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Nov. 21st, 2005 05:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annwfynFirst of all…
Ahem.
Anyway. Yes. My weekend…
Friday Night
The Plan
Tired, but relieved that the long week is over, Sally staggers out of Canada Water tube station, in to the warm and loving arms of her caring and supportive boyfriend. Happily, the two head off to their shiney new home, before heading out for a nice romantic evening. Maybe dinner at a nice restaurant? After some quality time together, the happy couple meet up with their good friends, Jon and Ginnie, outside Surrey Quays Cinema at 10.15 pm for the 10.30 pm showing of ‘Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire’. By 10.30 pm the cinema is likely to be a bit quieter, and the four friends can enjoy the film in a slightly more adult environment.
The Reality
Tired, and in a vile mood from a bitch of a day which finished up with one of her workmates explaining how the problems with the NHS all stem from ‘those foreigners being allowed in’ because ‘well, people like that just don’t understand things like hygiene, do they?’*, Sally staggers off the tube. It turns out that Jeremiah’s tube has been delayed, so Sally settles down to wait for him. Twenty minutes later, jez staggers off his tube, knackered and even grouchier.
The date seems like a bad idea. At least there is a lovely big bath at the new house. Sally and jez decide to head back there. Jez settles into the bath, and Sally does a quick run back to the old house to pick up some bits and pieces before ordering in a curry.
The evening improves a bit, and at 10 pm Sally and jez head out to the cinema to meet Jon and Ginnie. Sadly, by the time they get there, the entire cinema has filled up with energetic teenagers, and the 10.30 pm screening of Harry Potter is entirely sold out.
Jon and jez suggest waiting for the 11.30 pm showing. Sally reminds people that there is a bed being delivered at 9.30 am the next day, and then she’s meant to be driving to Salisbury. She’s not doing that on no sleep.
Everyone agrees to give up and go home.
Saturday
The Plan
Sally wakes up at 9 am, possibly by the doorbell ringing as the mattress she ordered and paid for on Wednesday from Bedworld is delivered. She lets the delivery men in, apologising for still being in her pyjamas and then supervises as they carry the mattress up to her bedroom.
As soon as they’ve left she grabs a quick shower, gets breakfast, and waits for the nice men from ‘And So To Bed’. They are due to arrive around 10 am. They arrive and carry the bed up to the bedroom before assembling the bed and heading off. This leaves Sally with a couple of hours to move some more bits and pieces across from the old house and do a bit of a food and bed linen shop before meeting Ginnie at noon to head off down to Salisbury. Sally, jez and Ginnie are meeting up with Elle there for an afternoon pottering around Salisbury, seeing the sights, and having a nice dinner before meeting up with Ginnie’s family in the evening for ’My Mother Said’.
The evening ends with the entire party heading off to Ginnie’s parents’ house for the night.
The Reality
Sally wakes up at 8 am, unable to sleep and mildly hyper. She potters around the house for a while, and surprisingly manages to get an hour of university work done before waking up jez with the loving words of ‘the bed gets delivered today! You’ve got to get up!’
Jez gets up, and he and Sally have breakfast. And wait.
And wait.
And wait.
At 11 am the nice men from ‘And So To Bed’ arrive with the bed to be delivered. They carry it upstairs, chat, and begin to assemble the bed.
They discover that this is impossible. It appears that the boxes they have in their van only contain half a bed. They say cheerfully "well, there’s nothing we can do. You better call ‘And So To Bed’. We’re just a delivery service. They’ll sort out the delivery of the rest of your bed" and head off.
Sally inhales.
Sally is nice and polite.
Sally calls ‘And So To Bed’ in a panic. They are, to be fair, very sweet. Fifteen minutes later they have located the missing parts of my bed and are trying to get hold of someone to deliver the aforementioned parts.
Jez decides we might as well call Ginnie and get her to come over provide company. Ginnie arrives, and she and jez start playing ‘crib’. Sally sits on the sofa and tries to get some more university work done. This begins to turn into ‘staring at a bit of paper and muttering “where is the mattress”’ after a while.
At about 1 pm Sally decides to call the mattress people and check where they are. She discovers that the one number she has for Bedworld feeds through to a recorded message saying ‘this office is currently closed. Please call back on Monday’.
Sally begins to panic.
At 2 pm Sally texts Elle to let her know that the afternoon excursion to Salisbury isn’t going to happen, and it’s looking more like a 6 pm meet up in time for the theatre.
At 4 pm, with no sign of a mattress and a bed being stuck in bad traffic in the Chelsea area (the man from ‘And So To Bed’ says this to me a lot), Sally, jez and Ginnie realise that if they don’t leave soon, there will be no play.
