French quirkiness, pants and a reporter

Yes, it is me, I am back!  After my previous blog when I realised some time had passed since the last one, I vowed to get back on track with more regular postings.  However, I have had so little free time that it simply did not happen.

What have I been up to then? Well, to name a few events..........holiday in France, British Grand Prix, weekend in Bristol, visit to The Shard, extra celebration for my birthday, Kenilworth castle, Phil’s 50^th.................oh yes, and working long hours.  Life is crazy.

France was great fun from start to finish.  We headed to Le Mans for the 24 hour race and found our apart-hotel. Great, that was easy.  Checked in and was told that the underground car parking as advertised on the website did not exist and we had the choice of parking outside the accommodation for three hours at time, or use the free car park 500 metres down the road.  We opted for that and abandoned the car for three days.  Ah, the accommodation.......quirky to say the least!  The coffee machine had apparently left with the previous occupiers and we had to wait until the following day to get a kettle (although we were free to help ourselves to boiling water from the breakfast room and carry it through the building.......good old ignorance of health and safety).  Other features of the room included bare wires hanging out of the lights; a lounge style lampshade in the bathroom; the only chair was so broken there was no chance of being able to use it; the pole to pull the net curtain was not attached.......and so it went on.  By far the funniest thing was the cooking arrangement – the electrical hob was in the draining board of the sink adjacent to the tap.  Hmmm, water and electric not really a good mix.  We chose not to use the hob, another example of continental health and safety at its finest.

We had a good time at the race and only laughed a tiny bit (well a lot actually) when the flag people managed to hang the German flag for the winning team upside down on the flagpole.  It was not rectified either and appeared in the motoring magazines the following week.  From Le Mans we headed to Paris for a couple of nights.  As regular readers will know, I enjoy driving abroad and it is usually an easy way to get around.  We programmed the satnav and headed off on our journey.  Now then, this clever gadget was set to take us the quickest route to our destination and apparently this involved traversing through the centre of the city.  We didn’t realise this until we were actually there......ha ha, it was an entertaining experience.  I drove past many of the major tourist locations (some more than once), up the Champs Elysses, under the Arc de Triomphe and considered picking up a few Japanese visitors to add to the tour theme.  We had to negotiate an enormous junction in the city with traffic in multiple lanes in each direction all approaching from various angles as they saw fit, horns blaring and to top it all off there were cyclists and moped riders travelling up the middle of all the lanes.  Phil (not being at all keen on travelling on the wrong side of the road) was beside himself (actually he was beside me), shouting, swearing and stamping his feet. As soon as we got as far as the Arc de Triomphe I knew where I was and we soon found the hotel.  For the next couple of days we relied on public transport whilst Himself’s blood pressure returned to a more normal level.  Our time in Paris was fun and was followed by a trip to Le Touquet on the way home where we stayed in a hotel literally on the beach. 
The day we were due home coincided with my Dad’s day surgery for a hernia.  I was back in time to collect him and when Mum and I got to the hospital he was sitting up having his dinner and laughing.  The room he was in was the same as Mum took over last year for her hip surgery, spooky.  He looked particularly fetching in his hospital frock; the blue in the pattern suited his eyes.  By now he wanted to leave for home, just one more thing to do.............have a wee.  Now then, when someone has not had anything to drink for nearly 24 hours anything they then drink is absorbed directly into the tissues to rehydrate the body, therefore no wee is produced.  Some two hours later after two pots of tea, two jugs of water, some orange juice and much exertion in the bathroom, a bladder scan was done to discover it was empty!  However he was allowed to leave as he was well in himself and was the only patient left in the entire hospital.  The actual leaving process took longer than it needed to as Dad kept interrupting the nurse, making jokes and laughing about strange stuff (anaesthesia is a marvellous thing).  Once we were finally given the go ahead to escape, Dad’s parting gesture was to walk down the corridor with the surgery pants on his head (until he was spotted by Mum who was not impressed).  Bizarrely Dad was wondering why his scar area hurt two days later............Errrrmm that will be because you had abdominal surgery 48 hours ago.

I have been enjoying the spell of hot weather and for the first time since I was a child have been walking around wearing shorts in daylight hours.  So far nobody has reported being scared at the sight and people do not appear to be running for cover when my lily white legs are on show so I guess I will continue.

Going back a few weeks to when Lady Thatcher passed away, my Dad was approached in the street by a reporter from the local paper and asked what he thought about her death.  Fortunately he was a great supporter of hers and expressed his views accordingly, had his photograph taken and appeared in the edition that week.  I am only glad that the subject matter was not immigration otherwise we would have had to post bail and the time between my blogs would be even longer.