Come along for the ride!!

Sunday, January 27, 2008

Back To The Future


Yesterday morning, we were blessed with a bit of a lie-in. Well, 7.30am is a lie-in in our house.

As the children were playing on our bedroom floor, M and I discussed what to do with our Saturday. We narrowed it down to a choice of two things.

One: Go to Brick Lane market (in East London), get some filled bagels from the Bagel Bakery, which serves beautifully filled bagels 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and then on to Bethnal Green museum for children in the afternoon

OR

Two: Go to Wimbledon dog track boot sale for the morning, Northcote Road (SW11) Antique’s Market (to find something for my Dad’s birthday) and then home for roast chicken, “You’ve Been Framed” (Joseph’s favourite), leaving enough time to make “Grandad” a card.

We would normally run the options past the children but this time, selfishly or not, we didn’t. We opted for option two. So we swung into action, had breakfast and was at the boot sale within an hour and a half.

The reason I am telling you this is because, prior to having children – actually, prior even to being married – M and I loved to visit car boot sales. You know, one man’s junk is another man’s treasure and all that. Plus, in our culture of use it and throw it away, we always felt that buying “stuff” at car boot sales was a way of recycling.

(Now I feel I have justified buying old rubbish, I shall continue).

Visiting this market yesterday, reminded us why we loved them in the first place. The anticipation of finding something you’ve “always wanted” be it an old record, an antique leather chair, a huge gilt mirror, an old Victorian school type radiator in need of some attention (to name but a few of the things I saw) and when you do find something, the haggling Life of Brian style – 10 for that, you must be mad – even Joseph got in on the act when he spotted a Darth Vader light sabre which lit up and made the “real” noise.

“It’s a pound love,” the woman said.

Following a bit of prompting from me Joseph piped up, “can I give you 50p?”.

When she said yes and gave it to him plus change from his pound coin, his day was made. Annabel then found a talking Barney the Dinosaur for the same amount and pulled the same trick on the poor unsuspecting stall owner but the find of the day was M finding an intact (albeit rather tatty) copy of Mrs Beeton’s Cookery Book for the grand sum of, yes, you’ve guessed it, 50p.

50p?

The same book is fetching £85 online, so as you might imagine, she was rather pleased.

Anyway, I suppose the details aren’t all that important (or interesting for you) but the point is, we did something that we used to do before becoming parents, introduced the children to it and we think they enjoyed it, so it bodes well for going again.


Today was my Dad’s birthday and we all went out for something to eat. Always enjoying eating at new places, we went straight back to the gastro-pub we ate in for my Mum’s birthday only two weeks previous and, although our roast beef was a little on the cool side, we were all stuffed and generally had a very enjoyable afternoon.

We arrived outside our house just before 5pm and, as we got out of the car, we realised that it was still light and that spring really is on its way. “The nights are drawing out”, as my Mum would say and had she said it today she would have been absolutely right.

Back in November, I mentioned our neighbour’s boiler outlet making a very strange noise when it “fired up”. This morning it “fired up” at 4am, waking M and me, so I wasn’t pleased.


Statements I want to finish with are:

Thanks for being so good this weekend kids – it was a real pleasure.

Foxes yelping in the night are bloody annoying.

Noisy boilers are even more annoying.

Happy birthday Dad.

I am extremely tired.



Beautiful afternoon sky



Beautiful evening sky

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