My Day

[CambridgeCabby]

Happy Birthday from Katie and I

[Gracie]

Happy Birthday, have a lovely day 

Grace x

[ExSurveyor]

Happy birthday Carole. Have a great day.

[Bikertov]

Happy "Special" Birthday Carole  

[MargeandParge]

Happy Birthday 

Kindest Regards Marge and Parge 

[kpnut]

Happy birthday Carole. That’s an extra special one. Hope you’ve been spoiled!

[addicted]

Thanks everyone for the kind  wishes. I'm home now having had a really lovely time  and  I must confess I  was thoroughly spoiled. 

 

 

Carole

[SwanR]

Happy Birthday Carole 🎂 Sounds like it’s been a good day. Hope you have a lovely weekend to carry on celebrating. 🥳 

[LizG]

Happy birthday Carole! Spent the day in Norwich with my youngest daughter pretending to be tourists. Last Saturday we were tourists in Cambridge!

50 years or so ago this was my work view minus the pigeon netting! I worked on the first floor of Parton's Jewellers. Today it is a Cafe Nero but the loos are still up some tight winding stairs!

[YnysMon]

Happy birthday Carole. Glad to hear to had a grand time.

[ChrisB]

Well, Tuesday actually, went over to Yarmouth to see Andalucia and called in the Elizabethan House Museum.

[kpnut]

Very impressive.

[floydraser]

My day yesterday: there was a tiny slot in the weather forecast that said little or no rain. When we worked the weather was just the weather but now it seems to dominate all our aticivity, or lack of it! 

So we jumped on the train and went to London for the day again and used our Two Together railcard to get two-for-one entry into St Paul's Cathedral. Any of the railcards gets the two-for-one deals if you didn't know and we use them a lot.

St Paul's is magificent, just go there. No pictures as it's all online and mean little unless you are there. It was great to see the memorials to Wellington and Nelson, and both their final resting places in the crypt. We didn't go up to the whispering gallery but we are going to go again sometime to tick that box. What they don't tell you on the website is that there is a small cafe in the crypt selling drinks and prepacked sandwiches, which is handy because it's a big place! 

Then we walked over the Millenium bridge and along to Horniman at Hays, just about level with the bows of HMS Belfast for drinks. A couple of traditional Thames barges caused Tower Bridge to lift, one each way. After drinks we chilled out for a bit around the Beehive and watched the cricket on the big screen. We find walking in the countryside good exercise but in places like London it's quite tiring. I think it's trying to avoid crashing into people on their phones which does it, along with crashing into people on their phones when you can't be bothered to avoid them! 

Around 5 we went back to Horniman for excellent fish and chips while Londoners beat themselves up in rush hour, then back to the Beehive to watch this:

Cruise ship Hamburg, 420 passengers, REVERSING through Tower Bridge! Very impressive even with a tug to help. I showed this pic to the family Whatsapp group and a daughter in law added the caption: Beep, beep, beep,beep....

We have now given up on first class train travel after very inconsistent service. If it were consistent and relaible then it would be worth the money but when it fails then it's just not worth the extra. With drinks and snacks it saves hunting around London for somewhere reasonably priced to get lunch. Yesterday they failed to provide a trolley service at all and no explanation or apology. We've given them a fair try and found sometimes sandwiches are available or not. I guess they rely on business travellers on expenses. This is East Midlands Railway.

[SwanR]

I love St Paul’s Cathedral. Just something about it. You’ve reminded me how much I would like to visit again. 

[ChrisB]

At school, we would have an annual service at St Pauls, because although my school moved from Charterhouse Square out to (then rural) Middlesex in 1936, it was still considered the school church.

It was a real logistics feat, moving 600 boys. The Metropolitan Line used to put on a special train to take us from Moor Park Station to Barbican.

[Mouldy]

9 hours ago, SwanR said:

I love St Paul’s Cathedral. Just something about it. You’ve reminded me how much I would like to visit again. 

I just checked the website and saw that the entry fee for St Paul’s is now £25 per person, unless going to worship at a formal service.  It says that their services are free, but ask their sightseeing visitors to ‘contribute a small entrance fee.’

[floydraser]

2 hours ago, Mouldy said:

I just checked the website and saw that the entry fee for St Paul’s is now £25 per person, unless going to worship at a formal service.  It says that their services are free, but ask their sightseeing visitors to ‘contribute a small entrance fee.’

£22.50 for oldies. The two for one system is hard to navigate but you buy one ticket for £25 and get the second for nowt. We don't like paying to get into relegious places but in this case, and Westminster Abbey, we thought it well worth the £12.50 each.

[floydraser]

4 hours ago, ChrisB said:

At school, we would have an annual service at St Pauls, because although my school moved from Charterhouse Square out to (then rural) Middlesex in 1936, it was still considered the school church.

I see memorials to army regiments in these places and I was pleased to see one in St Paul's dedicated to the Middlesex, my Granddad's old regiment.

