Electric Quaker II

A weekend away and an Aftershow

Well. Actually the aftershow for Panto took place a week ago, but I’ve got two photos of it what I’ve taken some time to upload. And even then I needed Ruth to point out how to do the size attributes and things…

However, we’ve just got back from Bath, where we’ve been hiding for a couple of days because we rather needed a break after January, which was rather a stressful month, what with Panto and all other manner of concerns wandering about…

So, aye, we went to a really rather nice place done by Paramount Hotels, which, despite being near Bath felt really rather Northern, which was nice. It was on the upper slopes of a valley, which makes a nice change after the flat tedium of Oxfordshire. Hills I like; flatlands can go hang.

We polled up on Friday evening, after various excursions to doctors surgeries, Waitrose and Swindon (This is what you get for getting on a train direct from Didcot to Bath if Worst Great Western are running it; ie, a train that doesn’t stop at Bath – nice train, though, full of legroom and proper doors you open by leaning out of the windows. Nice to see an IC 125 still wandering about the lines, though).

Saturday we took a wander down into the bottom of the valley, which seemed to contain an interesting looking school, and then slogged back up the hill, beneath a pair of buzzards, which I’m not sure I’ve seen before. We get Kites round here, though. Back on site we went into the gym thingy, in search of, I’m sorry to say, exercise. Not a fan of that sort of thing, but, since I’ve been told it’d be good for my poxy knees to muck about on cycling machines and generally trying to build up the muscles in the approximate vicinity of said poxy knees. That was predictably tiring, but somehow faintly rewarding, and then we piled off and had a bit of lunch.

Come the afternoon we hit the steam room, which, like all steam rooms, is really rather super. No plunge pool, which I was a bit sad about, but the main pool was OK, though slightly cool for me at 28 centigrade. And then there were some really astonishing hydro beds which pumped air though holes in the frame, which gave an experience somewhat like being battered by lots of water being blown about, and was still strangely relaxing.

It was all really fantastically refreshing, which is hard to fault, and so we’re likely to head back at some point in the summer – every couple of months seems a good time to take a break; and since our last proper one was the Ramble, that was a very welcome weekend.

Pantomime Ended
with a big aftershow which was superb. I did, however, get astonishingly drunk, as the picture’s likely to show. Mind, I was knackered as well. The thing what I’m holding is the silver trowel the Sinodun Players dish out each panto since ’96 to the person who’s built up their part the best. Which is super, hooray! (Although I do feel that if I did clever “making it look like a painting” photoshop work on it it would suddenly look like I’d walked out of the cover illustration of a 1070’s bodice-ripper…)

and then Ruth had a picture taken for her industry year report to show that she isn’t just doing Fortran and trying to set the volume of the television to – as she now realises she’s been doing for months – a multiple of five, which has somehow ended up with the following photo:

And now I’m posting this and having done with it, because we’re just coming to the end of V for Vendetta, and I like the ending too much to miss it for the sake of telling you guys what we’ve been up to, toptastic though you all are.

Goodnight!

Edit:
Can’t get images to work. Someone’s gonna have to guide me through that bit, I reckon. Problem with the permissions, I think, but it was making a nuisance of itself.