I’ve escaped for 10 days before the summer guiding rush.
On Sunday morning I flew to Tenerife and spent a pleasant afternoon and evening, mostly in the hotel room. I took a nap and caught up with email. For lunch, we found a nearby Irish bar called Grandee O’Donnell that was serving Sunday roasts. It was damn good! So we went back for dinner (also good) and a little karaoke.
On Monday we flew into Birmingham. I spent a lot of the flight working on the whodunnit. A week ago I found a section that had somehow disappeared from the most recent version. So I decided to re-read the whole thing, to be sure there weren’t any other missing bits. I didn’t find any in the first 10 chapters, but I did find and fix a couple of minor continuity errors and polish a bit. It was a nicely uneventful flight until we landed and nobody came to the plane with steps or a jetty (that corridor thingy to connect the plane to the terminal) for perhaps 15 minutes. It was good for a laugh.
It took about 10 minutes to get through passport control. I looked at the queues, and the boarder staff and the high tech and thought, “This is what the Leave campaign call ‘Having no control over our boarders’?”
And then we collected a hire car and I drove to Telford. Where we found that we’d misunderstood the cost of the room. Our mistake, but OUCH!
The other OUCH! was that my grumbling tooth started shouting, so we went in search of dinner and a chemist. We found both at a 24-hour Asda.
I took a 12-hour ibruprofen before bed, but the pain woke me 4 hours later. I started to get really worried that the tooth was going to ruin the holiday, but I took paracetamol (yes, you can mix them for short periods) and managed to get back to sleep. And this morning the took is back to a gentle grumble, and small amounts of paracetamol are quite enough. I wonder if the pressure change on the plane upset it?
My son’s spent most of today with a friend, so I’ve continued my emergency read-through to chapter 27, over a quarter of the book and a little past the point my critique buddies have got to. Phew! And still no more missed bits, but more small errors fixed.
So hopefully tomorrow I can get well ahead. But now it’s dinner time.
