Sunday, May 18, 2003

And another weekend has been and nearly gone. Time sure does seem to fly past at an alarming rate some days. I'm sure there are deep learned treatises out there in the world that can explain why some days seem to go in a flash while others drag, maybe I'll seek some of them out one day. If I ever have the time!

So, Friday. Had a car park meeting in the morning, which was about as thrilling as normal. All useful information to find out what the "competition" for Park & Ride is doing (especially if they are planning to put prices up) but some of the people involved just make my skin crawl/are soooo boooooooring. Talk about stretching points over seven sentences where a couple of words would do. (Yes, I know that is usually my trick). Still, always good to get out of the office for an hour or so. And I can always do shopping on the way back rather than at lunchtime thus saving a few more minutes towards another flexi-day off. Even more handy given that the weather kept me in all week anyway. Plus they also keep my name in the minds of the upper echelons of the Ipswich Partnership rather than anyone else's and that may well come in handy some day.

The rest of the day was spent mopping up and checking the returned timetable pages. I think we are pretty much all sorted now and hopefully Sonic will be happy for us to go to print when he has a look tomorrow. That is assuming he does come back from his holiday and hasn't realised how much he winds us all up and does the decent thing and not return. No, I'm sure he will be there in the morning as full of energy as ever. We will have to find some way of bringing him down to earth a bit though. Oh well, there's a bank holiday coming up so only 9 working days until our week off to put up with him.

Yesterday Joan was at work so I had a semi-relaxed day. Got a stack of ironing cleared up, a look at the Llamasoft forums and some Cube stuff. Pretty close to being what the Doctor ordered really. Plus we allowed ourselves a Chinese for tea which was bloody lovely.

Today we have been out and about in Felixstowe. Took the old gate down to the tip then when we were down that end of town drove up to the dock viewing area for a walk on the beach there. Then we decided to have a look around Landguard Fort as it was open. I went there many years ago (while I was still at College, and more to see if I could use it as a good vantage point to get some pictures of the docks to use on my dissertation) but Joan had never been before. They have spent a lot of money lately and it really has become an interesting place to visit now. We even managed to get a guided tour just for the two of us, which was nice. Much work still needs doing, and most of the rooms are just bare shells at the moment with no real clues as to what they were used for over the different stages of the place's development but then that lets the imagination fill in the gaps. There have been a number of different forts on the site over the years since the 11th or 12th Century and what is left dates from 1744, 1860ish and some World War Two additions so plenty of history there - in fact it is the site of the last attempted invasion of British shores - by the Dutch in the 1600s.

Part of the site also houses Felixstowe Museum so we had a look around that as well. Again some interesting stuff. Not as much as I would have liked on the growth of the town itself, the architecture of some of the buildings and so forth but still pretty interesting. And again much expanded since I last took a trip round. It is so easy to forget things that have happened in the town over the years and always nice to be reminded. Just as an example where Landguard Terminal stands at the docks now used to be a Seaplane research station - it must have been wonderful to have them buzzing overhead, all new shapes and types cropping up. That was one of the things I used to like back in Welwyn Garden City when the British Aerospace factory was still producing planes down the road in Hatfield.

Then it was back to the here and now when we got home. Put another coat on the gate to hide the marks and scuffs it received in the hanging (it was looking lovely when I gave the bits to Jerry, what on earth did he do to it?). Then also slapped a coat on a bit of the fence that will need another coat when we re-paint the whole lot while we are off. Nice to spend so much of the day out in the sun (and only a teensy bit of rain) and I feel quite virtuous after it. Joan has now gone off to play Bingo with Helen so I will tinker about on here a bit more and hope they don't come home empty-handed.

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