A Busy Month...

Allen and Judy, my thoughts are with you...

It’s been a bit of time since the last post and it’s been a pretty busy time with so much going on. Spring has sprung, and we’ve been having some glorious weather (for England) and with daylight savings keeping it daylight til around 9.30pm each night it has been too good to pass up.

This has ranged from a great number of things that have included:

- Walking the Thames (or part of it) - see below.
- Drinks after work with the work crew, which had us all on a small pub crawl one Friday night. These are led by one fellow at work who will find some battle in history where the English beat the French, and usually only last for about five pubs. The funniest part is that they’re all within about 2 city blocks - there are just that many pubs about!
- Spending the afternoon round at Husky n Kels with some others for an afternoon of food n drink to watch the FA Cup final, before heading in to Soho to join Karyn, Marty n Colin at a Thai restaurant, to be joined later by Shar n Okanya in the nearby pub. The pic here is (the backs of) Shar n Karyn doing some late night "window shopping" shortly after we’d left the pub.
- Sunday lunch in the sun at Covent Garden with Shar and Okanya, that continued on till all hours down in Clapham.
- Being back on the bikes now and enjoying the spring sunshine through the countryside north of London. Only one drawback with this time of spring - copping a bee sting to the side of my head! Thankfully the earphones of my ipod kept it out of my ear as it flew straight into me to be caught between my head and my helmet strap. Anyway, it’s amazing the little villages you come across when out on the lanes of country England (see pic on the left. Click on it to see the full pic and read the village name on the sign).
- Football matches and trips - more on that later.
- Last Sunday afternoon in the sunshine on the banks of the Thames down by Hammersmith Bridge (behind me in the pic on the right) with Shar, Adam n Juliana. Drinks, sunshine, people, boats on the river - all good. Juliana and I headed off for dinner after the others had left with the sun going down.
- Lazy evenings down in Parsons Green at the White Horse pub or in the Green opposite the pub. This included one evening after a session of NSA for my back, where after a text invite (and being sort of in the neighbourhood), I rode through Chiswick and Hammersmith to spend the evening on the Green with Shar, Charlotte, Stella, Jesse and Juliana in the sun before heading across the road to the White Horse. Pints, chicken burgers fresh off their bbq and plenty of laughs including Shar and myself convincing the rest about drop bears. What made this more comical is that while Charlotte is French and Juliana is Brazillian, Stella and Jesse are fellow Aussies and hadn’t heard of our Drop Bears...
- A night out in Clapham with Shar, Katriens, Juliana, Okanya, Charlotte and a few of Juliana’s housemates. Kicking off after work on a Friday night with dinner at Lost Society we went on into the night at the Artesian Well and beyond. Truly a multicultural night considering that of our group there was only one nationality that had more than one representative - a Kiwi, a Kenyan, a Brazilian, a Belgian, a Frenchwoman, a Swede and finally two Aussies. That’s Juliana, Tobias, myself and Karen.
- An evening with Row at a pub in Borough Market to catch up after she’s returned from a 3 month expedition through South America.
- To last night’s catch up with cousin Zara and Jarrett with some friends of theirs. This was on a boat moored on the Thames - Tatershalls Castle. An awesome set up, despite not having my sea-legs for much of the early part of the night and therefore spending a mix of my time both below and above deck. We headed on from here to a Turkish restaurant before heading home at around midnight...

These, of course, are really just the highlights as there’s been plenty more going on with life in general. I’ll kick off with one of the two main events of the month here, and will post the other shortly...