E & A in the UK: Tuesday

Traffic isn’t too bad on the way down to Manchester. We get caught up a bit in rush hour traffic around Leeds, and then again on the M60 around Manchester, but before we know it we’re pulling into the airport and frantically gesturing at signs pointing us to the short-stay parking lot. It’s weirdly empty.

We go into Terminal 2 and sit in front of the big arrivals exit. The only people in the terminal are bleary-eyed workers in high-vis. The board has only a single arrival for hours, an A330 from Orlando with my sister and my brother-in-law on it.

We both get a sandwich.

Erika and Austin emerge and we greet them with hugs and delight, and then head back to the car. There’s an abortive attempt to fit the suitcases in the boot with Ghyll, but they sort of fall on top of him as soon as we start moving, trapping him between the back of the bench seat and the jumper cables. He whines. We leave the multistory and pay £12 for the pleasure of a 40 minutes’ stay. I now understand why the car park is so empty.

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Manchester is sunny and bright and a little windy. Judging by the smell on the breeze, the entire population of the city is high. I guess 11am on a Tuesday is a good time for that kind of thing. We get a coffee and a donut at Tim Hortons and stand around in the shadow of some tall building while a group of kids count passersby for a school project. An old lady shuffles past and makes smalltalk with Sam about Ghyll.

We move on to Afflecks. We’ve been before, Sam and I, and have hearty memories of papier-mâché art in the hallways and hole-in-the-wall cassette tape shops. We take turns trying on those tiny glasses that Venjent wears. We scroll through a shop selling irreverent t-shirts, reading things like “The worst day of fishing beats the best day of withdrawing from heroin in jail” or “I AM FISH MAN” or with pictures of David Mitchell as Mark Corrigan from Peep Show.

It feels like all of these t-shirts are just memes in real life. I look for a “i herd u liek mudkipz” one but come up empty.

Ghyll makes a friend on the second floor, a shopkeeper from one of the adjacent stalls with a little spaniel that keeps rolling over on its back in an extremely cute way. The owner is effusive about Ghyll, who has sort of looked a bit bemused the whole time, only occasionally poking his head under a stool or a low table looking for snacks someone might have inadvertently dropped years ago.

After Affleck’s we head to Bab for lunch. It’s ostensibly a kebab place but has that kind of 2010s urban millennial vibe. Red Stripe and Neck Oil on tap kind of place. The food is very good; the man brings Ghyll a couple of treats and then Ghyll spends the rest of lunch sort of standing around in the background looking forlorn and hungry for grilled lamb.

The drive home is uneventful, but by the time we're on the A19 I've started to point out local landmarks, sharing touchstones with visitors in a way that I've (secretly) rehearsed dozens of times. First Leake Church, then the industrial vistas of Teesside, the first sign for Wingate. “This is Station Town; this is the traffic-calming measure; this is the butcher’s; this is my GP practice; this is our estate; that house at the top of the hill with the solar panels is us.”

Erika and Austin make wonderful houseguests: they make themselves right at home, come loaded with a plastic bag full of tiny bottles of Bombay Sapphire, and immediately ask to head back out to pick up a case of beer. Now That’s What I Call Priorities.

We grab a couple cases of Budweiser and then pop to the chip shop for a couple of cod’n’chips. They’re sort of lukewarm by the time we get home but it doesn’t take long for them to disappear.

Then, exhausted, we turn in for bed.

A whirlwind couple of days in Florida for my sister's engagement party: therefore a whirlwind blogpost to match.

Wednesday: Terrific flight down on Virgin Atlantic, due in part to a mostly-empty plane and in part to VA's tendency to sweat the details (e.g.: an exhortation on the infotainment system to use the toilet before The Captain Illuminates the Fasten Seatbelt Sign Prior to Descent). Pick up a pickup from the rental place: the attendant in the multistory tells us to take whichever takes our fancy. A long drive up to Gainesville punctuated by (dubiously unpunctuated) Popeyes fried chicken.