[Bikertov]

1 hour ago, floydraser said:

I see memorials to army regiments in these places and I was pleased to see one in St Paul's dedicated to the Middlesex, my Granddad's old regiment.

I seem to remember a song from my days in the Cadets:

"We are the Middlesex, Diehards are we

We'll fight through xxxx and slaughter just to ..."

Although I suspect the words we sung were not quite the official ones 

[dom]

3 hours ago, floydraser said:

I see memorials to army regiments in these places and I was pleased to see one in St Paul's dedicated to the Middlesex, my Granddad's old regiment.

WW1? My 1st cousin 2 x removed was 1st Battalion Middlesex Regiment, killed in the first few days of the Somme.

[Ray]

First trip out for a long time, entertaining my brother and my sister-in-law, started the day with a nice catch-up with Malc who also very kindly helped us swing our boat around from it's side on mooring to stern on as my sister-in-law has mobility issues... another beer I owe you, thanks Malc 👍

Nice cruise downstream arriving at Cantley just as the dog needed a pee and we needed lunch. There were about 5 spaces between moored boats of about 30 feet, we are 34 feet and unusually for the broads no one was up for letting us in. Squeezed in behind a very small flappy thing but the water level was so high it was just over-topping at the pub end and we couldn't get sister-in-law off safely so lunch was off.

I had to get the dog on shore anyway but the drop from deck to ground was extremely high leaving me no option other than to step on the wet quay heading... I had a good grip on the boat with my left hand so I didn't manage to copy Grendel but the wood was like ice and I swung my not inconsiderable weight in a great arc crashing my back at the left shoulder into the boat.

It was and is a tad painful but paracetamol is a wonderful thing and nothing is broken... Happy days! 🙂

 

[kpnut]

Can I go back to my boat please?

Not ‘My Day’, but My Week  

Since I left Springer’s Retreat early on Monday morning, I’ve been at my daughter’s planting up her garden. My poor abused back is screaming out for some light relief! (pain relief more to the point, I think co-codamol might be ingested this evening before bed).
So I’m sympathising with you, Ray. 

Catherine moved in to a new house in 2022 and lot of her favourite plants came with her, dug up and dumped onto sheets of plastic on the floor of a Luton van. We dug a temporary bed for them in the grass of her new back garden.
Along with them came about 40 shrubs etc that I had planted up in pots in her yard in 2016, knowing one day she’d move again and find a permanent home for them. Altogether it was two Luton van trips that day. 

Roll on two years and she decided to have the garden landscaped. We decided for once it was too big a job for us as it involved some major earth terracing and drainage. 

Eventually finished last month. It has taken since January in an extremely wet winter on very heavy clay. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if a pottery hadn’t been using it for their creations!

And so to Monday - 

All those plants in their temporary bed had been dug up again in January by the landscapers and dumped into pots, usually two or three species to a pot. And all the labels lost! Grrh. 
So my first job was to sort them all out and heel them into their respective beds. These poor plants, constantly on the move. 
I didn’t want to import bits of oxalis and worse into the new ground so the next job, on Tuesday, was weeding and loosening all the shrubs in their pots. 
The lorry arrived on Wednesday morning with 180 plants, mainly 1L pots, along with 3 trees. I was able to offload them all into lines of the same plant, and to check them all over as I did so. Only two rejects (rotten centres) and one incorrect tree!

Then I set to with the planting. What should have been quite straightforward turned out more of a headache as the planting plan had been revised a number of times and I’m sure we had ended up with some final ideas in our heads rather than on paper. Also when the original plan was drawn up, it hadn’t been appreciated just how wet this garden actually is, so a few things were certainly not following the maxim of ‘right plant, right place’ until I jiggled the plan round a bit more.

My schedule was to finish by 6pm on Friday, and I was only half hour behind my timings, my excuse being I’d had to take time out for last minute babysitting and a trip to a garage to drop a car off for a service. 
But it was jolly hard work. 

And oh so many pots 😂

There are still a few gaps for plants that weren’t in stock or need sourcing from elsewhere, but that’s not my problem!

Then a drive home of 2 hours, and up early today to completely tidy my two allotments and gardens at home, all of which needed work considering I’d been away at the boat previously for 11 days before the 5 days doing this job. I’ve harvested 4 big bags of peas, all at their absolute best. That doesn’t often happen and us just down to lucky timing. 

And tomorrow I have to go to Scotland to finish off my son’s garden job from last September, there’s a couple of concreting jobs and then a general tidy round of his garden if it needs it. He’s getting quite good at seeing to it now. ‘Learning by Doing’. 

So as I started with a question about my boat; the answer seems to be ‘No, not yet, work comes first’!

[Ray]

It looks fantastic, your back has earned the right to ache.. mine, not so much 🙂

[ExSurveyor]

Blimey Kate, that is some work schedule. You will be glad to retire and take things easier...

Hang on, didn't you retire last year 😁

[grendel]

theres this thing about having kids, somehow, having just done a 3 hour drive back from Norfolk, my daughter has persuaded me to drive her to brighton tomorrow. (2 hours each way.)