I'd rather have moles

I took this picture in our village, this afternoon, on my way back from the airport after dropping James off. Where else would you see thirteen horses grazing on your front 'lawn'.

Crowne Plaza Liverpool Airport

It's so good to be home with blue skies and warm sunshine. The dogs went potty when we picked them up and especially when they realised that we had arrived with my son James, who loves and spoils them.

It was good to unpack the suitcases after a five hotel stay, get back into our home routine and especially to see Kevin, Debbie and family who were staying at the house whilst we were away. What kind people. They had prepared a barbecue in order to give Jan a break before she starts feeding me again.

It sometimes feels like I'm always going on about hotels and restaurants. Well, after saying goodbye to mum, Pia, Dino and my cousin Sandra, the other day, we headed off towards Liverpool for an overnight stay before our flight to Nîmes. We stayed at the Crowne Plaza hotel at Liverpool airport. From the outside, the building is not very prepossessing, but inside it's quite unusual. It has been furnished in an art deco style in keeping with its previous use as the airport terminal building. Our bed, like the one at Miller Howe, was very, very comfortable. It must have been seven feet wide, large enough to accommodate even the two of us. (Don't you mean the one of you? - Ed)

We ate very well in the restaurant and found two excellent wines. The first an Australian, Houghton 2007, Chardonnay Verdelho mix and the second a New Zealand, Hawkes Bay, Vidal 2006 oak aged Merlot. Jan's quote, "that's one of the nicest reds I've ever drunk." Praise indeed!

The UK has so much choice when it comes to wine and interestingly we never choose French wine when we eat out.

Nîmes night market

What an excellent night. In different groups, thirteen of us managed to meet up last night during the Nîmes Thursday night market. It was a lovely warm evening, the streets were buzzing and there was music of different sorts on different street corners. Bob and Lynne were in great form and it was good to see then again. Debbie and Kevin leave tomorrow so this was their farewell meal. Pizza Cerruti is where we traditionally head and last night was no exception. The guy who makes the pizzas had obviously changed but they were still good and the chili sauce, despite now being served in sachets, was better.

Whilst this was the last such event of the summer, Bryan summed up my feelings exactly by saying, 'I'd forgotten how much fun these evenings are. We don't make enough of Nîmes' facilities.'

The Feria de Vendages takes place in the middle of September so that's something to look forward to.

Mummy

Dan was a single guy living at home with his father and working in the family business.

When he found out he was going to inherit a fortune should his sickly father die, he decided he needed a wife with which to share his fortune.

One evening at an investment meeting he spotted the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Her natural beauty took his breath away.

'I may look like an ordinary man,' he said to her, 'but in just a few years, my father will die, and I'll inherit 20 million dollars.'

Impressed, the woman obtained his business card and three days later, she became his stepmother.

Passwords

This is a funny story.

Brown, brown grass of home

A lot of our driving over the last week has been on unfamiliar urban roads through and around Manchester and Liverpool. TomTom, which I brought with me from France, has been a fantastic tool. It has worked extremely well, getting us from A to B, quickly and with no fuss. Add to that, by warning about speed cameras, of which there are lots around Manchester, I'm sure that it's saved me a ticket or two. We've been amazed at some of the routes that it calculated but it never failed. I'm a big fan!

***

An early flight from Liverpool this morning took us back to a very warm and sunny France. I'd forgotten how poor the weather can be in England. At best the last ten days have been warmish and grey. It's been the wettest August for 100 years. Grief, it's good to get back.

Miller Howe

Leaving our third hotel of the trip yesterday, we headed north to the Lake District. Jan had never visited the Lakes before so this was a trip of discovery for her.

Having missed breakfast, because we got up too late, we stopped at the first motorway service area that we came to. No smoked salmon and scrambled eggs here 'mes braves.' I thought that all motorway service areas had been refurbished. First Services at Bolton West, hasn't, it's a right dump. It was awful. It hasn’t been touched for years. Avoid it like the plague.

When we first planned this diversion we hadn’t realised that this was a Bank Holiday Monday. As we headed north up the M6 the traffic was heavy, with lots of cars heading for Blackpool, but with the majority coming towards us. What they knew, but we didn’t, was that it was raining, it was pouring down in the rain sodden Lakes.

Our target was the Miller Howe Hotel, somewhere that I’d visted about 35 years ago. It's quite a special place and chosen as a treat for Jan.

The upside, pretty much everything you'd expect from a good hotel, but the downside, it rained the whole time. That gave the stay a 'moody feel'. We had a room with a fabulous view (above) overlooking Lake Windermere (also known as Campbell Soup for the perverted historians amongst you) with low cloud and mist the order of the day.

We're all fussy about our beds, but this was arguably the best bed that I've ever slept in. I was sleeping like a log at 08.00 when our cup of tea arrived. Cool.

It's not cheap but if you want a special weekend, this is the place. Highly recommended.

Sorry

I was a bit tired and emotional when I wrote the last post and apologise if the swearing offended you.

