Carr Hill, Gateshead, UK. The night view was from N54.94835 W1.58215.
Janice and Graham's
I set out on my Suzuki Bandit 1200 from Henley-on-Thames to Gateshead on Friday to see my sister shortly after discovering that my bike panniers had been nicked when the garage was broken into a few weeks ago (there isn't a cause and effect relationship between suffering a break in and going to Gateshead, that's just my poor English). That was the second set of stuff I discovered missing just when I needed it. The three hundred odd miles took a bum numbing six hours and the temperature drop going north is quite noticeable. Even so I still managed to sweat enough for the dye in my leather jacket to leach into my nice cream Glastonbury T-shirt. Bugger!
Jan and Graham have kindly turfed the crap out of their garage to
allow space for my bike for the next few months. If I'm very lucky
Graham will clean it for me as well (I say this partly because I will
be bloody lucky and partly because I'm sure if he hadn't peddled me so
much drink I would have thought about cleaning it myself). Anyway, I
enclose an unhelpful photo taken from the bedroom window at 3am 
whilst somewhat drunk. You can't see the Tyne winding down below, you
can't see the view over beyond Newcastle, it's just rubbish.
More importantly than any of that, as you can see from the photo 
Jan is pregnant with twins. Amusingly, you can also see that Graham
is currently hobbling around on a stick having nipped a disc in his
back. Apparently the cat was sick as well. I'm sure Graham would
have looked more happy if he hadn't just spent half-an-hour trying to
get the voicemail for his phone working.
Jan is currently in the hospital twice a day having various scans and on top of that regular Doppler scans. The Dopplers scan are designed to measure the speed of blood in the umbilical cord which gives a view on how ready the foetus is to being born (at some point the blood flow will change direction!). Sadly, there appears to be some difficulty in doing the measurement (the things you're trying to measure move around a bit) and, worse, there is general disagreement between staff as to whether it's of any use at all anyway. Still, it's a key measurement they use to decide when to slice her up.
The Train Journey Home
The train journey home was fairly innocuous (I assume everyone's train gets delayed by the best part of an hour, all the tube lines directly between King's Cross and Paddington are normally closed and the Twyford train must always be 40 minutes late). I gave up after taking six hours to get to Twyford (about ten miles from Henley-on-Thames) and called up Helen's taxi service (recently returned from familial duties at Gatwick).
What was a bit of a shocker was getting into the station to buy the ticket and having a whopping £86 taken off me for the journey. No wonder no-one uses the railways anymore, the flight back from Paris to London is only £40-odd.
Copyright 2002 Ian Fitchet. All rights reserved.