But if they leave and the mattress shows, then there’s possibly going to be more complications of the really headachey variety.
In the end jez volunteers to stay behind and wait for a mattress and wait for the bed, especially as the bed is en route.
At 4.30 pm, as Sally and Ginnie drive out of London, ‘And So To Bed’ calls. The truck drivers won’t deliver the bed that day. It’s getting late and they aren’t meant to be working past 5 pm. They will deliver Monday morning. There is still no sign of the mattress.
At least there’s the theatre, right?
Well, if there wasn’t the rugby at Twickenham, causing major hold ups, serious black ice on the roads, and at least one road closure en route to Salisbury.
In the end Sally and Ginnie just make it, scrambling into the theatre at Ginnie’s family start to queue for their seats.
The play turns out to be quite interesting, if a little overly forceful in some of the things it is trying to say. The drive back to Southampton is a screaming nightmare. The fog is vile, the roads are awful.
Poor Elle had to do the drive alone while following Sally, due to having driven down separately, which must have been worse.
Finally all arrive in Dibden Purlieu, just outside Southampton, where Ginnie’s lovely father provides hot drinks and food before bed.
“Surely,” Sally thinks, “everything which could go wrong has now gone wrong? What else could happen?”
Foolish, foolish girl!
Sunday
The Plan: A
Sally and jez rise from a comfortable slumber and are cooked a delicious roast lunch by Ginnie’s mother, hanging out with Ginnie, Elle and Ginnie’s family before heading off towards Gloucester to pick up the kittens.
Kittens are collected around 5.30 pm, and Sally and jez then drive back to London, getting home around 8 ish.
The Plan: B
Jez gets the train down to Southampton for 12 noon, and is collected by Ginnie’s Dad so he can at least have a nice lunch before heading off to collect the kittens with Sally.
The Reality
Jez phones at 11 am to let everyone know that there’s been a bit of a train crisis. Mass engineering works, combined with a fatality on the line has stopped the entirety of South East trains south of Woking. There is a bus service running, but that has transformed the journey time from London to Southampton from an hour and a half to a minimum of three hours.
Jez is currently on a train which is stationary just outside of Woking. Woking is about an hour and a half away from Dibden Purlieu.
Conversation ensues. Various solutions are mooted, all of which are complex. How on earth is jez going to get to Southampton? How badly does this screw the lunch plans?
In the end Sally decides that she can see the writing on the wall. She takes one last mournful sniff of the glorious odour of roasting potatoes and says she’ll go grab jez now and just head onward to Gloucester. She’s got directions to the nice cat owning lady’s house from the ring road, so it’ll be fine.
You know, it would have been fine had the nice lady actually lived in Gloucester instead of Cheltenham. And it would have probably been better if I’d realised that I’d got the wrong town before we got there.
It would also have been better had I been able to get in touch with the nice cat lady to let her know that we’d be turning up earlier than expected as we’d had to ditch lunch, so she had waited in instead of heading out for the afternoon.
However, on the plus side we saw an amazing landscape on the way there (a valley filled up with mist, with the hilltops rising up like islands from a silver sea) and had quite a nice dinner in TGI Fridays while waiting for Debbie (the cat lady) so it wasn’t all bad.
The drive back was a bit of a nightmare (black ice, bad visibility, bad traffic, mewling cats) but we made it back safe. The house was warm, Ryan had loaned us a bed and I was ready to switch to the first person, it seems. Either way, the story ends happily, with kittens, a warm house, and no more travelling. But that was my weekend.
The bed and mattress arrived this morning. I’ve still no idea why the mattress was late, and I feel the mattress company were being more than a tad unreasonable assuming that someone would be in. As it was, I’d grovelled at the lovelyksirafai who was willing to sit in the house this morning as she is off work on holiday this week, but that isn’t the point.
Ach well. At least the bed is here now, the cats are happy and settling in, and jez and I are due to see Harry Potter this evening.
But my god, it’s been a bit of a weekend.
And never use Bedworld.net. Never. Ever.
Pigdog scum.
* I’m still not sure how to respond to comments like this, by the way. They are relatively common, and I’m starting to find them a bit offensive.
NEVER BUY ANYTHING FROM http://www.bedworld.net
Ahem.
