Today has been a very quiet and uneventful day - the usual Thursday! We took the kids to college and uni and then went and did our shopping in Kettering. The plan had been to call and have a drink at The Royal Oak to celebrate almost the last shopping day of the year (any excuse!) but we decided not to in the end, as we are out tomorrow night and then it's Berlin next week.
It was a good job we went straight home as Sophie called to ask us to pick her up at 1pm, right when I was in the middle of wrapping some presents! We hurriedly changed and went to get her through the murky, grey and horrible afternoon and called into the bank before heading home. I changed some money into euros...our trip is getting very close!
Friday 16 December
Mike went to college for his last day before the Christmas holidays, but Sophie had the day off as she had tickets to see The 1975 at the O2 in London with Daisy and Laura this evening.
We awoke to fog and it didn't really lift all day. We had a relaxed morning and we set off at 1pm to get more diesel and pick up Sophie's friends. Normally they would have stayed overnight near the O2 but Sophie is working tomorrow and with Christmas so near, their budgets were a bit tight! I had offered to drive them and to thank me, Daisy and Laura had bought us a bottle of wine, which was lovely!
We made good time on the journey and arrived at the O2 at 3.30pm. I had arranged another Just Park space, this time at the Holiday Inn Express about 20 minutes walk away. It was £7.50 as opposed to the £25 that the O2 were charging! We dropped the girls off, found our space and walked back. There is a lot of roadworks going on at the moment, on the approach road to the huge venue and I imagined it would be fun getting out later in the evening! There was a small Christmas market going on near the entrance but we managed to resist the lure of the food stalls!
We went and had a look at the cinema first as we had seen that the film "Allied" was showing at 9pm. It was a bit later than we wanted but there was not much else on offer...I didn't fancy the new Star Wars film!
We booked tickets and then had a couple of drinks at All Bar One, right at the entrance to the O2. The noise level inside was tremendous, so loud that we could barely hear the barman so we took our drinks outside and managed to grab a table where it was a bit quieter.
We spent a pleasant couple of hours sipping our drinks and watching the arena fill up with mainly teenage girls, some of whom were very excited indeed! I sent a text to Sophie and discovered that, as I feared, Laura had taken them all into central London to get a book out of the library. She had left a copy of a book she needed at her student flat and had forgotten to take it home with her. She thought there was a copy at her uni library so the three girls had made a fruitless trip into the city to get it, only the library didn't have the copy any more...Sophie was furious because it cost her £10 for the underground fare, an expense she can't really justify at the moment. I had told her to let Daisy and Laura go and she could have stayed with us, but I suppose she felt she didn't have a choice.
After our drink, Keith and I went to Garfunkel's for a bite to eat - fish and chips for him, steak and ale pie for me followed by desserts of apple crumble and trifle - and then we had a walk by the river for half an hour to get some fresh air and see London all lit up.
There weren't many other people walking along this stretch of the river but we carried on and walked right behind the O2. The building we'd seen being erected the last time we were here turned out to be a new hotel - the Inter-Continental. It looked beautiful. Although we could see people about next to the arena and the hotel, there was a high fence separating the riverside walk from this area and I started to feel a bit nervous as the path was very quiet. I didn't know if we could get back to the O2 by carrying on the way we were going so we decided to turn back. As soon as we did this we saw a whole host of people, including a petite lady out on her own for a walk!
We had an hour to kill before the film started and luckily we found a comfortable sofa to relax on. The adverts and trailers started at 9pm and the theatre was very quiet with not many people watching at all. I think everyone was at the Star Wars showing! We both enjoyed the film but Keith and I thought that Brad Pitt's performance was a bit flat. However, it was very enjoyable and well worth seeing.
The film didn't end until about 11.20pm by which time the girls had seen their concert. We arranged to meet at Starbucks at the entrance and then had a very fast walk back to the car as my parking time ran out at midnight! The traffic was indeed as bad as I feared and I was really glad that we'd parked further away. We managed to join the main road we needed very quickly and were soon on the M11 and then the M25. I think I may have been done for speeding as a camera flashed me (and probably other cars as well) on one of the gantries. It was showing a 50mph limit and I was doing just over 60 so that will be an unpleasant shock when we return from Berlin next week...
The rest of the journey was dominated by thick fog and I certainly couldn't go very fast at all. It was 2am by the time we got home and bed was a very welcome prospect!
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