The Way of the Wombat

I'm home from my trip to Skye. Had a lovely time, all the travelling arrangements worked perfectly - and I am really tired! I know, I've just had a holiday... I think it was getting up at 7.00 this morning that had that effect.

However - here is just one picture to give you a quick taste of where we were;



That was the view from one end of the living room of our self-catering 'cottage'.

There will be a lot more pictures over the next few days.

I seem to have been out almost every evening this week, or had someone here - and mostly it has been a week of being a very committeed Christian - and yes I did mean committeed!

But on Thursday D-d and I met up to do something purely for pleasure. (Poor S2C was at work that evening).

We went to the cinema within The Manx Museum to see the live broadcast from the British Museum of their Vikings Exhibition. Our island was a central part of the Kingdom of Mann and the Isles, and there are even a couple of pieces on loan from our museum to the BM for this exhibition.

The whole event was very interesting - and made even more so by the prominent position, in the crowd of reenactors at the end, of one of our local guys; noticeable by the three legs on his shield!

We completed our evening with an Indian take-away eaten at her flat; a good evening all round.

D-d and I are off, on Friday, to meet up with dougalsservant on another part of the Kingdom of Mann and the Isles; Skye. And I can tell you that not only was it was probably a lot easier to plan the journey when the Vikings did it, but it was probably much faster to simply row, or sail, up the great highway of the Irish Sea than it is going to be for us using modern day transport!

I got home last night, and it feels as though I've been away for months rather than just over a week. And, at the moment, the most noticeable thing I did on my holiday was caught a cold! So I am feeling rather ropey.

Mind you I seem to have arrived home to winter, anyway, so a cold seems reasonable.

Honestly - the sun was shining when I got home last night - but it now so dark, wet, and gloomy that, at 4.15 in the afternoon, I have the light beside me on.

Anyway - back to the trip, and back to last weekend in Coventry.

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Many farewells said, the numbers slowly dwindled - and, leaving my husband to make his own way home next morning, I set off for the station to head to London for a few days - of which there will be more in the next couple of days!

Just checking in, to say that I had an excellent time with some excellent people at Writerconuk in Coventry, and am now having a few days with D-d in London.

We are staying close to the Natural History Museum, in a rather nice hotel. Last night, as I'd just travelled down from Coventry and D-d had been at a wedding on Saturday, flown in on Sunday morning and met up with her friend from uni before coming to the hotel, we ate in the hotel - and were truly stuffed.

This morning we had a light breakfast and then walked over to Kensington Palace - we had free tickets from our hotel - and it was excellent. Apart from the usual exhibits there was a special one of clothes belonging to The Queen, Princess Margaret, and Dead Di. There will be pictures....

D-d decided to explore Kensington Gardens - I decided to spend a little time in the Natural History Museum, especially to see the portrait of Alfred Russell Wallace who is now given his rightful place beside Darwin. But there was almost a 1 hour queue to get in - so I'm afraid I didn't bother!

We are going to have afternoon tea in a few minutes and then pause, briefly, before walking to the Royal Albert Hall to see 2 proms - prom number 39, Holst, Nishat Khan, and Vaughn Williams, and then prom 40 - the Six Music prom, featuring Cerys Matthews, Laura Marling, and The Stranglers.

I'll report back.... but it might not be until Wednesday, as tomorrow's plan looks to be The Churchill Rooms, The Banqueting House (where Charles First was beheaded) - and we are going to the theatre to see Matilde.

I'm on the train on my way to Lancaster, hence to Heysham and the boat home. D-d is to meet me from the boat this evening and take me the last two or three miles home - and my Great Tolkien Adventure will be over. I will write it up properly tonight... or maybe tomorrow.

Suffice it to say, just for now, that I had an excellent time and met some lovely people.

I am heading for home a little later than everyone else as I went to gillo's on Monday and we wound down together.

I have lots of pictures to share, and a website or two to link to, and...

Actually, in reality, I have washing to do and will, doubtless, have to shop. I think it might take less than a couple of days before I am swallowed up by the flow of everyday life!

I had fully meant to report daily from Coventry - but was too busy doing - and then too tired.

So this is really just to show that it doesn't take much to make me happy, or impressed.

I am updating my journal from the Ben-my-Chree about 15 miles off the island, on our way home.

These days even the boat has Wi-Fi!

I can't resist - I'll have to join in. The WIP meme - you know the thing, post a taster of your current Work In Progress...

Under the cut there are a few paragraphs of ( Immigrants )

It's unbeta'd - so the punctuation may leave a little to be desired!

