Monday, 19 May 2014

A very British weekend



This weekend, whilst failing (standard) to pick an appropriate place for Saturday brunch, the rest of the weekend was filled with a selection of fabulous chilled out and occasionally super British activities.
            On Saturday, having spent most o the afternoon waiting around for the aircon men to come and run some checks, tests and basic cleaning tasks we headed out for a lovely dinner with a group of Nick’s work friends and industry buddies.        
            Nick’s main client (who we see quite a bit of) was the organiser of the event, so with him and his wife and three other couples, the ten of us gathered at a relaxed garden style bar called The Green Door for a couple of drinks in the setting sunlight, which was a lovely way to start off the evening.
            From there we took a five minute stroll over to a huge Thai place, which served amazing dinner, great cocktails and hosted some bizarre traditional Thai style dancing and musical entertainment on the side.
            Whilst at dinner we discovered that one of the couples present had actually signed their legally binding Singaporean marriage certificate during the afternoon. So whilst they had two other full weddings planned in their hometowns for the following year, this was actually their wedding day. It was a bizarre but fun discovery, and obviously called for a couple of extra toasts to be made throughout the evening, but otherwise it was just a totally normal dinner with relative strangers, as was expected.
            The evening ended fairly early and with general good behaviour in place, not least because I had to be up at the crack of dawn for yet another golf lesson (the final one!).
            The following morning I arrived at the driving range slightly worried by the massive grey clouds that were covering the skies, but impressed with the beautiful rainbow that seemed to touch the ground just in front of me!


Within about 15 minutes the skies opened and the rain that thundered down was like nothing I’ve ever seen before (made all the more impressive as I was three stories up and the rain was blowing in the open sides of the structure).
            The rain started, and it didn’t stop. It rained so much that even though I was mostly undercover, I ended the session soaked to the skin from the driving direction of the rain, the leaking roof and the soggy floor.
            As the class eventually drew to an end I stuck around for longer than normal, working through an extra 100 balls and hoping the rain would ease up. When it didn’t I spent ten minutes trying to get a taxi back. When that failed too, I put up my (leaking) umbrella and walked ten minutes to the MRT station. From the soggy warm outside, to the freezing cold air conditioned train, I then shivered all the way home, through three train swaps and a full hour-long journey.
            I arrived at our local MRT station feeling utterly miserable, looking like a drowned rat and starving hungry (it was definitely lunchtime). In an attempt to restore the joy to my Sunday, I trudged through driving rain to pick up bagels and bacon from ColdStorage, and then to Starbucks to pick up lazy-girl coffees, before going back to the flat to don pyjamas and cook bacon for brunch, having been welcome back by Nick doing laundry and tidying up – what a good boy!
            Having then dragged myself through the shower and into proper clothes, the final stop on our weekend was a giant roast dinner at Harriet and Jamie’s house on the East Coast.
            The taxi ride through the sludgy grey didn’t do much to comfort me, as by this point all I wanted was to curl up on the sofa, watching the gross weather from the warmth of the flat and never venturing out into the rain again.


Still, once the other eight people arrived, the red wine was poured and it was announced that there would be happy crumble and custard to follow a lunch of roast beef (complete with Yorkshire puddings), things started to look a whole lot more manageable! After eating an awful lot of food, and having made a couple of new friends, we were home by 7pm and there was still plenty of sofa time to be done.

 

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