And so, our adventures in London come to a close. Time to go back to reality. Back to Northenden. Packing up didn’t take too long, and after refuelling the vehicle, we set Google maps to take us home. Our accommodation was just off the A406, the North Circular Road and the last thing we wanted to do was negotiate the Hanger Lane Gyratory system, arguably the worst, most confusing roundabout in the known universe, voted the scariest roundabout in 2007. But Liesel just ploughed on, and we managed to turn off it at the right time.
The next surprise on this trip was that we were taken up the M1 before joining the M6. There were so many lorries, and all I wanted to do was take out a Sharpie and change every incidence of the word Haulage on the side of a lorry to Sausage. But would Liesel stop for me?
Vernon Kay on Radio 2 kept us entertained. But I thought the ‘Ten to the Top’ quiz questions were much easier than usual. Even the contestants on air both attained unusually high scores.
We stopped at a service station briefly and none of us could believe how much colder it was here than it had been in Ealing.
Nothing to report at home. Just 250 emails to process. And two physical letters.
We had the pleasure of collecting Martha and William from school and we drove over to Bramhall, specifically to Simply Books. I had a book token to spend (thank you Pauline and Andrew for my birthday present) and we said we’d buy books for the children too. So we all left the shop with some exciting new reading material.
On the way to Jenny’s, we stopped off at Papa John’s to order and collect our pizzas. Ordering online proved to be too hard with the 4G signal available in the area. After consuming the bulk of the pizzas, we went over to watch Martha playing cricket, as we said we would. She is very proud of her own, real, wooden, cricket bat. But I’m glad to see they’re still playing with tennis balls.
Martha also made a good catch and later confirmed that her favourite position is batting or fielding, she’s not so keen on bowling. It’ll be interesting to see how she gets on when they start playing with a real, leather cricket ball. I was a bit of a wimp at school, I must admit, I was quite happy staying in the pavilion at school, keeping score, well away from that very hard missile.
It’s that time of year again. I had to get up early to take the car in for its MOT. While there, I went over the road to The Mess for breakfast and a coffee. Rain was forecast and I was busy at home so I missed the organised walk in Northenden. Liesel did make the effort to attend her exercise class though.
In exciting news, we received a ‘badge’ from WordPress, the hosts of mickandlieselsantics.com. We are a Globe Trotter now, because people from over fifty countries have viewed the blog. No trophy to put on the shelf. No vouchers for a spa day. Not even a real badge to pin on our t-shirts.
Your task is to identify this superhero:
Of course, it’s our Keiran, bringing villains to justice.
In local news, our car passed its MOT: we didn’t expect there to be any problem, but it’s always a relief.
In overseas news, we offer our love and congratulations to our nephew, (my sister’s boy,) Rob, who wed Cristy in Torreón, Mexico. Pauline was there along with Rob’s Dad, Tony, and Cristy’s much bigger family!
Thanks to the professional photographer Brenda Rodríguez for the fantastic photos! And thank you to Pauline too for your wonderful pictures.
There was a mariachi band at the party afterwards at Cristy’s parents’ house and I can imagine my sister and everyone else tripping the light fantastic all night!
There is a river in Torreón which is dry most of the time thanks to a dam upstream. Let’s hope there’s never a reason to dam the Mersey: although if that river ever were to dry out, there’d be plenty of car tyres, bikes, fridges, sofas, supermarket trolleys and other débris to sell at a car boot sale. But on our walk to Didsbury, we just enjoyed the serenity provided by our slow-moving river, only slightly ruined by the background noise from the motorway.
On the way to our massage in Didsbury, we saw a solitary heron on the river. On the way back, we were pleased to spend time watching a family of ducks.
Oh, and our massages were great, thank you very much and I feel bad that we don’t know the names of our massagistes, masseuses, rubbers, therapists, whatever: see, I don’t even know what their job title is.
Lyme Regis is a bit too far away despite what my mouth said, so we visited Lyme Park instead. What a colourful place, you’d be forgiven for thinking that rhododendrons are taking the place over. Today Lyme Park, tomorrow the world. It was a perfect, warm, wind-free day for ice cream too, under the blue skies.
There were many people flopped out on the lawn that leads down to the lake. A family of goslings had also camped out there.
We joined scores, if not hundreds, of people wandering around the lake, some walking in the wrong direction: weirdoes.
Some of the plants were of course not identifiable by me, but unbelievably, even Liesel couldn’t name some flowers.
But apart from people, dogs and geese, there were some extraterrestrial beings.
The weather is slowly improving, by which I mean, getting warmer. And we know wind has been blowing in from the south, rather than from the north, because our car is now covered in dust from the Saraha.
Indoors, I continue to put together a two-hour show each week for Wythenshawe Radio WFM 97.2 and you are of course welcome to tune in each week on a Sunday at 4PM.
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