When I woke up on Wednesday morning and realised I could no longer kid myself that I wasn’t catching Tim’s cold I was rather gutted because I knew I had an busy and exciting weekend ahead of me, which I wanted to be able to enjoy Happily, either good fortune or the cocktail of vitamin C and echinacea which I was swallowing meant that my cold was nowhere near as bad as Tim’s, and so it was that by Saturday afternoon I almost felt okay again.

Saturday actually got off to a pretty bad start when I woke up at 5.30 am. I’m currently in my third week of working on a property development company in Banbury, a job which necessitates leaving home at 6.30am every morning, and thus I’ve had to get used to early starts. I’m obviously subconsciously a bit stressed about oversleeping, because my body decided it wanted to get up at that time even on a weekend Perversely, I didn’t actually feel sleepy at that point at all, so sat awake for a few hours playing on my computer until the internet connection did the usual and died. It must have been about half past seven at this point, in other words it was still far too early to actually get out of bed, so I decided to lie down and have a little snooze… Next thing I knew it was 10am and having been beaten to the bathroom by my sister, I was well on my way to being late

Somehow I managed to have a bath, wash my hair, eat my breakfast and pack my bag in record time, and was out of the house by 12.15. Just as I was walking down the road, Babel text me to ask what time I would be arriving, and I had to confess that it would be after 2 rather than around 1 which was what we had provisionally agreed earlier in the week. The traffic into the city centre wasn’t too bad for once though, and so I arrived in town with plenty of time to spare before my train left. Or so I thought.

I still had a really bad headache at this stage and felt generally a bit rubbish, so I decided to go to Boots and buy a Juice Doctor drink. If you’ve never had one of these then I thoroughly recommend them. Admittedly they’re not the cheapest in the world, but drinking one is pretty much equivalent to swallowing a magic potion so it generally seems worth it. I hasten to add that this isn’t some kind of nasty fruit juice drink (I hate all these silly overpriced smoothie things), it’s more spring water with a small amount of fruit flavouring in it. The selling point is not the taste, which isn’t actually anything to write home about, but the fact that each bottle contains 50% of your recommended daily allowance of every vitamin you’ve ever heard of, as well as a couple you probably didn’t know existed, and also a selection of random metallic things like zinc and potassium, which I believe some people normally acquire by eating bananas and thus are things I am probably rather deficient in The idea is that most headaches and feelings of lethargy are just caused by dehydration and lack of correct minerals, and therefore by downing one of these juice things you will instantly feel a whole lot better. I don’t know if it’s just a placebo effect or what, but every time I drink one I do indeed feel a whole lot better. I wish I had actually bought a second one because when I eventually met Babel later in the day he appeared to be slightly hungover so we could have seen if it cured him too.

Anyhow, I had to go to Boots to buy one of these things because WHSmiths have stopped stocking them. This shouldn’t have been a problem, because there’s a Boots just by the door of the Bull Ring which is directly opposite the door to New Street Station. I made my way in this direction, cursing the number of people who habitually clutter up the city centre at weekends and make it impossible for everybody else to walk in a straight line, and eventually arrived at Boots. Having made my way through a maze of teenage mums with buggies and old people (I’m sorry, why do old people and buggies come out at weekends? You don’t work, you have all flipping week to do your shopping, but you nevertheless choose to obstruct public places on the only two days which the rest of the world has to do their shopping? Whatever), I eventually arrived at the food section and picked up my drink. Excellent. I had a whole fifteen minutes now in which to pay for it, cross the road to the station, buy a ticket and get on the train. What could possibly go wrong?!

Famous last words. What could possibly go wrong was that Boots have seemingly decided to make all their staff redundant and replace them with self service checkouts. Personally I think this is a practice which, in light of the credit crunch and growing unemployment, should be outlawed. Anyone who has ever tried to use a self service checkout in a hurry will know that they are an absolue nightmare. For a start, there were five such check outs in a row against the back wall, only three of them were working and out of those three, one of them would only accept cash and not cards. There was already a queue of 15 people waiting when I arrived, none of whom had ever used one of these checkouts before and all of whom thus had difficulties understanding the instructions. The checkouts seemed to be having problems understanding what was going on too, and were shouting at people right, left and centre, telling them to remove their handbags from the bagging area, to swipe things for the 32nd time, and that they had to pay for their shopping with 5 pence pieces. Well, really – it was complete automated chaos.

