My family and I went to stay with my parents in Essex for a week last week. After a day at work I set off in the car with my two daughters on Friday evening about 8:15pm. My Wife and my Son were to join us on Sunday, as they were both involved in Chamboree . This was a big deal and in the end we had to accept the diary clash and the fact we were taking two cars across the country to keep both commitments, it had been hard enough fitting everything into all the School Summer Holidays and this was the best compromise.
I don't know much about it but Chamboree is some kind of mega international scouting camp that was being hosted in Cheshire, where we live. For the hard core fully fledged Scouts, it only finished yesterday but for my son as a cub, it was a two night camp and my wife (a parent helper in Beaver scouts) only all day Sunday with no camping for the little ones.
It is worth noting that I always call Beavers (which is Cubs for the under sevens) 'Beaver Scouts' these days. My wife started helping when our son was a Beaver, he has moved on to Cubs now but my wife enjoyed helping and has stayed on. Initially the innuendos amused me, I even put 'Beavers' in my work calendar every Wednesday night because I had to leave work relatively early to enable my wife to help. It was okay to start with saying, "it's Beavers tonight" "My wife does Beavers" "My wife is a Beaver helper". I didn't go fnar fnar, ooer or weyhey, it was a place of work after all and one where I have certain responsibilities to set a good example. Also Beavers was about children so you can't really go there anyway and I couldn't be so crude. I did leave the suggestion of innuendo hanging there for anyone to pick up though - lingering and waiting for them to say something themselves - I was just dieing for someone to have a little smirk with - unfortunately this seemed to be a non-smirking office (soz). The trouble, I suppose, was that no one did pick up this innuendo to my face, so over time I became worried that I'd driven it underground (or more accurately behind my back) although it's just as likely that no one thought Beaver was a suggestive word anyway (right?).
This is in the UK, however, and it is still a national pastime and an easy source of humour to think that everything sounds a bit like it might be about sex (or toilets) and make faces and noises like the years of 'Carry On' film heritage taught us. So now I say Beaver Scouts, which takes the edge off. If I'm talking to a group of more than one males with no women about, I will avoid 'Beaver' altogether (oooer) and say Cubs or Scouts.
Anyway on with the journey. Route planning programmes say that this journey would be about 3 hours 30 mins, so I was keen to bet I was going at a relatively quiet traffic time I thought and I was sure I could better the speed assumptions as over half the journey was on motorway - including the whizzy empty M6 Toll(Midland Expressway).
I would have done quite well too, except as I got to where we join the motorway, I went north instead of south by force of habit from when I used to commute and added a good half an hour onto my journey - doh!
Okay, this is getting boring. The worst ice breaker at a party, if you meet someone new or who you don't know that well is the how you got there conversation. I try very hard to avoid this these days, although it is a sticky trap to fall into. At a recent gathering round our house, I nearly caught myself talking about what route someone had taken and I caught it in time. I am proud to say I steered out of it and within minutes I had learned (amongst other things) that this guy's uncle was the first President of a certain West African Country. I won't name the country, although there can't be that many options (see map), bad form and all that. What I can say is that Uncle got to the Presidential Palace by driving along the B1148, in a tank (I joke - there was an election and then some electional reform making the Uncle party the only legal party -but we've all done it haven't we?). The weather is the other 'trap topic' - it was mostly sunny in this West African Country.Apart from that hiccup where I went to wrong way, the journey went well and I managed to achieve Google Maps target after all. When we got there the girls stayed up for another half hour or so and very late my mother fed me a lot of food - because that's one of the things that mums are for. I stayed up very late doing belated #followfridays and catching up on Twitter.
Coming next - Our trip to Colchester Zoo! (which road would we take?)
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