Sally Traffic & Chris Evans saved me a good one hour plus stewing on the motorway tonight - but there was a price to pay…

Scaffold : Lily the Pink

Aaaaaaaaaarrrrrrgggghhhhhhhhh!!

Pass me the medicinal compound…

I achieved 20 minutes on the cross trainer at the gym today!!!

And I didn’t fall off it a la Bridget Jones at the end!!!

In fact…I think I could have done even MORE!!!

OK, so I had a face the colour of beetroot for about an hour afterwards (gets you some strange looks as you walk back), but I feel I have turned a corner (which is quite a good trick on a static cross trainer…)

In honour of it being Mum’s 75th birthday on Friday, we treated her to a big day out at Cadbury World today - I last went in 2001, Chris has never been and Mum’s always wanted to, so off we went.

This was the first time we’d manouevered Mum around in the wheelchair I got for her off ebay, it performed very well, and Cadbury World really do cater extremely well for disabled & elderly visitors. Mum had a printed script to follow as we went round, as even thought they had a loop system, it was hard to keep up at times (and hear above the chocolate crazed kids!). We were able to access about 90% of the tour, as the old factory building itself wasn’t deemed suitable. Free samples galore, very friendly staff, a (not too expensive) trip around the gift & factory shop - what’s not to like??!! All topped off by a meal out on the way home. We’re all stuffed, and have retreated to our respective sofas to veg for the rest of the evening.

Happy Birthday for Friday Mum!

Mini is back, mini is fixed. Mini had something wrong with an inner wheel bearing (you would have thought, considering the nature of the damage, that they’d have done a proper road test before handing the car back to me in the first place, but hey), and this time it’s *really* nice to have her back, as they made me drive a Ford Ka all day. As and when the time comes, I will not be replacing Minifer with a Ford Ka.

In other news, we’ve had the sad job of sorting through and packing up all the Bones paraphenalia this evening. We do have a nice box of goodies and practical stuff to donate to a worthy cause though, and tomorrow Mum and I will be visiting the St Francis Hospice for Cats, a wonderful one-off charity run by a little old lady in Derby, who is looking forward to taking the box off our hands

Got the Minifer back on Saturday, and spent the rest of the weekend tootling around town remembering how to drive it - nearly sounding my horn rather loudly when a favourite song came on the radio and I went to turn the volume up on the steering wheel stereo controls my lovely little mini doesn’t have…

Finally got the hang of it all again by this morning, just in time to drive to work, got to the motorway and as soon as I went over 30mph - thrmmmmb, thrmmmb, thrmmmb - the strangest, oddest pulsating noise from the engine.

So the car’s going back in tomorrow morning. Phooey.

We bade a final goodbye and God bless to Mum’s cat Bones today - he’d gone sharply downhill since the weekend. Still, at somewhere around the 20 mark he’d had a good innings, and his passing was as gentle and peaceful as these things should be.

He’s going to leave quite a hole in this home

If you get the chance between now and the end of August, you HAVE to go and see the Banksy exhibition at the Bristol City Museum. It’s free admission, the queue takes about an hour to get through but is SO worth it!!!