The Long and Winding Road
We returned home from my parents on the south west coast this afternoon, and somehow survived the five hour journey without the children causing anybody to lose their temper. There were a few moments of raised voices during the last half an hour, but by and large, we got away with it. We have a lot to thank the creators of the Apple iPad, the Tesco Hudl, and the Google Nexus 7 for. Without them we would have faced playing “I spy with my little eye” for five hours straight. There's only so many times you can repeat “road”, “sky”, “cloud”, “van”, “truck”, “sign”, “fence”, “trees”, and “hill”.
We stopped half-way at a motorway service station that looked pretty much how we felt – the staff were stumbling around, shell-shocked after experiencing the earlier part of the day – when the rest of the visitors to the south west had passed through on their way home. There was no food left in Burger King. There was very little food left in the main cafeteria, and stories of shock and awebeing whispered between staff as the night shift took over.
We waited for a few minutes while some fresh chips were cooked, and the kids ate sausages, beans, and chips while myself and my other half made do with the remaining baked goods from Starbucks. You might wonder why we always end up buying dinner from several different places while travelling – there's an easy answer – our eldest daughter is Coeliac. She cannot eat anything with gluten in. And no, before you ask, she will not get better. It is not an intolerance – it is a disease. She can eat so little from the menu of either McDonalds, Burger King, Starbucks, or Costa that we never eat there. A few of their high street branches occasionally have something she can eat, but it's rare. Service stations never do. She ended up with a plate of chips and beans.
I had a coffee.
We finally arrived home well after dark, and the kids worked pretty hard at getting in my way as I made repeated trips back and forth from the car, dumping bag after bag into the centre of the kitchen. I kind of feel sorry for the washing machine and dryer in advance – tomorrow will see an avalanche of clothes thrown at them the likes of which have not been seen since at least a week ago.
While writing this my phone is on charge, the netbook is on charge, the iPad is on charge, the Nexus 7 is on charge... you get the idea. I'm typing this on the hilariously old desktop PC that somehow continues working, year after year. In computing terms it's kind of “Trigger's Broom” (Google it, if you don't know what it means – I just did, and discovered it's also called the “Ship of Theseus Paradox” – you learn something new every day). The only original part of it's innards is the motherboard – the graphics card, power supply, hard drive, and memory have all been replaced over the years.
Maybe I should re-name the desktop computer “Theseus”, in honour of it's life story – a far more appropriate name than “Inspiron530”...