After my post this morning it occurred to me that I hadn't explained properly just what D-d is doing over the summer - just mentioned it to one or two people. She finished at the College of Law on June 17th - and her new job doesn't start until the beginning of September. Technically she is still a student until the 31st August - and so this was her last long break and also her last chance to make use of a student round the world air ticket.

D-d has the travel bug - and so she wasn't going to let this opportunity pass her by. She has a very good friend who is teaching English in Buenos Aires and grandparents in Western Australia. She has wanted, since she went to Australia as a 17 year old, to explore the Great Barrier Reef, the Australian rain forest and so on, and also wanted to see Thailand as a couple of her friends have been there.

So she decided to put these things together and, if you are interested, here is her planned itinerary - already slightly altered to allow for volcanic eruption... ( under the cut )

D-d and I are home. To be honest we got home about 6.45am yesterday - but I only got the laptop out of the car late afternoon and was too weary to think straight in between all the 'doing of things' like unpacking cars, shopping and so on.

We had a nice extra day in York - we went to an exhibition of film and TV costumes used to illustrate clothing styles through the ages - which I will post pictures of sometime this week - and went to one of the 'hidden secret places' for our trunch (if brunch is breakfast/lunch then surely lunch/tea should be 'trunch''? It sounds more like a sort of meal than 'lea' anyway!) We also spent half an hour having our feet nibbled by fish - which was most restful - although to get rid of all the hard skin on my feet it would probably have taken them a month...

There was a big traffic diversion on our route home - I knew from getting lost on it on the way there. So we left York about 7.30pm to have good light for that bit. This was a very good decision. We had decided that it was not sensible to try to travel in convoy - we would doubtless get separated and then, probably, worry about it. So we set off separately and agreed to just meet at the boat, in Heysham, about 90 miles away.

Both of us managed to get lost, in different ways, on the diversion...

It is one of those 'local diversion for local people' things! One that assumes you probably know the way anyway. At one point there were two different diversions - one the main road one we were trying to follow, and one a more local one - both simply signed 'diversion'. D-d says that she reached a point where she had a choice of two diversion signs pointing in opposite directions and neither saying where it was a diversion to or from...

However - both of us had remembered that the diversion led through Harrogate, Otley and Ilkley to Skipton - and so found our individual ways back to the road we knew outside Skipton eventually! In the end, because there was very little traffic, I got to the boat about 10.15pm - miles too early as the boat wouldn't come in from the island until midnight. I was there before the staff came to open the check-in and so on. The 90 mile journey had taken me 103 miles...

About ten minutes late two sets of headlights came into view - one car was one of the check-in staff - the other was D-d in her little Citroen C3. Despite both getting lost in Harrogate, taking different routes from there to Otley, and so on, we arrived 10 minutes apart!

We were stuck there for hours. The overnight sailing is mainly the freight sailing - there were only 15 private vehicles - and they made us wait until most of the freight was loaded. D-d filled some of the time by chatting on her phone to a friend for over an hour (the friend was using up free call minutes...), we both read, ate our supper bought earlier in M&S in York - then drowsed whilst watching the freight load. Watching how they loaded the freight was interesting - for the first 10 or so trailers... but watching almost all of it load was getting a bit like watching paint dry.

Eventually we got on board after 2a.m. - picked up the keys to our cabin, got there, kicked off our shoes and got under our duvets within tn minutes of driving onto the boat. Fortunately the bunks are comfortable and we both slept until almost into Douglas - and three and a half hours sleep just put us on enough that we could safely drive home when we disembarked.

Poor D-d had a dental appointment at 9.15 yesterday morning - so only got another 75 minutes nap when she got home. Me? I went to bed and didn't stir until about 11 am.

This is a request for help from Daughter-dear. She is planning on buying a smart-phone and has decided that she would really like a Blackberry. She had thought it would make sense to get a contract with one of our two local phone suppliers (Sure and Manx Telecom - we don't have things like T-Mobile here) and then get one cheaply. But to get a free one she would have to take on a 2 year contract at about £40 a month - and still pay extra for the global roaming for her upcoming holiday.

Otherwise, using local Pay as You Go, it is no cheaper than Amazon.

So - the questions are;

1. Anyone have any reasons why a Blackberry is not a good idea and she should go for a different one?

2. If you've travelled through Heathrow Terminal 5 recently, are the prices in the Duty Free there (in for example the Dixons) much cheaper? And if she bought one there would there be any problem bringing it back into the UK later?

3. Would it be cheaper to buy one in Australia? Or even Thailand? Would she have to pay duty on her way back into the UK if she did?