Just back from a very enjoyable trip back home, firstly to London, where, in order t keep within budget, we stayed in a disabled room at the "Holiday Lodge" near Covent garden. To be fair we didn´t request the disabled room - it´s all they had left, but save for the very low sink and the window that opened with a winding handle on the wall we didn´t notice much difference. Only problem was that the window didn´t shut properly and so I was shunted over to that side of the bed to dutifully sleep in the way of the icy blast for the duration of our stay.
Girlfriend Nikki and I seldom argue, but when we do it tends to be about getting lost, or arriving late somewhere (usually because we´ve got lost). We´d previously located "The Duchess Theatre" TWICE during the day to make sure we knew where it was, but as we exited the coffee shop in the early evening, we still headed in the wrong direction by about 180 degrees. Or at least we would have done if we had followed her instincts, - earlier I had taken the flak for getting us lost the first time around (we had spent most of the day hunting round in bewildered circles, only to find that if we had set off in the opposite direction from the hotel we would have been in the foyer of the theatre within 5 minutes).
The play itself is a one man affair starring Bob Golding, who takes on the daunting role as one of our greatest ever comics Eric Morecambe, it was a sterling effort and he received a standing ovation on its completion. As we came out into the night air we came across an old fashioned bicycle tethered to the lamp post and thought how wonderful it would have been if Eric would have peeped round the stage door with a long trench coat, flat cap and carrier bag, put on a pair of cycle clips and rode off into the night shouting "We-he-hey!"(But he didn´t).
The train journey back to Blackpool was a long and expensive one, costing about twice as much as the flight from Spain a couple of days before, and we came to a juddering halt as the train in front broke down in Wakefied Station. This ensured that we neatly missed our connection from Leeds by three minutes and had to wait another hour for the next one.
We drank down our 100th coffee of the trip in ´Starbucks´ and then had a nosey round the visitors centre. - Visitors centre? - in Leeds? We eventually made steady progress towards the west coast until a points failure at Poulton-Le-Fylde" which meant shifting from crawling along at 4.5 miles per hour and coming to a blind stop at regular intervals. By the time we arrived it had been dark for about four hours and we had lost an entire day somewhere.
The two days in Blackpool were spent reading about the Queens visit for the Royal Variety Show a couple of days previously and fending off chilblains.
