Nat off to the DoIt4Real camp in Cumbria, Coach pick up at Leicester railway station, Allotment Therapy, Hannah’s back from Cub Camp

Nat was off to Castle Head in Cumbria this morning on a DoIt4Real course. We were due to drop him off at Leicester Railway station at 9:00 to pick up the coach that would take him, and the others kids, to the central organising point in Burnley where each of them would get a coach to whichever centre they were going to. We left home around 8:20 and were at the station by 8:40. The coach was already there but with time to spare Nat and I went onto the station platform to see what renovations had taken place. I can’t say that it seemed at all different to how it was when I used to commute to London in 1988. Back at the coach we got chatting with a few of the other parents and realised how lucky we were. It seems that Leicester is the only pick up point in this area and some of them had travelled from as far as Milton Kynes that morning. The coach schedule had a built in lateness component and would stay until 9:30 in case anyone had been delayed on their way. Because Deb and I wanted to get some work done on our allotment we eventually left leaving Nat happily sitting on the coach chatting to his fellow travellers.




Hopefully he had an uneventful journey because it’s Thursday as I’m typing this and we’ve not heard from him to date. Deb then drove us to the allotment where we started making an attempt at clearing some of the accumulated mess. Because of my hip operation we’ve not really done much this year and even the covered over areas were overgrown. Eventually after a few hours backbreaking work we made some headway and cleared this area and an adjacent one which we then also covered over. The photos below don’t really show what we did but our muscles certainly confirmed that we’d done something. On the upside, I finally managed to listen to the first two of Dan Carlin’s three Hardcore History Podcasts dealing with the Punic Wars; so that was nice! When we left we took a basket of beans and marrows plus a large bag of plumbs we’d picked, with permission, from Terry’s (a fellow allotment holder two plots down from ours) trees.



Later, 2:30, Deb left to pick up Donna and together they went and fetched Hannah and Josh from camp. Hannah had been sharing a hut; it was too wet to stay in tents, with Charley who she met at camp the last time she was there. Unlike Nat she’s had the wherewithal to get Charley’s Facebook address and made contact with her when she got home. The gossip, she told us, was that Josh had been snuggling/snogging with Charley while they were away and that she was now his girlfriend!!! His girlfriend…for God’s sake they are only nine years old; what are they doing having boyfriends and girlfriends at that age? I told Hannah that she wasn’t allowed to have a boyfriend until she was at least twenty! Apparently, according to Josh, all the boys in her class fancy Hannah but they’re also all afraid of her! Hopefully, this is state of affairs that will continue for a long time… I wish.

That was about it for Sunday.