Mmmmmmm.....cuuuurrryyyyyyyyy

Our first night in the UK turned out to be a later night that we had been expecting. We were both dragging at about 10pm, but Audrey arrived about then and we kind of got our second wind at that point which was bad from a jet lag perspective! Consequently we slept until about 10am after beating both alarms into submission when they screeched to life at 6am. My eyes were firmly superglued shut and it was only by extreme force of will did I manage to waken up at all.

I would have happily have stayed in bed, not least because getting up meant braving the arctic temperatures of the mother-in-laws house! I swear that I saw polar bears throwing on jumpers and complaining about the cold as I ran across the tundra to the bathroom! I made Stephen bleed the radiators in an attempt to get a little more heat into the place. Our room is above the garage so it's always colder, and it has a tiny radiator...and the tiny radiator was only lukewarm for the bottom third...small wonder that I had lost the feeling in my toes! Sadly bleeding them only took the temperature from -40C to -30C so I'm making mental notes to try and plan future visits during the summer months when we stand a fighting chance of getting the temperatures to around -5C.

We went down to the Town Centre shopping mall after breakfast. I needed things from Boots (shampoo and more moisturiser as my skin now appeared to be falling off) and got to the front of the queue to discover that the credit card system nationwide had gone down. Bugger! "Can you pay in cash?" she enquired. "I'll need to come back unless you take US Dollars" I replied. Thankfully I was able to take a loan from Bank of June in order to pay as I had a purse full of greenbacks and credit cards and nothing else!!

We went out for a curry on Friday. Nothing beats a good Scottish curry I tell you! We had pakora - fantastic! I would happily have had that for starter and main. They were SO good! The service was good and slow too...time to digest between courses as opposed to the "Ready. Set. Scarf." thing that we have in the US. The drinks order turned into a comedy of errors though. I had forgotten that wine comes in white or red only and had asked the waitress if they did Pinot Grigio. She said they did, and brought me over the wine list to look at. They did PG, but only in bottles so I changed the order to 2 glasses of house white (one for me, one for June). About 5 minutes later the waiter appeared with the lager for Stephen, the coke for John and 2 BOTTLES of Pinot Grigio.... Needless to say we sent it back. When we wanted a refill they came back with 2 lagers... I was beginning to worry that our waiter was actually Manuel and Basil Fawlty was in the kitchen trying to revive the drunk chef!