Home from the Holiday

Well, home in English terms. We’re back to base after our tenting/travelling trip. Both exhausted, perhaps because we travelled too much and didn’t rest enough. We’ll try not to make the same mistake when we go to Europe next month.

Our trip today was from Kidderminster to Attleborough, some three and a half hours drive if we’d done it all in one go. We didn’t, as both of us were very tired from last night, and anyway, driving that far in one go just isn’t the sort of thing we do very often.

We were tired because we had the heaviest rainfall last night that we’ve experienced while tenting. It poured, and poured – and did I mention? It poured.

But not only that. Sometime between three and four, the wind came up out of nowhere, with huge force, and we were startled to find the tent rocking back and forth, as though it was planning to take off into outer space. We thought it was going to do itself some damage, but nothing got broken, and the worst that happened was that some plastic plates and stuff on one of the tables inside the tent got thrown around, and wound up on the floor. Celia got up and rescued the laptop, which was in its bag in the front section of the tent – the part that doesn’t have an inner skin. Where we were, things were perfectly dry, amazingly enough, but the front section does tend to get a bit of water inside.

I got quite agitated about the tent doing its crazy house thing; started praying loudly, rather like the disciples on the boat when the storm blew up on the Sea of Galilee. Of course Jesus told them to cool it – after he’d dispensed with the activity of the storm. Celia did much the same, finding my agitation somewhat amusing.

It turned out that various mini-cyclones (that’s what the radio was calling them) flickered throughout the country last night: we may have got the tail-end of one.

Wrapped everything up this morning. It had stopped raining by then, but because the tent was so wet outside and the grass too, we stayed in our pyjamas until we’d got everything sorted out, and then went and had a hot shower. I cleaned my teeth, and went to put my dental plate in. For some reason it seemed to catch on one of my other teeth, and next moment there was a nasty little crack as I shifted it in my mouth. The front false tooth had snapped clean off the plate. Great.

We went into Kidderminster and found a denture specialist, but he couldn’t do anything till four in the afternoon. Decided that it wasn’t the end of the world and that it would be easier to get it done back in Norfolk, so I walked around today with a gap in the front of my teeth.

Got ourselves some breakfast – on a takeaway plate (Celia had seen the place advertised at the camp, and it was just across the road from the denture place), and bought some lunch for later too.

Photo on the right is from a site called Dental Distortions. The teeth bear no resemblance to mine.