It's good to be home

It might have taken us a good few hours longer than expected to get home, but after finally touching down at London Heathrow and having made our way through arrivals and baggage reclaim (following a slightly tense five minutes during which we were fairly certain that Nick’s luggage had been lost somewhere along the way in Doha, we were finally home.

            Mum and dad had performed their usual ritual of arriving three hours early to drink coffee, waiting for us to arrive whilst working their way around all the chairs in the café as and when they become vacant, trying to get the best, most obvious seats in the house so that we would be able to see them as soon as we arrived.

            Finally, late due to the annoying delays, we walked through arrivals, spotted my parents from a mile off due to their perfect seating chose, and we had a moment for a big hug and a fairly hefty coffee before the drive back down to the Shire.

            Thanks to the uncomfortable travel and the time zone confusions, what followed was a very quiet, slightly sleepy birthday.

            We mooched around the house, we had a lovely lunch at home, Nick and I wandered around the millpond to the pub for a ‘Welcome Home’ beer and flick through the local crappy newspaper, Lizzy came over to say hello and to showcase her amazing, growing baby bump, and then I sent Nick home for an afternoon-long nap ahead of dinner, whilst I went to visit my old people with mum.

Both old people were thankfully on fine form, and having run through all the essential “So, how do you like Singapore?” type questions from granddad (whilst eating chocolate covered ginger treats) and the “Are you living with this boy – I hope you have proper family planning in place – what sort of a bra are you wearing under that dress?” questions from Grandma (with the aid of a cup of tea and shocking, no whiskey or sherry chasers) we passed a fairly lovely afternoon of ridiculous chatter.

            The final port of call for the day was Hallidays restaurant just slightly set back in the hills, where we headed for an absolutely delicious three course, wine heavy dinner courtesy of my lovely daddy, and in the company of

both sets of parents and a slightly exhausted Nick (he definitely required another hour or five of sleep before he was going to be ready for life). 

It's time

It’s time to go home! The bags are packed, I’ve finally finished work, I’ve located Nick and Stuart, we’ve got to the airport, we’ve had a little drink or two, we’ve run for the flight because we were sat a bit too far away from the gate and we left it a little bit too long to go to the boarding gate, and we’ve flown for the first seven hours stint of the trip to get us as far as Doha.

            Just one more leg of flight back (once the delay to take off has finally been worked through) and we’ll be good to go and on our way.

            HOME TIME!

 

Amazing birthday treats!

Although my birthday isn’t until tomorrow, as we’ll be spending the next day or so on a series of planes to get back to the UK, Nick decided that Wednesday morning ought to be a mini-celebration of my birthday, which was a bit of an unexpected treat.

            Having had a bit of a bad week at work, Nick started this week entirely ready to leave for holiday, and so he took Wednesday off work to pack and sort himself out.  This would normally have meant that he would stay in bed until around noon before dragging himself into the world to start being productive. Not this time though!

            I walked out of the shower to find a fully laid table, with coffee and bagels with cream cheese and bacon ready for devouring, music on the radio and a very big box wrapped up on the sofa. I could quite happily start all my mornings like this!

            The wrapped box contained the foot spa that we’ve seen in the window of a local shop every day for the past few months, and that I have been desperate to buy on more than one occasion – when I’ve been out and about all day, hot and sticky with my feet pounding the pavements, quite often the only thing I want to do it stick my feet in a nice cold water soak – and now I can do that whenever I like. Perfect!

            Present opened, it was time for breakfast and coffee drinking, and it was delicious! Just as I was feeling pretty smug and was starting to get ready to go to work, Nick said he wanted to show me a video that his friend had just uploaded to Facebook.

            As it started I assumed it was going to be something incredibly random, but I fairly quickly realised that it was actually a video made by Nick, and that it was meant for me! It was another birthday present – and it was amazing! Nick has arranged for us to go on a long weekend to the Gili Islands, just off the coast of Indonesia. It’s one of those incredible places that is still safe from the worst burst of tourism, so there are no cars on the islands, only donkey carts and bikes, there are turtle safely areas where you can swim with the amazing old-man-faced creatures, there are a completely no-frills bars and accommodation, and there’s apparently amazingly fresh seafood grilled in open air restaurants and cafes.

            It’s a ridiculously generous present, and we’re not going until December, which means I get a couple of really good months to build up the excitement even more! I can’t wait! 

Number 18 – Top 100 Movies, Done

It’s just a couple of days until my 28^th birthday, so what better time to finally make some progress on me 30-Before-30 list and get Number 18 done and dusted.
      Over the past few years I have worked my way through the official IMBD Top 100 Movies of all time (correct when the list was pulled in 2012), which for me is really quite an achievement.

