Monday, April 09, 2007

Running

Tired today. I woke up in the middle of the night having heart-thumping panics about the amount we spent on dinner last night. I can be a bit dim when it comes to numbers and I suddenly realised that we must have spent pretty near £100 by eating from the A La Carte menu when, if we had chosen from the set menu, it would be more like £50. And I’m sure everything would have tasted just as nice! I lay there for ages mentally adding up all our courses over and over again (trying to make the numbers shrink with repetition!). Didn’t sleep a whole lot after that!

Finally I decided I might as well get up and I had a lovely hot bubble bath in the funny bath cabinet thingy. Charles managed to dig himself out of his pit at 8.45am – no mean feat when you think that his preferred time of rising is usually more like 2.45pm. It’s about the equivalent of me getting up at 3 o’clock in the morning! We both yawned our way down to breakfast and again they had the nice classical music playing in the background, and a French waitress, and endless food…

I really didn’t want to leave the hotel. We creaked back up the staircase to our room after breakfast and I lay on the bed to have a last stare into the wallpaper and try and imprint the room onto my memory… but finally it came time to go. Poo! If ever I become a squillionnaire I am going to buy that hotel and live in it, all by myself! (Well, me and my French staff!)

Back to Charles’ flat. We had decided that today was (long drumroll) Running Day. Time to Get Fit. Time to Lose That Flab. The sun was shining brightly, and I had my tracksuit and trainers in the car, so we had no excuse to put it off.

Running, yuck! I was convinced I was going to hate it! But hey, guess what, it was really fun! We entered Richmond Park and jogged along (well OK, we sort of hobbled with intent), we chatted (wheezed – and – huffed – a – few – words – out – gasp), we stopped to admire the view a few times (collapsed onto various fallen tree trunks to rest) and it was all really companionable and fun and sunshiney and nice. Blimey!

I bet I ache tomorrow though!

Once we had returned home and showered, we set off for Bournemouth. We were hoping it was going to be as nice as Poole had been on Saturday.


Silly us!

Bournemouth was noisy and yobby, with funfairs, amusement arcades and dirt. The chip shop was dirty, with loud thumpy music, staff who had no idea what the words ‘service industry’ meant, and the most disgusting fish and chips we have ever eaten – semi-cooked chips and burnt battered fish. Bleurgh! At sunset, gangs of yobby teenagers began to arrive in their cars, playing their music so loud that my skull vibrated in time with the beat, and smoking very strong-smelling pot. I’m sure I sound like somebody’s granny here, but I really don’t like stuff like that. Give me a quiet picnic on a pretty beach any day, but save me from the common people!!

It wasn’t all bad though. When we arrived we walked down the beach away from the pier area and sat in the sand for a while, looking at the sea and chatting. Then we found a little, red, plastic spade in the sand and played beach cricket with the spade and some pebbles. My cricketing style was more like badminton for girls - ie, arm windmilling in all directions and not much connection of spade to pebbles. But it was fun!

No comments: