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We’ve lived like true chavs this weekend. Probably inspired by our trip to northern Kent.

On Friday afternoon, after getting back from said region, I scooted off to Boots and, for the first time in my life, used one of those high street photo printing machines. It wasn’t a pleasant experience, but I wanted to print out some of the pictures of the wedding to pass on to Sal and Dan on Saturday morning. Somehow, Paul’s shoes had got left at their house under a pile of iced fruit cake, and we’d agreed to do a swap at Bluewater sometime around lunch.

Or at least I thought that’s what we’d agreed. Sal and Dan thought it was Lakeside, so as we sailed south across the bridge, two and a quarter hours behind schedule, they burrowed north through the tunnel beneath us, and we ended up at each others’ closest supermalls on opposite sides of the Thames.

We only worked out what had gone wrong after Sal and Dan insisted they couldn’t find a John Lewis in Essex.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if we’d not had a 2pm deadline, as Paul had booked a slot to test drive a new car, and the two and a bit hours of lateness had been to allow for him to clean his old one first.

So, we raced back over the river and met Sal and Dan for a brief lunch, and to do a swift swap of photos for shoes (a fair bargain, I thought), then high-tailed it back to Chelmsford where Paul was lured by the charms of the car, and bought it on the spot.

After such expenditure, it felt decadent going out, so we stayed in and watched Nicole Kidman in The Others. Hmmm… yes, well, that was a guessable twist, wasn’t it. They’d have got away with it, too, had it not been for the unnecessary explanation they put in for the thickies immediately after the reveal. Three out of five. Average.

We spent this morning sorting out September’s trip, and it’s pretty firmly nailed down now, with a string of booked hotels, and a good idea of the trains that will take us from Vienna to Salzburg to Innsbruck to Frankfurt to Paris, and the hydrofoil that should (fingers crossed) get us from Budapest to Vienna on the first day. It will be good to see Austria. It’ll be a new country to add to the list, but I do have my doubts. My Slackers’ Armchair Guide to Europe doesn’t paint a very rosy picture of the country, playing up its far-right leanings and its isolation, which makes me wonder whether it’s going to turn out to be a nation of Daily Mail types.

I hate doing all that trip planning. All the matching up of trains with hotels, and booking one before you’ve sorted out the other on the chance it’ll all work out. It’s not been a problem in the past, but it still takes a long time to sort out, and we were working on it all morning.

Feeling quite glad that it was all over, I decided to take the afternoon off, so retreated to mum’s for cake with her and Viv in the afternoon. We played three rounds of Rummikub, each of which I won by a slim margin, after which I went out for a ride on the bike, down to the mill pond and then up the hill on the other side of the valley so I could look back towards the house and the setting sun.

Truly idyllic.

But tyring.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 7th, 2005 at 11:44 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.