Rochester and a party

Back into Norwich yesterday for a short visit with the aim of trying to find a travel agent who could tell us more about rail travel on the Continent. Neither of the places we went to were much on to it; seems they don’t handle rail travel a lot. So in the end we went back to the online info in the evening, and are trying to work from there.
Today we drove down to Rochester in Kent, via the M25 at one point, and the bridge at Dartford. Four lanes of traffic on our side all slowing up to pay a pound toll (see picture). The bridge is massive, a great creation slung from towering pillars. And it rises way up in the air before hitting it’s peak and coming down again. Quite impressive.
We drove to Rochester because we were attending a ‘welcome ceremony’ for a recently-adopted child. She’s near to two, and has the energy of a fireball. Her father is Cockney Indian, so there were a lot of his Indian relatives there making us welcome. Her mother had friends from the library where she used to work. And there were various other ring-ins like us (we‘re not related to the family, but my daughter in NZ is). One of the librarians used to be in the Poetry Library which is situated in the Festival Hall building on the fifth floor; she‘s now in the British Film Institute Library - just as intriguing!. The poetry library has nothing but 20th and 21st century poetry in its stock: two copies of nearly everything, one for borrowing, one for the collection. Another friend at the party was a poet, Patience Agbabi, a lovely London-born woman from a Nigerian background. We’ll have to try and track down some of her poetry; though from what I read on the Net it sounds fairly radical!