Weekend in Bournemouth

Will & I had a nice weekend at the seaside. We drove down on Friday night & attended the wedding reception for one of Will's ex-project students. Saturday was Will's birthday so he got pretty spoilt for the day. We went for a nice walk along the boardwalk, then had a wander around the Bournemouth shops where Will chose his birthday presents. He wanted a dress watch that also had a stopwatch etc that he could use for coaching his sport. As you might expect, that was pretty difficult to find, so I ended up buying him a dress watch AND a sports watch! We then drove a few miles round the coast to Poole. The big attraction there was a visit to the Poole pottery factory shop where we got a few bits & pieces. It must be a sign of a) advancing years, & b) domesticity, that a visit to a pottery shop was one of the highlights of the weekend! We stopped for a bottle of white wine for our hotel room on the way home, but there was no fridge in our room, & the supermarket was out of ice. English supermarkets don't tend to keep wine in fridges like in NZ... In true kiwi spirit we fashioned a very acceptable ice bucket out of a bag of frozen beans! Later that night we went out for a lovely chinese meal at a restaurant near our hotel.
We left at about half-10 on Sunday morning as I had to meet at the rugby club back in Reading at 1pm. On the way home I got a phone-call saying that Alton had cancelled, so that was pretty annoying. I was really looking forward to the game, & it was extremely short notice; they cancelled about 3 hours from kick-off. The bonus was I had a whole afternoon to potter around, sort the house out a bit, & get ready to go back to school.

It's back to the coal-face tomorrow, but then it's only 5 & a half weeks until Easter holidays. Believe me, I'm already counting!!!