What's been going on?

It's Friday and the past week or so has gone past in a flash.

I have been neglectful of blogging Quick Catch Up time.

TNR and Mrs TNR were down in London staying at Reidksi's place last week and it was great to catch up with them.

Before meeting up with them I put my daughter on the train to deepest Devon where she was going to be staying with friends for a few days. I was so paranoid about this Journey Alone..though she was totally unfazed. I ensured she was sat near women and families - ie no weird men - although I found out later that a very weird old woman got on and harassed her for her forward facing sear later, and a 15 year old boy 'helped her with her case', so so much for my planning.

TNR and Mrs TNR are great cooks - see the link above to TNR's food blog called 'Chicken omelette, nae peas' which if I remember correctly is what a friend is his and Reidski's always ordered at their local Chinese. Saturday night they cooked a group of us some wonderful Spanish food.I am still drooling as I remember it now.

I was back in London again on Monday night which was their last evening in London and yet more wonderful food was had, this time at Wahaca which is a truly brilliant - and cheap - Mexican place in Covent Garden owned, as I learnt then, by a former winner of BBC's Masterchef Thomasina Miers. (The chillies she uses come from Devon. I took this as evidence my daughter would be basking in exotic sunshine during her stay at the Devon coast- yeah right.)

Plans for getting my daughter back from Devon had been carefully laid and involved her being picked up yesterday. Enough to say that those carefully laid plans spectacularly collapsed in the past few days and led to me having to take a 400 mile drive yesterday to fetch her home. I took my 16 year old son with me for company and map reading...although the second of his allotted tasks was scrubbed when he told me as we passed Oxford that he couldn't read maps. I was outraged. "What the bloody hell do they teach you in geography if not how to read maps? I asked. "Coastal erosion" was the answer. I didn't get much conversation either although I did get to listen to a lot of The Libertines, Dirty Pretty Things and Babyshambles. There is a link there somewhere I think ;-) It would have been OK but I got the lyrics 'Bang, bang, you're dead' stuck on relentless replay in my head which was a bit disconcerting.

We stopped for lunch in a little Somerset town called Ilminster where as J pointed out, he was the youngest person in the entire place - and I was second youngest. Lovely meal at a pub called The George - The Good Pub Guide coming up trumps again.

We got an hour on the beach before setting off back again. We drove past Stonehenge and I made a comment about how amazing it was to see those ancient stones there. Sometime later my daughter said "You know how you said those stones were so old?" "Yes?" said I. "Well, I thought all stones were old," she said which at least told me that they do learn something in geography at their school, but did make me wonder what they teach them about this country's heritage.

So that is about the week that was, or at least it is as I am going to spare you the gory details of a story concerning my 11 year old niece, her tonsil, a one and a half inch long salmon bone and three hours in casualty. (She is fine now thank you.)

Off now to see one of my nuttier clients which, believe me, makes this one very nutty indeed. Groan.