My new friend Geoffrey
I have a new friend called Geoffrey 
I’m not quite sure where he came from; he seems to have been living in a rather unpleasant shed at the back of the building where my boyfriend works. For reasons I don’t quite understand, this construction appears to be called “the glove box” or some such, and there was a rather hairy incident yesterday afternoon when my boyfriend and I went in to retrieve Geoffrey and I accidentally closed the door whilst leaving the key on the outside. That is to say, I closed the door deliberately, because it looked like otherwise it was going to make a loud banging noise, but I hadn’t realised that the key was on the wrong side 
There was a horrible few seconds where I thought we were going to be stuck in the shed all night, or possibly even until after the Bank Holiday when people came back to work and opened it, but fortunately it turned out not to have locked
My weekend kind of got off to a bad start on Saturday morning when I managed to attach myself to a cup. I was sitting quietly eating my breakfast when my Mom burst into the kitchen, having just got back from the local farmers’ market where she periodically goes to buy coffee. This time she had been conned into buying two different and expensives packets, which the farmer in question had apparently assured her had subtlely different flavours, one being vanilla coffee and the other being coffee with vanilla. I think we often drink vanilla coffee but had never had coffee with vanilla (or possibly the other way round!) so Mom announced that she was going to make a cafetiere. Is that how you spell cafetiere? Perhaps not
Anyways she made one and we all sat round and drank a cup out of these nice new flowery mugs which she bought not so long ago and which are very nice for drinking coffee out of. It was fairly pleasant, but I needed to drink mine fairly hastily because I was expecting Babel round to pick me up in about an hour and I still needed to wash my hair. I stood up to take my cup over to the sink for washing… only to arrive at the sink and discover that the cup was stuck to my hand 
More precisely, I seemed to have put three fingers at once through the handle, and now they refused to come out again 
There followed a couple of minutes of extreme panic as I attempted to extricate myself from the cup. Dad expressed an intention to go and get a sharp object with which he could smash the handle, but Mom declared herself to be against this idea, and in the end it was all solved happily when she suggested I run my hand under the cold water. This seemed to provide the necessary slippiness required to free me, which was rather a relief as I suspect that Babel may not have been very impressed if he arrived and found my coffee addiction had reached such heights that I now needed to be surgically attached to a mug!
Fortunately the rest of the day when a little bit smoother. We had had a vague plan of going to Malvern, but the drive is nearly an hour and in the end hunger got the better of us so we stopped off at a Harvester before heading to Evesham. I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised by the Harvester – I hadn’t eaten in one for a couple of years since I last stayed in a Premier Inn down south with work, I think it might have been in Newhaven, and that was the restaurant attached. I wasn’t impressed with the menu at all back then, but it seemed to have been improved a lot, and I had a very nice chicken, bacon and cheese sandwich with a generous helping of barbecue sauce. One of the big advantages of the place seemed to be that this particular sandwich didn’t come with any salad at all, and those wanting to eat like rabbits had to go to a separate buffet
Evesham is a very pleasant town, although I hadn’t been there since the year of the foot and mouth outbreak, which I think Babel and I eventually decided was 2001. I believe it was quite badly flooded last year, but there was no sign of that yesterday, and after a brief stroll up and down the main street we set off towards the river. I was a little disconcerted when I suddenly heard a man’s voice shouting through a megaphone, but it turned out that they were holding some sort of fishing contest, and all along the banks of the river were somewhat sad-looking men with rods. There are a lot of things which one could criticise about Babel, but at least he doesn’t fish 
We departed about five and the plan was to head back to Leicester and find a hotel for the night, but we ended up slightly losing our way. We didn’t have anything booked, so I was trying to check availability on the Travelodge website, and meanwhile we accidentally took a turning towards Stratford. I thought this wasn’t a problem as we seemed to be driving past signs for the M40 and I was pretty sure that that merged into the M42. For a while things seemed to be going well, but when we got to the M42 itself, the road signs were so unnecessarily confusing that we jumped to the erroneous conclusion that we were driving in the wrong direction. Quickly leaving the motorway we jumped back on it in the opposite direction, only to discover that that was most definitely the wrong way Third time lucky, we eventually got to Leicester and all that then remained was to find a hotel.
On the one hand you might have expected places to be rather booked up because it was a bank holiday weekend, but on the other hand, Leicester doesn’t seem like the most obvious destination for a weekend away, so I was somewhat disappointed when the Travelodge website pronounced that the Leicester Central hotel had no availability. According the web, the dive more commonly known as the Days Inn was also full, and so our next fault was to try to Ibis. Having parked the car, we went into their reception to enquire. No room at the inn here either, but the girl on reception was nice enough to provide us with a map to another hotel, the Campanile, which she thought would have free rooms.
It was rather a long walk which involved some intrepid crossing of traffic islands and looked like it was leading us onto a rather dodgy estate, before eventually we caught sight of the hotel. They did indeed have a free room, albeit with the slightly strange system that they swipe your card for £70 when you arrive, then cancel it when you leave and charge you £50, which is in fact the price of the room. I await my bank statement with interest, and have taken care to retain all the relevant til receipts in case there turns out to be a problem. Despite the fact that this was a hotel chain I had never heard of before, the room turned out to be really rather nice, and after testing that the bed was up to standard we headed out to meet up with one of my boyfriend’s friends.
This was also a long walk across Leicester and I was desperately in need of my third meal of the day by this stage, so we stopped off in MacDonalds and I was suitably impressed when the staff managed to get my order of a plain MacChicken Sandwich correct. We eventually got to the relevant pub, but ultimately didn’t stay very long – I didn’t know any of the people there, and Babel had apparantly had his drinking capacity reduced by having eaten a MacDonalds.
I didn’t sleep very well last night because I was stressed about something, and by seven Babel had decided to give up sleeping too, so we watched Back to the Future 2 on his laptop. I saw part of Back to the Future 1 a few months ago, but don’t remember it all as I was so exhausted I fell asleep halfway through. Back to the Future 2 seemed more amusing and kept us entertained for a couple of hours until we were able to go back to Babel’s house and get breakfast.
Hmmm. I don’t know what else to say, really. It seems to be a weekend where we’re destined to fall out, although I haven’t figured out why yet. But breakfast was nice, and Geoffrey is very cute, and after we’ve finished visiting Babel’s sister, we’re hopefully going to go to Rutland Water this afternoon