Thursday: breakfast at the International House of Pancakes (mostly sugar + HFCS) and a trip to Lowes followed by spectating my mom and sister planting new flowers in raised beds in the backyard. Sweaty work indeed! Hop in the pool for a swim and remain there for nearly 4 hours. Dusk descends on drinks with family, ending in sudden exhaustion: to bed.

Friday: quiet morning listening to birds in hammocks (we're in the hammocks, not the birds). Off to Zaxby's: underwhelming, slightly nauseating. Start decorating for tomorrow's party; fill an arch of balloons with our breath. Feel woozy: back into the pool. Drop by REI for a cheeky browse and then get tacos with dad and his partner downtown. An old friend shows up in the evening and we catch up over: you guessed it more beers.

Saturday: up early to run up and down the stadium steps at the University of Florida. I don't realise it at the time but this will be the most thorough calf workout I will have had in a long time. Back home, last-minute flower prep before our future brother-in-law's family arrives. It turns out that, as expected, they're wonderful folks, full of kindness and love and ingenuity. My sister fits right in with them, and I can't wait for them to be family. While away the afternoon in the pool, do some light packing, then zonk out at the end of a fruitful day.

Sunday: back to Orlando, drop off the rental car, queue up for check-in. Delta does not live up to VA's standards. Short flight to Atlanta; watch Fargo. Faced with the prospect of a 7-hour connection, we take the MARTA into town and get an early dinner at Daddy D'z BBQ Joynt. It is heavenly: precisely the kind of food that I suspect British people lack the genes to make. Hobble on sore calves back to the airport for our flight back to Edinburgh.

Monday: drive home. Flat tyre! Torrential rainstorms until the exact moment that we re-enter England, after which clear skies and sunshine. Don't read too much into it.

Ghyll progress update

Everyone tells me that he’s getting bigger, but I’m not sure that I see it. In pictures of him from last month, he looks basically the same. But I can tell that he’s actually getting bigger because he can reach the edge of the countertop now, just barely. Give it another week or two and the whole countertop will be fair game. In a sort of escalating arms race of Mischief, I’m developing a sense for which objects, laid idly about a room, are catalysts for trouble. We’re getting better at tidying up after ourselves: not leaving cups around on the arm of the sofa, not leaving plastic bags near the edges of the counter, not leaving magazines unattended on the coffee table. Something we'd been meaning to do for a while but never with enough of a standing threat to do something about it.

He’s had his vaccines as well, which means that he’s allowed out and about among other folks and other dogs; he's generally interested in dogs but he wants to be best friends with every human he sees. He hasn’t figured out how to greet people (or other dogs) yet, so at the moment he just jumps up and chews on sleeves.

He’s also getting better with house-training; maybe 2/3 of the time he’ll quite happily make his own way downstairs to relieve himself in the garden. The first time he did it on his own we were very pleased. He still whines when we’re not around—especially when Sam leaves the room—but we’re told that he’ll grow out of it and develop a strong independent streak in the next couple of months, so we oughta enjoy the attention while we still have it.

Eric

Midmonth we had a visit from my second cousin (or first cousin once removed?) Eric, whom I’d last seen a few years ago at Family Day. He was on a tour of Europe over the summertime and was stopping through the UK near the end of his trip, so we took him out for some of the best that the North East has to offer: a jaunt up to the bothy at Haughtongreen, a takeaway from Wingate’s finest, and a trip up to Hadrian’s Wall and the Roman fort at Housesteads. As the sun set we stopped at a country pub for a pint of local ale to round the trip off. The following morning, Eric was bound for Scotland on an early train out of Durham—talk about a whirlwind tour.

Yamaha YBR

After doing our motorbike Compulsory Basic Training (CBT) back in July, we figured it was high time to get our hands on a 125cc motorbike (the only kind you’re allowed to ride with a CBT) and get practicing. Lots of folks are getting their bike licence at the moment, with the high price of fuel, so we had some trouble finding a decent-looking bike. 125s at competitive prices generally disappear within a couple of hours. By and by we found one for a great price up in Scotland, the owner a bit bemused that we offered to put a deposit down sight unseen. Only problem: it was up in Scotland.

