Sunday 20 February 2011

If I died and went to brown sign heaven I would spend eternity doing days like this....

So this is me on Saturday at 6.30am after approximately 5.5 hours sleep and guess what, I was in a stinker of a mood. Anyone who's ever had the displeasure of being anywhere near me when I've had less than 10 hours sleep knows it's not a nice experience and the reason for my lack of sleep wasn't even from a night on the tiles, sadly no. It was after a hectic Friday night waitressing, where I made so many mistakes that I frequently wanted to burst out crying, so much so that even disappearing out the fires escape to smoke a lot of fags didn't help. And it was my poor sister, The Mose, who was on the receiving end of my bad mood in the morning. She's usually happy to spend the day with me, especially on brown sign days but, unsurprisingly, on Saturday she wasn't feeling it. She's also a great believer in pathetic fallacy and it was one of those dull rainy days that makes you feel a bit arse. Predictably then we lost our tempers and got in the car in silence with no idea where we were going, so I pointed us the direction of deepest darkest Kent and we huffed off onto the M20.

After a little while being in a mood though I find it gets boring and coffee and sticky buns from the petrol station seem to make everything just a little bit better, also The Mose finally chose a destination; Tenterden "the jewel in the crown of the Kent Weald" a mere 50 miles away, where there was also a museum shown in red on my AA map (thank the Lord for tourist maps. Pah! Who needs an iPhone?). Things were looking up.

Tuesday 15 February 2011

Staring down the barrel of some massive guns

A few weeks ago I noticed a museum on Twitter which immediately attracted my attention. Why? Because it's called "Explosion!" that's why, now you're interested, see? I especially liked the use of the hard hitting exclamation mark so I had a lot of respect for them straight away. This Portsmouth based museum looked like just the kind of place I love the very best, with dedicated passionate staff and an impressive repertoire of activities and exhibits which chart the history and importance of naval firepower. However, as much as I wanted to pay these guys a visit the 200 mile round trip from London was mildly off-putting. Also my life at the moment is a lot about doing boring but important computer based work with the website so felt I couldn't really take the time out, until.... My parents (being the older traveller) told me they were taking a 2 week cruise departing from Southampton and I was the lucky sole they'd chosen to drive them down there. Ecstatic to be given an excuse to hit the south coast I piled my parents and their luggage into the car (my mum's car that is, and what a joy it was to drive without the terrible my-exhaust's-about-to-fall-off anxiety), deposited them at the extremely windy and rainy Southampton dock 10 and shot straight off to Portsmouth harbour.