Wonderful West Country

Last week my sister (Megan) and I embarked on the longest road trip either of us had done since passing our driving tests .

We drove from Teddington (south west London) to Plymouth. A journey of about 215 miles on some rather windy, hilly roads. There were also inconsiderate truck drivers, traffic jams and our own attempts to navigate to add into the mix. Luckily we made it there in one piece without any major incidents. Yay!

Here is a picture of the more traffic free part of our journey...

We stayed with our aunt, Glyn, in the Mutley area of Plymouth. Handy for all the student bars and not too far from the centre of Plymouth.

On the saturday, we took the train down to Cornwall to visit Looe. Megan was keen to swim in the sea so as soon as we arrived in Looe, we headed straight to the beach. I don't normally go for trying to get into the sea beyond paddling depth but decided to be brave. Once I overcame the initial chill, it was actually really nice.

In the evening, Glyn hosted a party at her house to celebrate her birthday. It had a hippy theme so everyone dug out their long hair wigs, tie dye, flares and other hippy accessories. Here's a pic of me and Meg in our hippy outfits...

What you can't see in this picture is Megan's awesome hippy trousers, really added to the hippy look. The party itself was really good. Glyn has some very cool and interesting friends who had all put in a lot of effort for their costumes. There was even a hippy themed jamming session featuring a guy singing on guitar with a tambourine and flute to keep him company.

On sunday, we decided to stay in Plymouth. We took a walk down the hill to the city centre and explored the fairly new Drake Circus shopping centre before heading to the harbour area. We decided that the Plymouth Aquarium was an essential place to visit. I love aquariums! I get very transfixed by all the different sea creatures, particularly the jelly fish. They also had some amazing octopi (I think that's the right plural for more than one octopus) and mini sharks.

By monday it was time to go home. Unfortunately, the weather conditions on the way home were not so friendly. We had to contend with pouring rain and fog on the windy, hilly roads that took us back towards London. It was a scary driving experience for us both but we made it. Hopefully, we can do more cool road trips like this and feel much more confident as a result of doing this.

Driving me crazy, 2012

Following my last driving related post back in 2010, I would like to announce that I passed my driving test first time on 8th November 2011. With two minors. Clearly the many driving disasters along the way were worth the trouble.

When I finally did pass my test, my Dad provided me with the following advice: "now you have passed your test, the learning really begins".  At the time, I thought this was all a little patronising and was not really sure I could handle traumatic driving experiences all by myself.

Fortunately, in the nine months since I have passed I have not had any major incidents. I had visions of dramatic crashes, particularly on the first occasion I went on the motorway. Then again, I'm not sure any sane people decide that the M25 is the best motorway to start with.

Embarrassingly, I have had a couple of minor incidents. On one occasion, I was trying to reverse out of a parking space and knocked my wing mirror off by clipping it on a metal post. Stylish. On another occasion, I was trying to manouvre out of a tight space in an underground car park and ended up getting a bit too friendly with a van. Leaving a dent along the side of my car and the van completely unharmed. Luckily, my Dad has helped me fix these problems and make my car look less battered. He has fixed my wing mirror and beaten out the dent I put in the car. Perhaps his original post test comment wasn't quite as patronising as I orginally thought?

I'm planning a road trip down to Plymouth with my sister on Friday. I'm going to add an update on that trip once I get back with a view to using this blog more frequently from now on.




Demonstrating my driving skills by not moving in a car park and letting Colin the Cat take all the credit...

About this blog, the stories and the updates it contains.

Someone at work asked me today whether I ever wrote the stories I tell down. It reminded me that I had set this blog up some time ago with the intention to do just that.

I haven't decided whether I will publicise this or to leave it as it is, in a dark corner of the internet most people don't stumble across. I think I will have to see how it goes and whether I manage to add more stories over the next few months. I also feel it is worth establishing whether I can write stories in an interesting, compelling and maybe even vaguely amusing way.

All the stories and the updates on this page are taken from my life. I have developed a habit of finding myself in odd situations, having clumsy moments or generally causing chaos.

Disasterous Driving

I am currently learning to drive. In my six lessons so far I have managed to do the following slightly chaotic things:
- Accidentally set off the wipers instead of the indicators.
- Reset the mirrors at completely the wrong angles at inappropriate moments.
- Stalled in five out of six lessons.
- Displayed an inability to stay on the left side of the road.
- Almost run over a squirrel.
- Been too scared to go over 30mph, annoying other road users in the process (I'm sure somebody on a mobility scooter can probably overtake me).

To Milton Keynes and Back

Unlike most young professionals, I don't often get the opportunity to travel around. Even when I do, I get to go to places like Reading or Basingstoke.

Today I got an all expenses trip to Milton Keynes with my colleagues.

It didn't start well when my colleague lost one of her pearl earrings on the train to Vauxhall.

Then we got to Euston and found the first train to Milton Keynes. All my other colleagues got onto the platform but I had a different type of ticket which did not allow me onto Virgin Trains so I had to call everyone back to find another train operated by a different company. The glares I got from the Virgin Trains staff and some of the other passengers were pretty impresive!

