Christmas at Kings'

The choir of Kings' College, Cambridge. Famous for the annual broadcast of their Nine Lessons and Carols service each year on Christmas Day. This year, we were there.... queuing up at 8am to stand in line for one of the 600 places offered to the public.

The day is probably best told in pictures.

Snow day!

Yesterday, it snowed. And I mean really snowed. There was chaos that truly put last year's to shame.

Brendan and I had separate adventures! He left work at 3:30, I left work at 3... 

His facebook update: spent 3 hours driving home in the snow. This included the battery dying, pushing the car off the road, buying jump leads, killing another car attempting to jump my car, getting a third car to jump the second car and mine, getting stuck on an ice-covered hill, twice, and then ice-driving through the frozen back streets of Basingstoke. 

My facebook update: 

So far I've spent 4 hours in my car in the same 4 miles, killed my battery .5 miles from a safeish place to park it, pushed my car, jump started it and parked at aldermaston, waiting for train that might not come...

What happened... an enormous amount of snow! Basically most of the roads in Hampshire and Berkshire were impassable. I left work at 3pm and didn't get back until 10pm! I spoke to many many people who had similar stories of being stuck in their cars for hours and hours, batteries dying etc.... My car is still in Aldermaston Wharf at my boss's house. 

It was nice though, because people were very kind-spirited about it all and helped each other. 

I spent 45 mins getting the few miles from work to Tim and Carrie's house in Aldermaston, then another 3 hours getting the next mile or so. You'd pretty much move a car length every 15 minutes - I was timing! After 3 hours of this I decided it was ridiculous, and heard a man talking about how the road was blocked by a lorry stuck on the hill by AWE. So I turned around and went back... 45 mins later I was about .5 miles from their house when my car battery died! Luckily I had jumper cables in the car (thanks Brendan!), and luckily some lovely guys helped me to jump start it and push the car until it got going again. 

However, even though I parked at Tim and Carrie's, neither of them were there... Carrie, Lucy and one of our clients were all stuck in Basingstoke at a client's overnight! So I took the train from Aldermaston into Reading, and then back to Basingstoke. Thankfully they were delayed but still running, and I managed to get home. Many other people didn't.

Here is what the BBC had to say...

And here.... 3000 people trapped in cars overnight

And here... Basingstoke still at the centre of it all

And here are some pictures.... I was on the AWE road, and the roads of the IDR in Reading are incredible as well. When I took the train home to Basingstoke from Reading I saw cars stopped there at 9 at night!

Ice-skating in Winchester....

Last year we went iceskating with Lina at Winchester,and it was awesome. This year we went with Liz and Gareth, and it was just as good if not better.

Here's the cathedral and the Michaelmas Christmas Fair... very traditional.


Here's us iceskating... I'm getting much better and can go really fast! I still can't stop as well as I want though. (I.e. only by crashing into the barriers a little...)

The days are getting very dark now- the sun goes down at 3:30. So depressing. But only another few weeks to the Winter Solstice, and it will start getting light again.


I've been extremely busy with work recently - I'm being naughty tonight and having a night off. Lots of copy to write and projects to manage! But I really do love it. And I work with the most awesome people. Brendan has also been very very busy with his work, with two big projects. He's just bought the game Dragon Age and has been rather into that as well, leaving me with less choice for Christmas presents. ;)

I also have a new car so I can drive to work by myself! :) So we have two cars now as Brendan has the other one. It's grey and has a sunroof.

Right, time to leave you all with a photo of the River Thames taken from my work in November, right before all the leaves dropped off - I can look out the window at work and see this, although it's not usually as still and reflective.

A car of her own...

I have my own little car! It's grey and has a little sunroof. (Granted, it's winter, but who cares....) I love it - it makes me feel like a boyracer. Or girlracer in this case. It's slightly faster than taking the (unreliable!) trains from Basingstoke - Reading, then another.... but mainly it's flexibility - I can get to client meetings in Thame etc, or leave late if I want to.

Here's the first frost of the winter.... my car's the third one in the picture.

Edit: I can't actually remember when it was that I bought my car, but I think it was sometime around November. Hence the photo is most likely from early Dec, and I've mostly put this post up to remind myself that it was roughly around then. And so that you can all see it!

Autum is here....

It's really rather depressing - it's already getting quite dark.

But the autumn leaves are glorious.

Scotland!

Midges, enormous blisters and rain... did we really sign up for this? 

We've spent a week in Scotland as our summer holiday, walking 80 miles in the Highlands from Fort Williams to Inverness along a walking trail called the Great Glen Way. And boy was it "summer" in quote marks. The scenery was fantastic, though. 

  

The mechanic and the concert: or, what Brendan did on his birthday

Today is Brendan's 25th birthday.

Today is "buy a dozen overpriced Krispy Kreme donuts as a special treat for Brendan's birthday and eat two before feeling sick" day.

Today is "be given free concert tickets, have trouble finding the concert and then lock the one set of keys in the car ignition with the lights on" day.

Yes, really. We tried for about 20 minutes with one of the parking marshalls to get in - now we know one way to break into your own car! The string wasn't quite long enough though. So we called our insurance** and they sent a mechanic.

Here is Brendan looking unimpressed. Look at that unimpressed-but-pretending-to-smile face!

Here is the mechanic's tow truck, which couldn't actually fit into the car park.
(He said he works for Thames Valley Police, and usually gets called out for serious crashes on the M3 and M4, and suicides. They have to take the person's car as it's evidence in case of foul play. Ick.)


When the mechanic finally managed to break into the car, we all breathed a sigh of relief. Then Brendan and I enjoyed the last hour of the concert!


The concert was all tribute bands, quite a lot of fun really. Thanks to Lynne for tickets!


Today I was in Leamington Spa for a work meeting. We took the train up from Reading, which was about an hour. My boss thinks I'm the papparazzi cos I took some photos as we left.

This is the famous Leamington Spa on the left, built around the same time as Bath Spa when "taking the waters" was really fashionable as a health and beauty aid (and rather expensive!). (Sounds like the modern spa then!)








**They must be sick of us by now. This is the second time we've called them this week, after Brendan left the lights on at a work conference in Southampton. At least it's not AAA, where they only let you have six callouts a year (each). Which is probably much more than necessary for most people who don't drive dodgy cars or suffer from overt forgetfulness about lights in winter. But only just enough for Brendan and I with two dodgy cars in San Francisco and one country-wide trip. In our mail from America after we left, was a letter from AAA sternly warning that we had one callout left each. I think AA UK has a maximum of five.