Quick update....
As a friend from Perth recently pointed out, it’s been a very long time since I last updated this blog. Now part of that is while I did eventually with Orange, it was short lived. I’ve had some sort of technical fault for the last month that’s meant I haven’t had broad band, an absolutely unbelievable situation that I intend to milk for my financial advantage as much as possible. Nonetheless, I have a workaround for now.
Tonight was another difficult night as I was forced to stand in an English pub watching England win the semi final (in rugby) against France. Last week, just before I picked my parents up from the airport, I had to suffer the absolutely incredible situation of watching (in that same pub just across the road – it’s my only television at the moment) England beat Australia. If that wasn’t bad enough, as I was waiting for mum and dad to make it through immigration, I got a message from Ulrich in France to say that France had beat New Zealand. I mean seriously. What’s going on? Here in England, on the other side of the world you tend to get a real fondness for your “antipodean” mates as they term it. So for the major players of the southern hemisphere to be knocked out in one day was jaw-dropping. I’m not sure, but I think I might have to actually support South Africa against England next week.
Mum and Dad are hopefully having a good time, in between painting my front room and various other tasks. Today we went on a long boat ride along the Huddersfield canal into the deepest, longest canal tunnel in the UK. Very interesting. I took a photo of a car in the carpark which had windscreen wipers on the lights.
I’ve now settled into my little terrace house in Mossley, a little stone built village about 12 miles out of Manchester at the foothills of the northern end of the Peak District. It’s a traditional 2 up, 2 down terrace, which literally means two rooms on the bottom floor and two on the top (with one truncated to add a bathroom). But with the attic and cellar as well, I’ve almost got a proper size house, just vertical rather than horizontal. It’s funny what you can adjust to. Running up and down the stairs has just about made up for the change from walking 15 minutes to work every day to sitting on a train for that long instead. Of course, the train gives me a good opportunity to learn more French, so that’s ok.
Everything’s rather busy but in an ordinary sort of way (no more exciting holidays for a while) so I’ll leave it at that for now. Mum and Dad take their bus tour of Ireland next week, so hopefully they’ll love that. We’re planning all sorts of other adventures as well, not least of course will have to be a trip to France.
