Thursday was a fairly slow day, ready for the long weekend with nothing major planned for the day, so we called in on the neighbours at the old family home. Enlightening and possibly a pointer as to the way things are going in parts of the UK, and why the Brits are getting a little uneasy. Apparently, the new residents of our old family home wanted to turn our old single garage into a Mosque! You can probably imagine the outcry that caused locally. It was always a nice, homely but old, three storied family home, with three bedrooms and a proper attic room. There are now about 13 people living there...
The area has changed over the last few years, with several apartment buildings on the old garage site, my old junior school site, the squash club etc. Several grand houses on decent sized plots have been demolished and replaced by blocks of three or four dwellings, with further plans to build 700 more houses on formerly green agricultural land and the old coal mine site; they are even talking about 1200 houses on the golf course. So sad. Much of this housing appears to be required to house all the more recent immigrants to what is already a fairly small crowded country, with over 60 million people now, on an island the same size as NZ with just 4 million.
After a coffee we went in search of more shoes before heading for our supermarket big breakfast or brunch. Unfortunately our timing wasn’t so good with a 30 minute wait for food so we headed for a pub offering a good carvery meal but settled for lovely fresh baguettes, Paula’s with fresh carved turkey with a side salad we hadn’t asked for, and mine with a traditional English filling - chicken tikka, accompanied by several roast potatoes that I hadn’t asked for. Possibly a mixed order but nice anyway. Pity the coffee was only filtered, otherwise, a nice lunch.
For the evening, my ex-sister-in-law and her husband took us out to celebrate our silver wedding, albeit 4 months early! Dick proudly showed me his latest toy – a BMW trike! They have also swapped the caravan for a Fiat based mobile home that was very impressive, but Dick is getting a little frustrated that his age is counting against him when getting vehicle insurance or even a driving licence. Now he is 75, his truck licence is no longer automatically renewed and that affected their choice of mobile home. An excellent Italian meal.
Jackie would get on very well with Joanne (on the Dawn Princess) as she is also a keen quilter and was off this weekend to take part in a quilting workshop of some sort.
Chiropractor again tomorrow. The neck is much better but the nerve pains in the shoulder still persist.
Not sure what the weather is like up north so the Dawn Princess passengers may be feeling the cold... Tomorrow, we head just 20 miles up the road to Sherwood Forest (yes, it does still exist) for a real family weekend in a new luxury 4 bedroomed unit in the Center Parcs holiday village.
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