I seriously thought about leaving the queue and just heading over to the station, but I was so near and I thought I might still *just* about have time to do it. Finally it was my turn. I wrestled with the checkout and I have no idea whether it asked me to pay the correct amount but I paid something, obtained a receipt and sprinted across the road, only to collapse in a coughing fit at the ticket machine because I’d forgotten I couldn’t breath through my nostrils Ticket bought, I nevertheless had no choice but to sprint again down to the platform where my train was ready and waiting to depart. I nearly tripped over the handle of my bag at a critical point on the staircase, but I survived in one piece and managed to fling myself onto the train as the doors were literally just about to close. I landed in a bit of a disheveled heap in the vestibule area, incredibly relieved that I was now spared the embarrassment of explaining to Babel that I wasn’t actually go to arrive until 3pm.

The train was busy which was a bit of a nuisance, and so I had to stand for the entire duration of the journey. Nevertheless, I managed to drink my anticipated juice drink and by the time I finally pulled into Leicester, I was feeling a whole lot better As is his wont, Babel was late too, despite me telling him I was going to arrive ten minutes earlier than my train was scheduled in an attempt to thwart him There was little point me walking to meet him, as we had arranged to have lunch in the Time Bar, my favourite eating establishment in Leicester, which is located right next door to the station. Since Babel has had a car, I haven’t been coming to Leicester anywhere near as often as I used to do, and so it was a long time since I had had the pleasure of eating there. One thing in particular which I had been looking forward to all week was the chips. I am a very fussy eater when it comes to chips and there are very many varieties which I can’t be doing with at all, but the ones they serve at the Time Bar are my idea of chip perfection.

Alas, perhaps that sentence should read “the ones they used to serve at the Time Bar” Having spent a while deliberating over the menu, unable to decide whether I felt like a lasagne or a chicken burger, Babel went to place our order and get me a glass of wine. This was in itself a pleasure, as the bar is laid out in such a manner as to enable me to check out his arse while he is ordering When the food finally arrived – and I use the word finally because unfortunately the service in the Time Bar is never the best! – I was rather disappointed to see that the excellent chips were no more Instead of thin and crispy fries, our plates were adorned with something which bore more resemblance to fried potatoes. Now don’t get me wrong, I really like fried potatoes in their place, and when I tried eating some of these they actually weren’t that bad, but it hadn’t been what I was expecting and so it was rather a shame.

Other than that, I thought the food was good but Babel wasn’t very impressed with his so I guess it will be a while until we eat there again. The meal over, we headed off to pick Babel’s car up from his work car park, where he offered to give me a bit of an impromptu driving lesson. This turned out not to be a terribly good idea as I didn’t get the hang of it properly and Babel got a bit frustrated, so moving swiftly on, we set off to his house to pick up his tent. We’re hoping to camp in Salisbury for a weekend in April. Babel had a nice shiny new tent for his birthday in December, but so far he hasn’t had chance to try setting it up, so the aim of Saturday was to give this a go and make sure all the parts were in working order before we find ourselves in the middle of a field in the rain, depending on it. Unfortunately I’d got to Leicester so late that by the time we collected the tent from Babel’s parents and drove to his sister’s house where we were hoping to put it up, it was already gone five in the afternoon and on the verge of becoming dark. In the end we had to settle for just having a cup of coffee with Babel’s sister, before heading back into the town centre again to check into our hotel.

We were staying in the Leicester Travelodge for the night, this being conveniently located near to the Guildhall, a rather impressive fourteenth century building where we were due to spend our Saturday evening. In a remarkable stroke of good luck, Babel had recently had an email around his workplace offering him discounted tickets to attend a murder mystery evening at the Guildhall. We’d both said vaguely a while ago that this was the sort of thing we’d like to try one day, so we were really rather excited. I was a little worried that it was going to be frightening, but when we arrived at the Guildhall it transpired that the murder had already been committed and so I didn’t have to worry that one of the fellow audience members was about to be struck down.

