nice to visit with a relatively open mind and see what it had to offer. On balance, I'd say Birmingham's nicer, but then it's been regenerated a few years more recently, so it's bound to be a bit more ultra-modern and stylish. In any case, there were plenty of decent restaurants and good company, so it doesn't really matter. One excellent pizza, a brief interlude of underwear shopping (I really fear to tally up the amount of my life I've recently spent duitifully following girls around underwear departments) and one unintentionally hillarious, if unprintable text message later I regretfully braved the disgusting driving conditions and headed over to Hull to see Grandma and the family.
My time in Hull was short but nice- I spent most of Thursday night and Friday morning doing odd jobs around the place for Grandma, like cleaning above her work units in the kitchen and sorting out the virus protection on her computer. In the early evening we drove over to see the family, and had a very nice few hours chatting to Lynette and Lyndsey while watching Oliver, Bradley and Millie run around and generally cause vast amounts of noise and mess. It's really amazing how quickly they've grown up- Millie is quite the little girl now, and was very keen to show off the new knickers that she'd been bought as she moves off nappies. Sense a theme here? Bradley was a bit shy but Oliver was very talkative- next time I go up we're going to have a lightsaber duel, although I'm fairly jealous of the fact that his one makes the noises as well as lighting up. Bah...
After a nice meal with Grandma at her local Chinese, the next morning I set off on my final leg of the journey- Clover's house in Upper Longdon, via a rather odd but fascinating pub in Derbyshire. The pub- called the "Three Stags' Heads" is literally in the middle of nowhere in the Derbyshire peak district, about halfway between Buxton and Chesterfield. It was all a bit Royston Vasey, complete with gruff landlord suspicious of stranger and whippets _everywhere_. This last thing led to endless entertainment, as Clover's lurcher Rowley took a shine to one of them and spent the next two hours having his advances violently and noisily rebuffed. The food was great- no choice, just what the landlord had in. I ended up with ham, egg and chips, and a couple of the vast selection of Belgian fruit beers that were rather randomly on offer.
Saturday evening was spent at Wolverhampton races, which was great fun- thanks to Clover's racing nous we made a joint bet of £2 each and walked off with £40! Thanks to her boss getting us some owner's badges we were able to get in all the exclusive areas and the trainer's square, which was quite fun- better, and more profitable then the last time we went, anyway. On Sunday morning I was going to leave fairly early, but the desire to prove a point (hope you're not reading this Phil) meant that we ended up spending most of the morning in Lichfield, visiting the requisite underwear deparments and finishing off with a pretty good lunch.
It was a really good weekend actually, extremely sociable and varied.
Oh, and this is the inaugural posting made by my swanky new computer! Everything seems to be working fine with it so far, after a few initial hiccups caused mostly by my own incompetence, so here's hoping it carries on going well...
(Originally posted by Ed)
Along the way I made a quick detour to Leeds to meet up with Claire, as we hadn't seen each other all summer and had a lot to catch up (read: rant) about. Leeds was great. I haven't been up there since a trip to the Armouries with Grandma and Grandad about ten years back, so it was nice to visit with a relatively open mind and see what it had to offer. On balance, I'd say Birmingham's nicer, but then it's been regenerated a few years more recently, so it's bound to be a bit more ultra-modern and stylish. In any case, there were plenty of decent restaurants and good company, so it doesn't really matter. One excellent pizza, a brief interlude of underwear shopping (I really fear to tally up the amount of my life I've recently spent duitifully following girls around underwear departments) and one unintentionally hillarious, if unprintable text message later I regretfully braved the disgusting driving conditions and headed over to Hull to see Grandma and the family.
My time in Hull was short but nice- I spent most of Thursday night and Friday morning doing odd jobs around the place for Grandma, like cleaning above her work units in the kitchen and sorting out the virus protection on her computer. In the early evening we drove over to see the family, and had a very nice few hours chatting to Lynette and Lyndsey while watching Oliver, Bradley and Millie run around and generally cause vast amounts of noise and mess. It's really amazing how quickly they've grown up- Millie is quite the little girl now, and was very keen to show off the new knickers that she'd been bought as she moves off nappies. Sense a theme here? Bradley was a bit shy but Oliver was very talkative- next time I go up we're going to have a lightsaber duel, although I'm fairly jealous of the fact that his one makes the noises as well as lighting up. Bah...
After a nice meal with Grandma at her local Chinese, the next morning I set off on my final leg of the journey- Clover's house in Upper Longdon, via a rather odd but fascinating pub in Derbyshire. The pub- called the "Three Stags' Heads" is literally in the middle of nowhere in the Derbyshire peak district, about halfway between Buxton and Chesterfield. It was all a bit Royston Vasey, complete with gruff landlord suspicious of stranger and whippets _everywhere_. This last thing led to endless entertainment, as Clover's lurcher Rowley took a shine to one of them and spent the next two hours having his advances violently and noisily rebuffed. The food was great- no choice, just what the landlord had in. I ended up with ham, egg and chips, and a couple of the vast selection of Belgian fruit beers that were rather randomly on offer.
Saturday evening was spent at Wolverhampton races, which was great fun- thanks to Clover's racing nous we made a joint bet of £2 each and walked off with £40! Thanks to her boss getting us some owner's badges we were able to get in all the exclusive areas and the trainer's square, which was quite fun- better, and more profitable then the last time we went, anyway. On Sunday morning I was going to leave fairly early, but the desire to prove a point (hope you're not reading this Phil) meant that we ended up spending most of the morning in Lichfield, visiting the requisite underwear deparments and finishing off with a pretty good lunch.
It was a really good weekend actually, extremely sociable and varied.
Oh, and this is the inaugural posting made by my swanky new computer! Everything seems to be working fine with it so far, after a few initial hiccups caused mostly by my own incompetence, so here's hoping it carries on going well...
(Originally posted by Ed)
posted by Mark at
1:20 pm
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