One day after another
I have the week off work. You would imagine that would lead to a deluge of blog posts from me – unloading the darkest corners of my brain into the internet in a steady torrent of ultimately forgettable garbage. It hasn’t happened.
I woke at 7am on Saturday and got straight out of bed. Within half an hour I had a shower, tipped a cup of coffee into my mouth, carried a ladder outside, and climbed onto the roof. I then spent most of the rest of Saturday hacking back the jungle of a back garden that had begun to envelop the house. There was method to the madness – the back of our house is an extension with a flat room – and it was going to be replaced today (Monday).
It turns out hacking back brambles is an exercise in finding out how many pieces of thorn you can end up with embedded under your skin. My hands were really quite painful on Saturday evening when we finally sat down to eat something. We invited a wonderful friend over that lives nearby, and I felt awful – sitting in the garden in the grubby clothes I had worn all day, with a day’s worth of stubble, and hair sticking out in all directions. She of course looked lovely.
On Sunday I had promised to take our eldest daughter to London – a visit “Forbidden Planet” – quite possibly the best comic book store in the country. This entailed another early start, ahead of a two hour train ride, and several miles on-foot around the heart of the city. After eating sushi for an early lunch on our arrival, and spending quite some time perusing the latest Anime, Manga, DC, and Marvel wares, we wandered off in search of other interesting things to spend a Sunday afternoon doing in London.
I love wandering along with no particular place to go. It’s probably my favourite thing to do on a day-out. We looked around Covent Garden, Leicester Square, a number of very expensive make-up shops, Trafalgar Square, and eventually the National Gallery. I headed straight for the headline Michelangelo exhibition, until I discovered they wanted to charge everybody a fortune to see it. Sod that. We contented ourselves with Rubens, and Rembrandt instead.
Today was altogether different. I had promised to take Miss 11 swimming last week, and she had not forgotten. By some kind of minor miracle we also managed to get Miss 16 out of bed in time to catch the 10am train out of town, and were in the pool before 11. Not bad going. I stuck an hour and a half of chasing after Miss 11 (who has turned into quite a good swimmer), and watched Miss 16 swim several lengths of front-crawl. She’s such a natural swimmer – if she could stand the early mornings, she could easily swim in competition.
By mid afternoon – after a trudge around the shops picking up all manner of random bits and pieces (including a new Iron!?), we came home, and collapsed in a heap. Half the reason for keeping the kids out of the house today was to avoid the workmen that descended at 8am to replace the flat-roof mentioned earlier.
It’s now 10pm and I’m sitting in bed, hoping that tomorrow will involve nothing. I need a day of nothing. A day of sitting, reading, writing, sipping tea, and having a day of the “holiday” I’m supposed to be having. No doubt I will wake up at 6am tomorrow morning though, and get up to avoid wasting the day.
Expect to see a blog post from me while sipping coffee.