25 September 2007

Chewing the fat

vegetable suetIt's been lovely to be back in the UK and catch up with everyone: family and colleagues. I spent Sunday with my aunt and brother and his friend which was great fun. On Monday I stayed with my father and stepmother and I met my step-niece, Isabelle (Bella) for the first time. Today I drove up to Manchester and spent the afternoon catching up with colleagues (thanks for the suet Paddy!). In many ways it felt like I'd just been off on a long holiday.

I popped in to the old house in the morning. The vegetable garden has become a bit of a jungle, but otherwise everything seemed OK and I chatted with two sets of neighbours who were very interested to hear how we've been getting on. Still hoping to complete the house sale in the next week or two, despite the lack of news from the solicitors. Somehow the fig plant that we'd left behind in June (through lack of space for it in our hire car) had survived, so I'll take that down to Mike's mum's on Friday for her to adopt, which had been our original plan. That was another wedding present - amazing how resilient our gifts have proved to be!

The flight over on Saturday/Sunday was fine and seemed to go fairly quickly, mainly because I was reading Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin, which was very absorbing. Just as well, because none of the films they were showing appealed to me at all.

Ah, there are police sirens wailing outside. Definitely back in Manchester!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I was very upset not to see a picture of Mike enjoying himself while you were away - I had a picture in my mind of him slouched asleep on the sofa, in a lumberjack shirt, with a 6-pack perched on his lap ...

Amanda said...

That's a terrible slander - he assures me that he was working very hard!