Eventually we got to Milton Keynes where we due to visit the home of one of the residents and paint their living room. I will call him Mr A for the purposes of this anecdote. When we arrived, Mr A's massive dog emerged to great us. I'm not a big dog person so Mr A spent a lot of time trying to reassure me that the dog wouldn't bite my hand off. He even tried to make me feed it dog biscuits which added to my discomfort. Then he gave us the grand tour, featuring his avery full of budgies.

More challenges came when we found that Mr A had not really prepared for our visit. The room was full of furniture and ornament. In addition the room had very textured wallpaper which immediately posed a problem. Were we going to paint over the wallpaper? Would Mr A want he wallpaper to be stripped? Then when the paint did arrive, it was the wrong colours and the wrong brand. No amount of persuasion could make Mr A change his mind and allow his room to be redecorated. After a few frantic telephone calls to the head office, it was decided that there was no option but to cancel the redecoration of Mr A's room. Having spent a few hours at his house, it was a little embarrassing to leave the living room in exactly the same state it was when we arrived.

Unfortunately the problems did not end there. We then had to find a taxi back to the station and in the process found ourselves between a bleak college campus, a school and the housing estate we had just visited. The taxi coming to collect us got lost trying to find us. Then on the train home we sat with a tattoo artist and started chatting. He told us about all the bizarre tattoos he'd been asked to do and even offered to give my colleague a free Winnie the Pooh tattoo if she was ever in Northampton. It certainly made the journey home more entertaining!

Most work trips I have been on previously have not had any notable moments. In fact, the most exciting thing to happen normally is trying not to fall asleep in a meeting. I think it was one of those days where the sequence of events just got more and more bizarre. I plan to be a lot more cautious when I am asked to attend work trips in future, there are too many opportunities for stange things to happen.

Recognition

There are many things a student is prepared to do to make some money over the long summers. I was no exception to this and during my student years, took many odd jobs in order to make ends meet.

One year, I found myself working for an event staff agency. I generally found myself at racecourses, particularly Ascot. I would get up at some unusually early hour, arrive at the racecourse and be allocated with a work area and uniform. Most normal people with some degree of hand eye coordination would find themselves waiting in a box or silver service where the tips were known to be generous. Unfortunately, my tendency to be clumbsy around crockery ruled me out of such glamorous roles.

Generally I ended up behind a bar or working in a food outlet of some form. I even ended up serving curry to the British Ambassador to Malawi and celebrity impressionist Rory Bremner.

On one occasion, I found myself working in a cafe dining room in an exclusive members area of the race course. I was even more pleased as I landed the easiest job in the place as the main cashier. All I did after we set up was take orders and take money. Compared to some of my previous eperiences of taking abuse in busy bars, it was a dream job.

One day I was absent mindedly staring out of the window taking a quick break from clearing tables. As I was looking outside I saw an elderly lady in the paddock below the restaurant. I thought it was quite odd as she was being followed by quite a large group of people. Every so often she would stop to talk to somebody in the group who would take a small bow before responding. I found this all rather puzzling - who was this lady and why were all the other people acting like she was so important?

As I was contemplating this, one of my colleagues joined me and let out a startled cry. Turns out the elderly lady in the paddock was the Queen. Meaning I had spent quite a while staring at somebody I see on my money and my stamps on a daily basis without a hint of recognition.

Unfortunately, this is not the only time I have failed to recognise somebody famous. However, not recognising the Queen is slightly worse than not recognising a Z list celebrity.  My only excuse is that I wasn't expecting to see her on that day so the old lady I saw didn't look any more special than most of the customers I had served earlier in the week.                              

Me - nil, Brighton - 3

A birthday trip to the beach in Brighton turned a little bit chaotic.

Obvious course of action when you visit the seaside is to get fish and chips. We got our food and decided to wander down to the beach to consume it. Unfortunately I didn't really think to close the box my food was in. Consequently, I got dive bombed by a seagull which stole my fish and caused me to drop a lot of chips. Dropping the chips then caused the whole flock of seagulls to head in my direction. It was rather traumatic. Luckily I managed to save enough of my chips and my friends kindly donated me some fish from their (untouchd by seagulls) meals.

Later on we decided to go for a swim. As the beach at Brighton is covered by pebbles, I wore my spare flip flops to get to the sea. Sadly, luck wasn't on my side. As I got into the sea, there was a particularly strong wave which stole one of my flip flops. In an attempt to retrieve it, another wave stole the other flip flops. Then I got hit by a succession of waves which took me to a slightly different bit of sea and caused me to lose track of my flip flops. When I had to get out of the sea I had to half crawl, half stagger back up the beach as the pebbles were particularly uncomfortable to walk on.

There are probably two morals to this story. The first being, don't walk into the sea wearing flip flops. The second being, always cover up food at the beach just in case you get dive bombed by a cheeky seagull.


The possible culprit (not the random people lying on the beach)...