Birthday and UK Visit

 

Birthday And UK Visit

I spent my birthday in Scotland with Natalie and family and had a great time there. Natalie had bought some good bitter and it was good to have a glass of that hat soon after my arrival on the Friday and a curry in the evening. Curries, fish and chips and sausages and mash (and bacon sandwiches in the morning and pints of bitter to drink) are now my staple diet when I’m in the UK, food that is difficult to find and which I don’t normally want in France; it’s a function of climate. I’m a foodie of a different sort when I’m in the UK .

On the Saturday I got the full birthday treatment: cards and presents in the morning, lunch at a good restaurant and fizz and cake with candles in the evening (photos below). I didn’t want to do anything special for the rest of my stay, just be with the family, do a little shopping and a little gardening and be around the house. It was a very pleasant few days.

 

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 I left Glasgow to go to see Steve and Jo in the house they are renting temporarily in Sywell while awaiting their eventual move to Scotland. It is a lovely, small old house in a quiet close and of course I got to see Tiloup, the dog, and have a love-in with him. Jo gave me a short tour around the area which has attractive countryside, a couple of good pubs and an aerodrome for antique plane enthusiasts. Their initial foray into Scotland to scout the possibilities there was rather a washout, hindered by floods and torrential rain, but they will be back again in the spring. I also met Carl while I was there, who looked much fitter than I have seen him for a while. Four days a week at the gym have put a lot of muscle on him and he seems content with his life in Birmingham.

From Steve and Jo I went to Reading, as my friend Margaret couldn’t put me up in London, and met up with former girlfriend Mairwen. We went for a pub lunch together aand reminisced a bit about old times and friends there. Reading had changed so much in the past 15 years that I found it quite a shock. The old station that I knew so well from frequent commutes to London had become something of a railway palace with two new entrances, six new platforms and a third-storey concourse with shops and cafes. It’s high all-glass frontage now dominates the road infront of it. The centre of the town had changed quite dramatically too with a lot of new building and quite different shops. Department stores it seem are now “out”, nobody wants them or the space is uneconomic and now empty. The smaller shops seemed predominantly food stores, cafes, restaurants or take-aways with a wide variety of food with different national flavours. I found that quite attractive but not so much the method of payment. After my arrival in the UK I had withdrawn a couple of hundred pounds in Sterling but in the event had difficulty spending it. Many of the shops and pubs insisted on payment by card or phone only. Mairwen said that had started in the pandemic, presumably for hygienic reasons, and subsequently continued and intensified. But it came as a shock to me, used to life in a small rural French village.

I found my visit to the UK tiring but very enjoyable; lugging suitcases around is bound to be for someone at my age but I had numerous unsolicited offers of help with them. Whatever is happening politically in the UK the people are still very much OK.