Anyway. Yes. My weekend…
Friday Night
The Plan
Tired, but relieved that the long week is over, Sally staggers out of Canada Water tube station, in to the warm and loving arms of her caring and supportive boyfriend. Happily, the two head off to their shiney new home, before heading out for a nice romantic evening. Maybe dinner at a nice restaurant? After some quality time together, the happy couple meet up with their good friends, Jon and Ginnie, outside Surrey Quays Cinema at 10.15 pm for the 10.30 pm showing of ‘Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire’. By 10.30 pm the cinema is likely to be a bit quieter, and the four friends can enjoy the film in a slightly more adult environment.
The Reality
Tired, and in a vile mood from a bitch of a day which finished up with one of her workmates explaining how the problems with the NHS all stem from ‘those foreigners being allowed in’ because ‘well, people like that just don’t understand things like hygiene, do they?’*, Sally staggers off the tube. It turns out that Jeremiah’s tube has been delayed, so Sally settles down to wait for him. Twenty minutes later, jez staggers off his tube, knackered and even grouchier.
The date seems like a bad idea. At least there is a lovely big bath at the new house. Sally and jez decide to head back there. Jez settles into the bath, and Sally does a quick run back to the old house to pick up some bits and pieces before ordering in a curry.
The evening improves a bit, and at 10 pm Sally and jez head out to the cinema to meet Jon and Ginnie. Sadly, by the time they get there, the entire cinema has filled up with energetic teenagers, and the 10.30 pm screening of Harry Potter is entirely sold out.
Jon and jez suggest waiting for the 11.30 pm showing. Sally reminds people that there is a bed being delivered at 9.30 am the next day, and then she’s meant to be driving to Salisbury. She’s not doing that on no sleep.
Everyone agrees to give up and go home.
Saturday
The Plan
Sally wakes up at 9 am, possibly by the doorbell ringing as the mattress she ordered and paid for on Wednesday from Bedworld is delivered. She lets the delivery men in, apologising for still being in her pyjamas and then supervises as they carry the mattress up to her bedroom.
As soon as they’ve left she grabs a quick shower, gets breakfast, and waits for the nice men from ‘And So To Bed’. They are due to arrive around 10 am. They arrive and carry the bed up to the bedroom before assembling the bed and heading off. This leaves Sally with a couple of hours to move some more bits and pieces across from the old house and do a bit of a food and bed linen shop before meeting Ginnie at noon to head off down to Salisbury. Sally, jez and Ginnie are meeting up with Elle there for an afternoon pottering around Salisbury, seeing the sights, and having a nice dinner before meeting up with Ginnie’s family in the evening for ’My Mother Said’.
The evening ends with the entire party heading off to Ginnie’s parents’ house for the night.
The Reality
Sally wakes up at 8 am, unable to sleep and mildly hyper. She potters around the house for a while, and surprisingly manages to get an hour of university work done before waking up jez with the loving words of ‘the bed gets delivered today! You’ve got to get up!’
Jez gets up, and he and Sally have breakfast. And wait.
And wait.
And wait.
At 11 am the nice men from ‘And So To Bed’ arrive with the bed to be delivered. They carry it upstairs, chat, and begin to assemble the bed.
They discover that this is impossible. It appears that the boxes they have in their van only contain half a bed. They say cheerfully "well, there’s nothing we can do. You better call ‘And So To Bed’. We’re just a delivery service. They’ll sort out the delivery of the rest of your bed" and head off.
Sally inhales.
Sally is nice and polite.
Sally calls ‘And So To Bed’ in a panic. They are, to be fair, very sweet. Fifteen minutes later they have located the missing parts of my bed and are trying to get hold of someone to deliver the aforementioned parts.
Jez decides we might as well call Ginnie and get her to come over provide company. Ginnie arrives, and she and jez start playing ‘crib’. Sally sits on the sofa and tries to get some more university work done. This begins to turn into ‘staring at a bit of paper and muttering “where is the mattress”’ after a while.
At about 1 pm Sally decides to call the mattress people and check where they are. She discovers that the one number she has for Bedworld feeds through to a recorded message saying ‘this office is currently closed. Please call back on Monday’.
Sally begins to panic.
At 2 pm Sally texts Elle to let her know that the afternoon excursion to Salisbury isn’t going to happen, and it’s looking more like a 6 pm meet up in time for the theatre.
At 4 pm, with no sign of a mattress and a bed being stuck in bad traffic in the Chelsea area (the man from ‘And So To Bed’ says this to me a lot), Sally, jez and Ginnie realise that if they don’t leave soon, there will be no play.
But if they leave and the mattress shows, then there’s possibly going to be more complications of the really headachey variety.
In the end jez volunteers to stay behind and wait for a mattress and wait for the bed, especially as the bed is en route.
