Friday flies by, Sunday in the slow lane

Discovering the slow puncture at Winchester whilst driving to Norfolk should have been used as a warning to the weekend's success. We arrived at my dad's about 10:15pm and watched TV for a bit. Quite impressed by Jack Dee's new sitcom, Lead Balloon. Went to bed about midnight and for 45 minutes had to battle with a fly infestation. We lost and took a chance finding a hotel hoping to find one with a night porter. Luckily, we did but had to fork out £55. When we returned to my dad's the house was surrounded with flies dotted about on the roof and buzzing above. We could see how they were entering the house through a crack in the roof which my dad repaired later.

Spent lunchtime in Dereham with my mum wandering around charity shops. The flies seemed to have followed us as the bakery we stopped at had loads behind the counter. The afternoon was in Norwich helping the Dog and Catfish shopping empire with the prurchase of some new clothes.

Saw Josh and Christie in the evening for a decent Chinese take-away. Another Josh classic story with him helping a fashion historian set up a presentation in front of a packed village hall of old ladies. The subject was John Singer Sargent highlighting his portrait of Madame X. The presenter went on to explain the artist's sexuality preferring male company then the PowerPoint slides showed his private photo and painting collection of male genitalia. No wonder the show was sold out and packed.


We returned to my dad's with the assurance of no flies and a pleasant drive spotting two barn-owls. A quick dash over to see Bernard on Sunday we came back for a pub lunch with Coleman Snr. Left Norfolk at 3:15pm but before exiting the county the warning light for the tyre pressure stopped us and discovered the puncture had got worse. Being a Sunday, nothing was open to help us so we had to use the space-saver wheel. This meant a maximum speed of 50mph all the way home, some 160 miles! 99.9% of the traffic overtook us though we scored three that we passed. We got back to Southampton at 8:45pm.