It was an amateur performance, but rather well done. The crime had taken place outside the church hall where a parish meeting was about to take place. The people who had bought tickets comprised the meeting audience, whilst the actors sat at a table in front as the committee. They were led by the vicar, who seemed rather suspicious from the outset and was led away by the police halfway through the proceedings for questioning. This gave a convenient gap for the food to be served and whilst I have to confess that not all of it was exactly to my liking, it was nevertheless good food and most people weren’t complaining. There was no wine provided but Babel had helpfully brought our own, so all in all it was a nice atmosphere and good fun When the final revelation came as to who the murderer was it wasn’t a complete surprise, but nevertheless there were various other people who had motives and it could theoretically have been any of them. As far as I’m concerned it was a thoroughly enjoyable evening and I’m very grateful to Babel for buying me a ticket

That was admittedly the end of our evening, as Babel proceeded to go back to the hotel room and fall asleep without so much as offering me a chocolate But nevertheless that was probably a good thing, because we had a relatively early start in the morning. The plan was to go to Cambridge to visit one of Babel’s aunts. Babel’s sister and her little boy were coming too, so we needed to be at there house not long after nine. Babel’s sister very kindly cooked us a delicious breakfast, and although I’m not normally overly fond of baked beans, I ate all the ones she put on my plate so as not to look terribly rude. I didn’t manage to do the same with the mushy tomato, alas, but hopefully that didn’t cause too much offense

It was a pleasant journey to Cambridge, where we located the relatives without too much trouble, and then headed into the city centre itself, together with one of Babel’s cousins who was over on a visit from New York. I was very excited about seeing Cambridge, and I have to say that it didn’t disappoint. That is to say, we didn’t get to see very much of it at all, due to the fact that we were there with a small child in a buggie, but the bits that we were able to see were absolutely beautiful. We parked the car somewhere near Trinity College and were able to walk a little bit through the gardens and across the river, taking in the gorgeous display of crocuses I wished very much that I had had the presence of mind to bring my camera with me, but, erm, I forgot. I did try to take a couple of pictures on my mobile phone, but due to the persistent lack of an internet connection at the moment, I’m unfortunately not able to upload them

Cambridge also appears to have a very modern shopping centre, and we spent a while hanging around in this before going for a coffee and heading back to Babel’s aunt for dinner. She had gone to lot of trouble to put on a nice spread, and I was relieved that there were some things which even I was able to eat; pizza, macaroni cheese, and some rather nice rice We sat around for a bit waiting for some more of Babel’s relations to arrive, before heading down to the local pub for a drink. All in all, it was nearly 7pm before we left and set off on the long journey home.

From my point of view, it was a very stressful day. I don’t deal well with meeting new people, and so I spent most of the time feeling scared and uncomfortable. The situation was exacerbated by the fact that Babel was naturally occupied by looking after his nephew most of the time, and so I kept finding myself on my own with his relatives, desperately trying to maintain a conversation and not die an excruciating death. So as to whether I enjoyed the day, the honest answer has to be no, that wasn’t my idea of fun. That said, Babel’s relatives were all very pleasant people and I genuinely liked his auntie, plus I’d had an enjoyable day on the Saturday so I can’t really complain – sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to for the sake of other people. Ultimately I feel pleased to have survived the ordeal as well as I did, and hopefully when we go again there will be less people there and it won’t be so overwhelming. I would definitely like to go again, because Cambridge really does seem to be an amazing place. In fact I think Babel should pull his finger out and actually apply for his phd so that he can become a professor and we can go live there

Anyhow, Babel’s sister kindly drove us back to Leicester, and Babel even more kindly drove me home Despite the stress, it was a lovely weekend and a million times better than being at work, so thank you to Babel for arranging it

Tags: cambridge, murder mystery

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 12th, 2009 at 5:31 pm and is filed under Holidays and outings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.