The bloody olympics

Is it only me or does anyone else think that the closing ceremony for the Olympics is crap? What a total waste of time, effort and money? These end of games events try to outdo each other in their complexity, people organising, people moving (alla Nazi and Communist propaganda films), waste of timing and fireworks displays. You sit there and think, 'what the fuck', 'impressive or what?' and the commentator explains the symbolism to you. So what's the point of the symbolism if you can't work out what's going on? It's all a load of bollocks. Leona, who the fuck, Lewis and Jimmy Page are supposed to wet our appetites for the London games. NO THEY DON'T. Grandpa and granddaughter. It was toe curlingly naff. Naff, naff, enough.

Look, I enjoyed our success, a gold a day was a good effort. There was some really good stuff but, way ahead, the best bit for me, was the Spanish synchronised swimming team. What a bunch of good looking women, frolicking about in the water. Delicious. Tell me they're not on drugs?

Carbs on carbs

At lunch time today we had our last 'Italian' meal. My mum and her sister Pia vie with each other to feed us to death. We started lunch today with the ultimate 'carbohydrate' meal, consisting of a large bowl of rice cooked in a tomato sauce with chunks of potatoes added to give it a little extra 'body.' Pia apologised because it should really have been made with pasta, not rice, but mum didn't have the right pasta. I told her not to worry because it was probably less fattening with rice, so would fit into my meal planning perfectly. I think the irony went straight over her head!

***

Last night we stayed for one night in the Cairn Hotel, Harrogate because we had to vacate the Travelodge. This was always going to be an interesting experience because it's the first place I ever worked part time, whilst still at school. I wondered how much it had changed in the intervening forty years. Not much was the answer. It badly needs a few million pounds spending on it, a bit like me really. It's where I learnt waiting skills. It's where I learnt about wine. It's where I decided that working and holding a fistful of quids in your pocket was much more interesting than conjugating Latin verbs. It's where I was taught to steal by my mentor, BP. It's where I learnt how to behave as a guest in a hotel or restaurant, or more to the point how not to behave. It's where I learnt that hotel staff are very poorly paid and depend on your tips to help feed themselves. It's where I nearly got fired because I refused a tip of six pence, telling the tosser who tried to give it to me that he needed it more than I did. It's where I learnt that as a boss you should support your staff when someone takes the piss. I learnt a lot at the Cairn Hotel Harrogate.

After lunch we headed over the Pennines to Cheshire, to see Pia's daughter, my cousin Sandra, to a house I'd never been to before and Tom Tom got us there perfectly. It then moved us seamlessly to the third hotel of our stay (with two more to go). Oh joy! Don't you just love packing and unpacking? Oops, I forgot, Jan does all that!

Menwith Hill

No matter how often I do it, driving past Menwith Hill (above) just outside Harrogate, always spooks me. The huge 'golf balls' look very incongruous and sinister in this bleak countryside. It's a top secret military establishment and I believe that it's the largest electronic monitoring station in the world, and that it's a major link in the early warning system. It's stuffed to the gills with American service personnel who can't talk about what they do, and it strikes me that it would be one of the first places in England to be attacked in the event of a major nuclear conflict. Harrogate would be very gentile right up to the last moment!

Anyway I'm following a Smart car over the moors with a personalised plate 1 CRM when it occurs to me that the registration plate is worth a lot more than the car. How odd.

You see lots of slightly unusual things like that around Harrogate. Like a very powerful Jaguar XK, with a registration plate JT 4, showing a disabled badge in the windscreen. Now call me old fashioned, but I'd feel a lot happier if this very lethal piece of machinery wasn't being driven by someone who qualified for a disabled sticker.

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.

***

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

Gentile Harrogate

We were eating breakfast again at Bettys yesterday, sitting next to two silver haired, gentile, elderly ladies. We both ear wigged their conversation which turned out to be very amusing. The nature of the conversation told us that they weren't that close. Lady A was telling Lady B about how well her daughter was doing.

Lady A, "She must be doing well, they keep calling her in to do more work."

Lady B, "Where does she work?"

Lady A, "Oh, she works at Woolworths."

Lady A then tries to impress Lady B about her good friend Beryl.

Lady A, "Beryl is going back to Spain for six weeks tomorrow. Her man friend has bought her a new table and chairs. He's very wealthy, he's 86 years old. But unfortunately the weather has been so bad that she hasn't been able to sit out."

Lady B, "Do they live together?"

Lady A, "They both have their own houses, but yes, (hesitating) when they're in Spain they live in the same house."

Lady B, "Do they have separate rooms?"

Lady A, hesitating even more, "Oh yes, they have separate rooms."

Lady B, "Yes, that's what you want. A wealthy boyfriend and separate rooms."

Doctors

I'd forgotten to bring my eyedrops (for glaucoma) so I popped into Boots and spoke to the pharmacist who was very sympathetic but refused to sell me the drops without a prescription. Bum. It's not bloody cocaine or anything like that, so I had to sign on with a local doctor to get my prescription.



Waiting my turn to see the medic I was amazed to see how quickly people were going in and out of the consulting rooms. I reckon that one doctor saw three patients in about ten minutes flat. This doctor was dishing out prescriptions at a phenomenal rate. This compares very unfavourably with my experience of the care in France where you always get your blood pressure taken and no appointment lasts less than fifteen minutes. Interesting.



Anyway, my turn came and I got my free prescription very quickly with no questions asked, and no demand for payment, but with an inference from the doctor that the pharmacist was being a bit over cautious. Hmnnn.