It’s been another week, I guess. A couple of dinners out, a couple of tedious tasks successfully completed, and a cycling milestone. Goodness me, is that it?
We were out to dinner early in the week with some good friends who used to be fellow-spinners at the gym. They still go regularly but, as you may remember, we stopped our membership during the pandemic and bought a Peloton-type bike instead on which I’ve now travelled far enough to have done half a lap of the earth. At the equator, not the North Pole. (In case you’re wondering – and I know you are – the earth’s circumference at the equator is just over 40,000 kilometres. Since we’ve had the bike and it’s been recording the distances I ride I’ve covered 20,327 km. Whew! I thought I was getting tired. It was lovely to see them all, they’re great company and the food was excellent!
Penelope and I were finally able to enjoy our aborted Anniversary Dinner from last month – we were out to dinner at the Cromwell Cottage on Wednesday evening. The food there is always good and they have a pretty extensive menu. In the run-up to Christmas they were, not surprisingly, very busy – a lot of people and a couple of business/company celebrations complete with paper crowns, etc. We did have fun trying to work out what sort of business the table adjacent to ours was engaged in. There were fourteen or so youngish men, some dressed very smartly, others a bit more casually, one or two in hideous Christmas jumpers. Some were quite geeky or nerdy in a way while others were clearly of managerial substance. Clearly, some sort of technology-type business. Exciting stuff when you’re out to dinner and waiting between courses.
Equally exciting, our gutters needed cleaning so I decided to employ a new technique this year. I got someone in to do it! The Gutter Man arrived with an impressive industrial-sized Vax-type vacuum cleaner and a set of long tubes with which he proceeded to hoover up all the debris. Spic and span. And all I had to do was watch.
Thursday late afternoon I had a phone call from my sweetheart. She had gone to Banbury to do a bit of shopping and, on the way home, had collided with a pothole the size of a small country which shredded one of her front tyres. Quelle merde! Thankfully, this had happened only about a mile or so from home and I was able to hop in the campervan, proceed to her location and change the tyre. No charge, ma’am. Happy to be of service.
During the actual activity of wrestling in the mud with tyres, the jack, whilst straining every sinew to loosen the lug bolts, covering myself in grease and mud during the process, my darling kept my spirits up by referring to me as her “Superman” and her “hero”. More than ample compensation.
We’ve had some wonderful photos of our Chinese family’s travels – they are currently in Cambodia. They met up with a good friend, George Jefferies, who lives in Phnom Pen and now they are at Angkor Wat – thanks for sending the photos!
And the excitement continues! We’re out to dinner tonight with Nick, Lucy & Annabelle – apparently, it’s somebody’s birthday? Who knew?
YCNMIU
This week’s winner is (again) the white elephant that is HS2 (the alleged high-speed railway which was to run from London to the North but now is being built only as far as Birmingham). It continues to provide astonishingly stunning stuff especially with regard to its “budget.” It seems that the enormous budget overruns are all due to a “rush to start” rather than any fundamental error about the whole concept of the project. It’s now estimated that the final total will be something like 3 to 4 times the original budget, certainly in excess of £100 billion. All this so that a tiny number of people who need/want to travel from London to Birmingham, or vice versa, can make the journey in an hour instead of an hour and twenty minutes. Money well spent! As I think I wrote at the time the northern part of the line was shelved – only the British could build an excessively expensive railway line in the south of the country which no one needs and fail to extend it to the north where it would provide a huge benefit to the area.
Enormous budget overruns on the HS2 high-speed railway have been blamed by its new chief executive on a “rush to start”, as the Department for Transport admitted it did not know how much it would cost.
Our holiday cards wishing you all a very Happy Holidays and New Year, etc. have been dumped at the Post Office and hopefully will reach you all soon. Of course, we have pruned our Christmas Card list so that now physical cards only go to those who are unable to receive one electronically. If you haven’t received yours, check your Spam folder as that is where your email client would logically place it. And, if you’ve still received neither a physical or electronic version, you can still avoid our Happy Holiday newsletter by not clicking here.
Meanwhile, keep breathing, keep happy, keep smiling, keep exercising, be good, be careful, and keep safe. And be gentle to wasps and bees – we need all the pollinators we can get.
Lots of love to you all,
Greg