breakfast in Belfast, dinner in Douglas…
Well, that’s me back from the Beyoncé/Belfast/Dublin dash for a week and an exciting week it’s been, if your idea of excitement is throwing virtually all of your recently hard-earned into some serious DIY planning and preparation with a nifty bit of room-painting, floor selection and wall light shopping as a sideline. Fortunately mine is, at least when the alternative is looking pensively out of the window at the current May weather wondering if this year’s day to finally turn the heating off will fall before the school summer holidays start.
As previously mentioned, Phase 3 of Operation sort-the-flat-out-you’ve-been-there-five-years-ffs is moving headlong towards, well, getting somewhere at least and everything thus far has gone smoothly enough; plans to take July off and get the next bits finished are also looking feasible (just by way of a warning) and I have been looking forward already to getting my phone number down from Adultwork once again for at least a week or two. Obviously July off means June and what’s left of May resolutely on – yay! I will be chasing about the land (and others) more than usual over the next few weeks, and full details of Ireland in particular will be posted soon, but next up is my favourite little island (or at least joint first with Manhattan) and five whole days in Douglas, Isle of Man from this Friday – woohoo! Preparation for this years’ TT is well underway and I will be there to help out and mop brows until well into Week 1; fingers crossed for the weather this year.
London follows shortly after, and a lengthy spell in Ireland shortly after that – phew! As can be seen above I have already got cracking with some spending commitments which to be fair, are also serving as reward for a day spent inadvertently in a countryside-with-people-who-have-moved-to-it setting, a situation which induces in me the sort of panic, terror and dread most often reserved for hearing very bad news at the doctors, or perhaps that Robbie Williams is coming to play an open air gig at the house next door to yours. Proper Country (cows, meadows, trees, sheep, babbling brooks): nice. Newly-Relocated people in country villages (yes, I did originally type Village People but I noticed); women jittering with Mumsnet withdrawal, exhausted and sheepish-looking blokes, huge shiny cars: suicide inducing. Never, ever, again.
For reasons I still don’t entirely understand (any more than why these women all carry such gigantic ugly handbags – I somehow doubt that their husbands testicles are big enough to require that amount of storage space and I’m equally sure the kids aren’t getting any sweets), I found myself at a sort-of family occasion – not realising that the trains tail off to bi-hourly and there are no taxis – having to spend almost a two hour block pretending to have just received an important text message (which, given that I’ve had a better mobile signal 100ft below ground on the Jubilee line probably wasn’t as convincing as I’d hoped) and fantasising about taking up smoking again whilst assorted attendees in raspberry corduroy either kindly avoided me completely or made attempts at polite small talk until my bones started to decalcify. I mention it because these are times when I wonder how I arrived at a pricing structure which earns me more for having a lovely time in comfortable and civilised surroundings with charming friendly folk than hanging around like the norovirus at a wedding buffet in a chilly field with smug, braying, Boden-clad oddballs for the princely sum of zero. Whatever the answer is, I earned those shoes.
Preparation for Douglas continues apace, and I am looking forward to being back – for the benefit of Scarborough visitors, I will be taking only very limited appointments in the scant time I have at home in June, and advance notice is crucial. There is no longer any Scarborough availability this week – sorry! I am hoping to update from the island, but obviously this depends on local enthusiasm and also weather, since sitting alone in front of a computer in a hotel room when it’s nice outside is not my idea of a fun trip away. I may bring back kippers.
More soon. And I think I’ll stick to seeing the country from train windows.
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