Catch up blog

A lot has been happening here…and here are the highlights!

Newbury Comedy Festival....every night for a week!! We had festival passes (£60 each) which meant we could book up and see whatever we wanted, and get 10% of drinks at the bus bar! Excellent! We made full use of this and saw 1 or 2 acts every night! My highlights were - Ed Byrne (hillarious!!), Brendan Burns Bad Film Club (basically we watched Roadhouse (feat Patrick Swayze) which is a bad film and the 3 comedians had pointers and mikes and pointed out all the mistakes and funny bits! It was hilarious!! Swayzeeeeeeeeeee!), Arthur Smith (of Grumpy Old Man fame - again very funny), Mark Thomas (political humour about protesting – much funnier than it sounds!), One Big Improv with Phil Jupitus (Carl got one of his suggestions (Tomb stoning) mentioned -well it was his birthday! The comedians didn’t seem to know what it was though!) and Adam Hills (Ozzy guy who is up and coming and very funny!) We also saw Ardel O'Hanlon (from Father Ted - not as funny as we thought he would be), Susie Essman (from Curb Your Enthusiasm – which I’d never seen. She was OK. Her routine was very ‘down with men’ stuff that’s been done before), Trevor Lock (a bizarre, contradictory, kinda sleazy guy! I also managed to get picked on by him! I was sitting about halfway back in a small theatre when I blew my nose...and heckled him! Yes, I heckled him with my nose!! Apparently it sounded like a clown car horn, and he asked me if I was hiding a small clown and his car. At this point I was very red and crying with laughter, as was Lou sitting next to me. He harped on about it for a while (not that long really, but it felt like ages!) before saying "Oh, I like you!" Probably because I was laughing a lot! He had picked on a couple of girls at the front basically asking if they were prostitutes! Nice!! So, my advice is, don't even blow your nose in case you get picked on!!)

End of Term ‘do’ – A BBQ and crazy golf at ‘The Sun In The Wood’ – and no rain!

The Floods - it was pretty bad here. On the last day of term we had 2 months of rain in 14 hours!! It was raining heavily and just when you thought it couldn’t rain any harder – it did! I got a phone call from Carl at lunchtime (he was at home that day as we had an electrician in) saying the water was nearly in the house...and we live at an altitude of 150m! The water was running off our garden and the garden of the house behind us who are the top of the hill, waterfalling down our steps and forming a lake on out patio as it had nowhere to go! Carl ended up 'swimming' around in it trying to find a manhole cover (there isn't one) before ripping the guttering off the wall and wedging up the fence so the water could get between the houses (there is about a 20cm max gap between our house and next doors garage) Carl videoed the waterfall (which I wouldn't have believed until I saw it) and the state of out flooded sunroom. The water was 1 or 2 cms away from getting the house! Scary stuff!!
Sadly, Ross and Nicky got flooded. To make it worse, they’d only moved a week earlier. Loads of their stuff was still in boxes in their flooded garage. Carl, Dave and I drove straight over as soon as we spoke to Nicky. Then Ross and Lou arrived followed by Putin. Travel around the area was a nightmare, with trains not running (Newbury train station looked like a canal), flooded roads, abandoned cars etc. We then spent about 5 1/2 hours sweeping/bucketing out all the water (as drains were full and water coming out of them to start with!) What a nightmare! Lou and I went to get chips at about 9.30 (I think!) and they didn’t believe we wanted 25 portions of chips!!

Family – been up to see the family a few times – but my nephew still can’t say my name! He says lots of things (especially car and lorry – at every one you pass in the street!) I thought I could trick him into saying my name by saying words and him repeating them, but when I got to ‘Auntie Ray’, he just said ‘Yeah!” He is very funny though, and I watched in great amusement as he repeatedly ran over Paul in his car!

Apart from that, we've seen the new Harry Potter film (which I enjoyed), I've read the new Harry Potter book (which I now need to read again! It was great!), we've been researching new kitchens and trying to tame our wild garden (Oh the joys of owning a house!)