Nevermind—we heeded Hokkaido’s informal motto, “Boys, be ambitious!” and struck off for Scotland with the intention of riding our new bike the 200-odd miles back to Wingate. No problemo.

Nerves elicited an uneasy sleep the night before; and on actually taking ownership of the bike, the first laps around the estate where the (erstwhile) owner lived were fraught ones. After half an hour of rickety shifts and undismissed indicators, however, we took to the open road and the prospect of a long trip home.

We took the trip in short stints at first: 15 minutes, then half an hour, then an hour of continuous riding at a time. Sam & I stayed on the phone while I rode, but as we took to the rolling hills of the Borders—no way we were taking the A1 home—signal cut in and out and left me alone with the buzz of the single-cylinder engine. Stopping for energy drinks in Whitburn, fuel in Peebles, Carter Bar for photos, and Woodburn for dinner, we rode out the sun and into the dark as only Northumberland is dark. Ghyll bore the long miles out better than any of us, causing only a minor stir at the pub over dinner despite having been forced to spend the whole day in the back of a car. Leaving the windy roads behind us, I gunned the engine, hopped onto the highways, and sprinted the last long stretch home.

In the office

At the end of the month, I headed down to Leeds for my second-ever day in the NHS Digital office. Last time I was there was back in February. While the pandemic has made a remote work convert of me, I always feel supremely productive when I'm in a big faceless environment. It's probably just the change of scenery.

After work we dropped into Editor's Draught for a couple of beers with the team. I don't think that meeting teammates for the first time in real life will ever feel quite normal; seeing someone you thought you knew face-to-face always reveals something else about them that doesn't come through over the camera—even if it's just that they're a lot taller than you thought they were. I'm sure you've read more thinkpieces about remote work than you'd care to consider so I'll leave it at that. We had a great time, though, so I'm already trying to plan out my next trip down, fuel prices permitting.

Awful road works on the A19 northbound on the way home, though, so from Thirsk to Yarm I was stuck on B-roads behind a Lithuanian lorry that evidently had a 20-mph speed limiter installed. Home very late.

Outdoors

Outside relatively little in August, owing at least in part to the heat. At the beginning of the month we took a trip out to Waskerley Reservoir with Ghyll to see how he'd like being out in the wild and lonely places that we like to frequent. We didn't go much further than 2km but that must have been a bit more than his little legs were ready for, so we fell back on training walks around Wingate for the rest of the month.

After a couple of weeks we got the sense that he'd developed a bit more stamina, so we brought him up Guisborough Moor, which he seemed to love. We even let him off the lead for a little while, and his strong puppy desire to be near us kept him from getting into too much trouble, even if he was a bit over-keen on eating sheep poo. A walk down Castle Eden Dene late in the month confirmed it: the pup loves the outdoors.

Besides that, our gym in Hartlepool was closed for refurbishment and my knee's been feeling a bit better, so I took back to the gravel tracks around my house for a bit of running, the first in a while. I'd like to get back to the Hartlepool parkrun, as well, but most Saturday mornings I'm so spent that I struggle to get out of bed at all.

Also got back out on the bicycle for a 25km trip around Peterlee—the first preparations for an attempt at the Coast-to-Coast ride from Whitehaven to Tyneside, tentatively scheduled in for May of next year. I've wanted to do Wainwright's Coast to Coast for a few years now but it requires two weeks to complete and I don't have that much PTO left—so doing the cycling version is, for the moment at least, an adequate substitute. Based on a 250km trip I did before leaving Hokkaido, I'm scheduling two days for the ride, which feels ambitious—hence the early start on training. More to come as plans develop.

The weather finally seems to have turned at the very end of the month: the first rains are starting to fall, the wind is picking up more often than not, the nights are getting cooler. After the hot, dry summer we had, it's a huge relief—even if it means I'm not as likely to get out on the motorbike. The days are getting shorter as well: we take a headlamp on our evening walks now. England's a weird country for the changing of the seasons; it gets dark before it gets cold, and daylight saving time knocks you for a loop. If you're not paying attention, changes in the climate sort of sneak up on you.