Away

I was away from home last weekend. Sadly, it was for another family funeral. This time it was David's aunt Mollie who passed away. The funeral was near Evesham, close to Mollie's smallholding. Getting there on time was the big challenge of the day. A train journey last Friday that started at 8.30am in Newcastle got us to Evesham spot on time, despite having to catch two connections. And then the problems started. We discovered that no taxis run in Evesham early Friday afternoons. Evesham comes to a halt every Friday at this time.  The town becomes gridlocked. It's something of a regular Friday spectacle so the taxis simply stop business for a few hours until the streets have cleared. After trying multiple taxi companies, we found the only operator with taxis still operating in the afternoon was Uber. So we got to the crematorium but missed the start of the service. We crept quietly into the back of the hall and took up seats at the back.

Fortunately, we were offered a lift to the wake by Mollie's near neighbour who is a livestock vet and whose husband is a farmer. We had quite a chat about calling out vets in the early hours to deal with sheep in the snow!

We stayed overnight in Evesham and on Saturday took the train to London. The journey required an unexpected stop in the middle of nowhere as the train had hit something on the track. An hour of waiting then followed while the driver and guard checked out the train. Fortunately there was no damage so the journey could continue. We were over an hour late into Paddington. 

We had planned to pop into the National Liberal Club only to find it was closed over the weekend so we headed to China Town in Soho for dinner. Back at our hotel, a karaoke was underway in the bar. Classic songs were being ruthlessly killed by the clientele. It was painful. Sunday was spent at the London Canal Museum. On Monday we returned home. I now have a stack of blog posts to catch up on, a mountain of emails to sort and more Focuses to write. Welcome home!