            At the start of the challenge I had only seen around 30 of the films on the list (and that was almost entirely due to my love of Fred Astaire films, and obvious choices like Indiana Jones and It’s a Wonderful Life), but thanks to two years of LoveFilm membership and Nicks impressive collection of movies stored on his hard-drive, I have finally seen everything from the Godfather movies, to The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, right through each Starwars film. I’ve also ticked off some classics like the original Korean Old Boy, and anime classic Spirited Away which I would certainly have never watched without encouragement, but which were all brilliant and great to have seen.

            There are many films on the list that I had never heard of before, and a number that I struggled to get hold of (thankfully a lot of the old Charlie Chaplin movies were available via YouTube when all other searches failed), but the list is done now, and the 18^th item has been officially ticked off the list. Only 12 more to go!

Happy Annual Martini Day!

With our slightly patchy past, and around five years of uncertainty of whether we’re “on” of “off”, when people ask myself and Nick how long we’ve been together for they are always rewarded with a look of confusion and uncertainty that both concerns and alarms them. If we don’t know the answer, how can anyone else?! This also means that we don’t have an anniversary, or indeed any recollection of when our first date was, or anything at all like that.

           

Whilst this has been perfectly acceptable for us up to now, during our recent discussions (fuelled by the extended countdown to our return home over my birthday this month), we realised that it was a year to the day since Nick came back to London on a surprise trip for my birthday. If that wasn’t a suitable ‘fake-anniversary’ date / excuse then I don’t know what is.

            As such, 24^th May has now become our annual Martini Day. When Nick arrived back in London this time last year, he left his bags at Victoria Station and came into Covent Garden, where he waited for me to finish work at a little bar called PJs. Before heading to dinner at the beautiful Clos Maguire, we worked our way through a couple of fantastic martinis at the bar, kick starting his trip to London, and celebrating the first time we’d seen each other since starting to speak again the Christmas before.

To celebrate the passing of a year, this 24^th May we went to the Swiss Hotel, rode the lift to the 73 floor, and we made the most of a little Happy Hour break, with incredible views of the city, whilst the sun battled to display a beautiful sunset around the edges of a thunderstorm that hovered over the National Park.

It was an utterly beautiful spot to be, with great service and surprisingly few people battling for a table looking straight out of the glass, which was pretty perfect for us.

            Once our martinis had been drunk (followed by a Pimms for me and  a Long Island Iced Tea for Nick), we had to jump in a cab and head over to Jules and Kev’s flat, for a belated house warming and birthday celebration in the form of a BBQ on their 23^rd floor observation deck. It was a night of great food, great drinks and great views from start to finish. By the time we finally clambered into a taxi at around 2:30am, it was definitely time to go home following a great annual Martini Day celebration.

         

Finally Friday

Following a ridiculously excessive Wednesday night, and a client dinner of Peking duck, deep-fried everything and buckets of wine on the side on Thursday, Friday has been a little bit too much like handwork for me this week.

            Whilst it’s been an incredibly busy day, and loads of work has been finished up and polished off (perfect timing ahead of our holiday that kick starts next week!), it’s also been a pretty demanding day, and one that I couldn’t wait to get to the end of.

            Having waited for the rain to stop for long enough I popped out to meet Mike for a quick lunch to and to pick up a pair of trousers that he borrowed from Nick when then came over for dinner and then needed non-shorts to get into the bars that we headed out to later in the evening.  Then the afternoon was crammed with finishing off work before heading out to meet Nick at the Singapore Affordable Art Fair in the exhibition space that houses all the Formula 1 Pit Lanes and teams for one weekend each year.

            You would think that the “Affordable Art Fair” would have been a little bit more reasonable, but with ten minutes of walking into the five room exhibition, with each of Singapore’s locals galleries displaying some of their top artists work, it because clear that if the bulk of the art was affordable, we were most definitely not the target audience.

            Prices ranged from $100 for generic prints of fairly uninspiring pictures of Asian cities to $10,000 for giant coloured canvases with colour squiggles down the middle, or statues of unicorns made out of mangled My Little Pony bodies.

            We inevitably failed to locate anything that we might be either able to afford or tempted to decorate our flat with, which was slightly disappointing, but while our art hunt continued we headed to the curry house just close to our flat for a Friday dinner with Flash and Liv and a glass of wine or two. Following a busy and excessive week, I couldn’t wait for Friday to ease to an end and for our relaxed weekend to get started!