Travelodge

We've been pleased with the Travelodge in Harrogate. It's relatively inexpensive, very central and you can walk to all the shops. The beds are quite big so we have been getting a good nights sleep and as long as you remember to shut the windows before you bed down you are not disturbed by the surrounding bars. Having said that we were woken in the middle of the night, last night, by a bunch of drunken Scotsmen returning to their rooms. At least the noise didn't last long. They were all obviously incapable of reading their room numbers and even opening their doors but as soon as they did get in they all crashed out.

Unable to totally get away from France, we park each night in the Montpellier Gardens car park.

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Chris and Delphine get married today. Sorry we can't be with you guys. Have a lovely day.

Italian mamas

Glyn called from the UK this morning complaining of terminal teenage overload. More to the point he had misplaced his French bank card and wanted me to check his house. He had visions of the waiters at our last restaurant stop in Nîmes setting off on a cruise at his expense. No problem, I found it, and now I'm off on the cruise!

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Chris sent me this piece about seagull pie today. It's one of the funniest pieces about Italian mamas that I have read in a long time.

This is how they do it!

It looks like William and I will be joined by Peter (from Czechoslovakia) for our regular tennis sessions. That's an Englishman with an Italian mother, a Frenchman and a Czech all with an English spelt first name. I find that a bit odd. Anyway, this morning was the second such threesome and boy, do you have to work hard. We played 2 on 1 which means that the person on their own has a lot of running about to do. After a good warm up we play five games each as the 'one'. The games are even more competitive than when William and I used to play on our own. William and Peter won two of their five games each and, neeless to say, I won three, but it was tough. (I'm surprised you mentioned it - Ed.)

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Always one for the quick, incisive riposte, Chris (ex journalist and author and more recently chef) makes a somewhat bitter but funny comment to my recent post 'How do they do it?

How do they do it?

Here's another article from NewsBiscuit which I found funny. It occurs to me that if you like this type of humour you will look there yourself, so I won't post links in future.

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I spent a great deal of time yesterday getting the computers up to date. After installing Office 2003 (Student and Teacher Edition - much, much cheaper than the regular price, if you have children at school or children who are teachers, or even if you were ever a child yourself), you are prompted to check for security patches. This entailed not only hanging around for the installation of the new programme, but also downloading and installing over 60 megabytes of security patches for each machine. This was a seriously boring process.

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To cheer ourselves up, Glyn, Jan and I went to the relais in Montmirat for dinner. We all had the 11.5 euros menu, which includes wine, stuffed ourselves on the four courses and finished with a bill for 36 euros. How do they do it?