At 4.30 pm, as Sally and Ginnie drive out of London, ‘And So To Bed’ calls. The truck drivers won’t deliver the bed that day. It’s getting late and they aren’t meant to be working past 5 pm. They will deliver Monday morning. There is still no sign of the mattress.
At least there’s the theatre, right?
Well, if there wasn’t the rugby at Twickenham, causing major hold ups, serious black ice on the roads, and at least one road closure en route to Salisbury.
In the end Sally and Ginnie just make it, scrambling into the theatre at Ginnie’s family start to queue for their seats.
The play turns out to be quite interesting, if a little overly forceful in some of the things it is trying to say. The drive back to Southampton is a screaming nightmare. The fog is vile, the roads are awful.
Poor Elle had to do the drive alone while following Sally, due to having driven down separately, which must have been worse.
Finally all arrive in Dibden Purlieu, just outside Southampton, where Ginnie’s lovely father provides hot drinks and food before bed.
“Surely,” Sally thinks, “everything which could go wrong has now gone wrong? What else could happen?”
Foolish, foolish girl!
Sunday
The Plan: A
Sally and jez rise from a comfortable slumber and are cooked a delicious roast lunch by Ginnie’s mother, hanging out with Ginnie, Elle and Ginnie’s family before heading off towards Gloucester to pick up the kittens.
Kittens are collected around 5.30 pm, and Sally and jez then drive back to London, getting home around 8 ish.
The Plan: B
Jez gets the train down to Southampton for 12 noon, and is collected by Ginnie’s Dad so he can at least have a nice lunch before heading off to collect the kittens with Sally.
The Reality
Jez phones at 11 am to let everyone know that there’s been a bit of a train crisis. Mass engineering works, combined with a fatality on the line has stopped the entirety of South East trains south of Woking. There is a bus service running, but that has transformed the journey time from London to Southampton from an hour and a half to a minimum of three hours.
Jez is currently on a train which is stationary just outside of Woking. Woking is about an hour and a half away from Dibden Purlieu.
Conversation ensues. Various solutions are mooted, all of which are complex. How on earth is jez going to get to Southampton? How badly does this screw the lunch plans?
In the end Sally decides that she can see the writing on the wall. She takes one last mournful sniff of the glorious odour of roasting potatoes and says she’ll go grab jez now and just head onward to Gloucester. She’s got directions to the nice cat owning lady’s house from the ring road, so it’ll be fine.
You know, it would have been fine had the nice lady actually lived in Gloucester instead of Cheltenham. And it would have probably been better if I’d realised that I’d got the wrong town before we got there.
It would also have been better had I been able to get in touch with the nice cat lady to let her know that we’d be turning up earlier than expected as we’d had to ditch lunch, so she had waited in instead of heading out for the afternoon.
However, on the plus side we saw an amazing landscape on the way there (a valley filled up with mist, with the hilltops rising up like islands from a silver sea) and had quite a nice dinner in TGI Fridays while waiting for Debbie (the cat lady) so it wasn’t all bad.
The drive back was a bit of a nightmare (black ice, bad visibility, bad traffic, mewling cats) but we made it back safe. The house was warm, Ryan had loaned us a bed and I was ready to switch to the first person, it seems. Either way, the story ends happily, with kittens, a warm house, and no more travelling. But that was my weekend.
The bed and mattress arrived this morning. I’ve still no idea why the mattress was late, and I feel the mattress company were being more than a tad unreasonable assuming that someone would be in. As it was, I’d grovelled at the lovely
ksirafai who was willing to sit in the house this morning as she is off work on holiday this week, but that isn’t the point.Ach well. At least the bed is here now, the cats are happy and settling in, and jez and I are due to see Harry Potter this evening.
But my god, it’s been a bit of a weekend.
And never use Bedworld.net. Never. Ever.
Pigdog scum.
* I’m still not sure how to respond to comments like this, by the way. They are relatively common, and I’m starting to find them a bit offensive.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-11-21 06:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-21 06:25 pm (UTC)Maybe by telling them that they are a bigoted asshole? Maybe by informing them that most of these 'foreigners' are simply from colonies that britain once ruled and its their chickens come home to roost.
Or, possibly the best way is handing them a tic-tac or some gum as they are talking to you. Thats a nice, subtle way.
no subject
Date: 2005-11-21 07:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-21 08:17 pm (UTC)The general view for me is that the only jobs I should be doing are cleaning or au-pair work and I should be grateful for the priviledge to do them (and get paid next to nothing)!
Oh and Sally - this now explains my bed question :o)
no subject
Date: 2005-11-21 06:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-21 08:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-22 10:29 am (UTC)