Visiting the North

Posted on Mon 22 June 2009 by alex in general

Our visit to Manchester was considered a success. It was a slightly longer visit than usual as Fliss was working in the area. This gave us the opportunity to travel up on Wednesday evening. What follows is a summary of what I/we did:

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.