I took the opportunity to go on a short tour of some of Manchester’s many fine ale houses. It was nice to catch up with some of the old Transitive crew as well as the regular beer drinking buddies. Somehow we managed to end up exploring some interesting cocktail bars in dark recesses of Salford. We also forgot to eat dinner which might have accounted for the slightly wobbly state which we returned to Aidan and Gillian’s in.

Our post weekend high was brought to a rather abrupt halt last night when a neighbour brought Andy, one of our cats, who had been hit and killed on the main road. We are understandably quite shocked, least of all because we thought with all the space behind us the cats wouldn’t be tempted to go near the road. However being free roaming felines as they are it’s hard to think what else we could have done to dissuade venturing to the front of the house.

Unfortunately we couldn’t get the chain on Fliss’ bike working so she retired early via taxi to a nice warm bath while myself, Mufi and Daz continued on back via the predominately downhill route. I say predominately because there where still a number of rises we had climb as the landscape of Cheshire is still considerably more lumpy than the flat fenland that is my usual staple cycling experience. This wasn’t helped by the occasional navigational snafu. The 10% incline was great to zoom down but not so much when we discovered we needed to go back up it to take the turn we had missed.

By the time we made it back to the house we’d managed 34 miles and some very soaked feet. The king size bath was a welcome end to the excursion.

The rest of the day was mainly concerned with the last three games of the 6 Nations. The Wales game was fantastic, all credit to the Scot’s for saving themselves from the humiliation of the wooden spoon. It was also good to see England playing considerably better than they have been the last few days. It’s a shame it wasn’t enough to win but good that we held France to such a narrow lead. There was a mini party afterwards although no overly late nights as there was a preponderance of tiredness around.

Wednesday saw us at the climbing wall with Chris and Paula (and the rest…). Fliss had climbed before whereas this was my first time giving it a go. All in all it was quite enjoyable although I slightly lost my nerve on the one of the flatter walls. It seems even experienced climbers try not to look down too much!

For Thursday I was on my own as Fliss was working so I headed down to Knutsford to join Mufi for a working lunch discussing various business approaches and other trials and tribulations of being a coder for hire. I left him in good spirits in the evening, I have no idea of what happened between that and when TJ arrived home

Friday started with a lunch with Sue, Al and Rosie with a swift visit from Anne. After a suitable pause for digestion (and a light evening repast) we headed down to Lee’s for his birthday burnination event. Things seemed to go well, wood was burnt, beer consumed and apparently so were some marshmallows. I think we ended up staying later than intended as I have memories of manoeuvring Chris home followed by very quickly falling asleep in bed.

I had a comparative lie in on Saturday as the rest of the household headed to various work like activities. However once the sun made it’s presence felt through the Manchester clouds I got my stuff together and headed into town. I’d booked the English Lounge for the combined birthday/engagement bash. Having a dedicated room for the celebrations certainly made things a lot easier and it was good for the growing number of families to be able to attend. It was really cool to catch up with everyone at the party, I hope I didn’t miss anyone while walking around. Thanks for all the good wishes for the up-coming married life experience:-) After we were finally kicked out we made our slightly roundabout returns to Radcliffe

Sunday didn’t see us achieve much apart from slowly extracting ourselves from Chris and Paula’s sofa to drive home. I spent the evening doing a little weeding in an attempt to hold back the tide of invaders to our growing garden. We feasted on our first harvest after cutting the Savoy cabbage back to prevent them smothering each other. It made a lovely soup. Some ripe (but eaten) strawberries were spotted during my sweep so it may be time to start putting some netting around the more tempting of our fruit and veg.

Lovely if a little tiring (extended) weekend.