Mileage – Done
Posted: Tue 13 July, 2010 Filed under: Domestic, Driving, Travel Leave a comment »All went fine last night. I got down to St Pancras in tons of time, and parked up to wait for Herself’s arrival.
Two downsides, as it turned out :
- You can’t leave your car unattended. Big signs tell you that unattended cars will be removed/destroyed. That’s going to put a bollock on your day for sure
- Turns out there’s two specific car parking areas, two big blue signs saying “St Pancras International” and two concourses (concoursii?) Guess which one I picked. Yep, the wrong one. Cue a conversation…
“Where are you?”
“Outside the station, in the parking zone, under the big blue sign”
“So am I”
“No you’re not”
Still, once all that got sorted everything was fine. And once Herself had appeared, I could nip in to St Pancras and find their toilets before another 2+ hour drive…
The driving was fine too – not too many idiots on the roads at that time, except for me – and we got home by 1am (having dropped off others as well – otherwise we’d have been home at midnight)
Mind you, today I’ve got the IQ of a stunned lemur, and could just curl up and go back to sleep right now.
Mileage
Posted: Mon 12 July, 2010 Filed under: Animals, Domestic, Driving Leave a comment »Once again I’m driving tonight.
This time it’s collecting Herself from London, so it’s going to be another late one.
Still, Hound will be happy once Herself is home.
Driving (Again)
Posted: Wed 7 July, 2010 Filed under: Business, Customer Services, Driving, Travel, Weirdness 1 Comment »Last night was the day I took Herself and Others down to London. I’d already worked all day (as usual) so it was always going to be a late one.
As it turned out, I got everyone down to central London (Kings Cross / St Pancras) in two hours flat, dropping them off at 9:50.
By that time I hadn’t eaten anything since lunch, but wasn’t massively hungry, so just headed back up, thinking that if I got hungry I could stop at the services near Stanstead airport. (Birchanger Green, not that it means much) It was 10:45 by the time I got there, and by that point I was hungry enough that I could’ve eaten a scabby donkey between two pieces of bread. (Which is, of course, why I was even considering something from Motorway Services)
Only it turns out that Birchanger Green pretty much shuts at 10:30.
- Burger King – closed, cleaned up, and one lowly person wiping the surfaces.
- KFC – closed, deserted
- Waitrose – closed, deserted, barriers in front of the doors
- “Eat In” – open, a poxy range of crap (and overpriced) sandwiches, with a queue of people that outnumbered the sandwiches available.
- Shop – closed, barriered off.
And that was it. Nothing else. I assume it stays open for people in dire need of a piss, and that’s about it.
Bear in mind, Birchanger Green is the only services on the entire M11. And it shuts at half-ten.
Call me naïve, but I always thought services were supposed to be open super-long hours – if not 24-hours. That impression appears to have been wrong.
But I wonder how much business Birchanger Green loses by closing at half-ten ? The car-park was at least a third full when I got there. You’d think that being open ’til half eleven or midnight would make sense – particularly when they’re the only one in god knows how many miles.
Very strange.
Heavy, Heavy Mileage
Posted: Sat 3 July, 2010 Filed under: Animals, Domestic, Driving, Travel Leave a comment »The coming week is another one with lots of miles to go under my wheels.
Tomorrow I’m off back down to Berkshire (and, of course, back again) to collect Hound. It’s been a really nice ten days without her barky shithead presence, but I know Herself will be glad to get the poxy pooch back. Me, I’d happily leave her in Berkshire. But there we go.
During the week I’ll be doing my normal commute to Bury St Edmunds, which is just second nature now, but still adds 350 miles to the week.
And I’ve also got one night of driving Herself down to London, from whence she shall depart the next day with others for a week’s holiday. I’ll be looking after Hound – who will just be eating, shitting and sleeping, following her time in ‘kennels’. (The place she goes is really ace, with lots of running round rather than being cooped up for most of the day. So she’ll be utterly knackered, and won’t have eaten much, if I know Hound)
All told, I’ll be covering near as dammit 1,000 miles between now and next Friday. (And there’ll be another London run the week after to collect Herself from London again, as well as a weekend seeing friends in Manchester)
I don’t mind, fortunately – the driving’s something I can do easily now, and in a lot of ways I enjoy it. I’ll be playing my music quite loud, and just making progress through the motorway system.
Missing Pink
Posted: Thu 1 July, 2010 Filed under: 1BEM, Charm School, Domestic, Driving, Introspective, Stupidity 2 Comments »Following on from yesterday’s post about Pink, Portman Stadium, and signs in general, some extra thoughts…
1) I can be a total arse. I know that’s not really news, but all the same, it’s worth re-iterating.
2) I fucking hate getting lost, being late etc.
3) If I’ve had a crap day, my tolerance for 2) is particularly low, leading to qualifying even more for 1)
Tuesday was, however I look at it, an exceedingly crap day. Stuff had come up at work that had affected me – nothing seriously traumatic of negative, it’d just been one of those days. In all fairness I really wasn’t in the mood for a late night – particularly with the knowledge of an early start in the morning. (For a number of reasons, last working day of the month is a big day in the current job, and requires coming in earlier than usual)
So the afternoon/evening didn’t start off all that well, and my mood wasn’t the best. Not being able to find the stadium just pissed me off a lot, and I didn’t do what I should’ve done, which was either
- Stop and think a bit
- Call someone else already there and find out how to get there
- Use the iPhone to do the same as 2
- Stop somewhere and ask someone.
I should have done one or more of those. Instead I got locked in to trying to find the place by driving along the A14.
Admittedly, I also didn’t expect the stadium to be in the town/city centre. All the other stadia (stadiums? I dunno) I know of are on the outskirts, not in the centre. Manchester, Norwich, Oxford, Crewe, Stockport – all on the outskirts. I also kind of expect there to be signs to say where the hell to go – after all, it’s not like a stadium is somewhere that no-one ever goes to.
But anyway, I did get pissed off, and went home. It wasn’t my smartest move, but it was the one I did.
No excuses for it at all, just sometimes an extra explanation is worthwhile.
Hey Ho.