Off

So, today I head off to the wilds of the North of England. I am feeling tired already so getting up at 5.30am tomorrow is looking even less appealing than it was anyway. I went to someone’s leavings drinks last night and left at a reasonable hour, ate a sandwich and packet of crisps as my dinner on the way home and then wiled away my time until it was time to go to bed. At which point I realised that if I am going away for the weekend I probably needed to pack some clothes and tried to focus my brain on what I needed to take with me.

What is the golden rule of packing? Always pack extra underwear. This is not because I am always hopeful that I might get lucky while I am away, but merely because you never know if you might get stuck somewhere and therefore be grateful for some clean underwear if you have to stay away for longer than planned. I don’t take spare underwear with me when I go somewhere for the day though, so I am possibly not all that consistent in my policy, but it has stood me in good stead on the occasions when an extra night’s stay has proved to be necessary.

I am staying in a Ramada hotel. I am slightly ambivalent about Ramada’s based on an experience of staying in one in Albany in New York a few year’s ago. Albany is the state capital of New York state (if that makes sense - meaning as opposed to New York City). It is a really strange place and I was there on a Friday night and the entire place was deserted. It was one of those places where had you been murdered at some point you would not have been entirely surprised. Not that there were gangs roaming the streets or anything, it was just an eerie place. The day before I was heading to Albany I mentioned to someone I had to go there and their face just dropped and they said “Why?” as though there was no conceivable reason why anyone would want to go to Albany. I understand what they meant now but a stopover was required to get from Boston to Toronto on public transport and that was the easiest place to do it. Anyway, I stayed in a Ramada in Albany and it was a bit like staying in some kind of cell. The windows in the room were so high up that you couldn’t see out of them unless you were incredibly tall and the whole hotel was just this really run down place. The hotel manager was obviously really proud of it though and couldn’t do enough to please. He even gave me a lift to the station the next morning, along with a number of schoolgirls who must have been taking part in some ballet related thing as they kept dancing around reception in tutus. Suffice to say it was a strange place and I was pleased to leave.

On other matters, I am feeling slightly miffed with our building maintenance people. They have this policy that if food is out of date in the fridge they remove it and leave it on the side. First of all, to me something being one day out of date is not therefore automatically inedible. I have probably built up immunity to chemical warfare if the amount of out of date stuff I have consumed is anything to go by. I can understand that out of date stuff shouldn’t be left in the fridge for ages, but leaving it out so that what was drinkable milk turns to cheese is not a helpful way of working. Why not just throw it in the bin if they think it is unhygienic? But perhaps I should find better things to be concerned about.

At time of writing the results are not out, but the next stage of the Bloggies is due to start today. The first stage was nominations, then a select group of people were asked to go through them and cast votes to narrow the field down to 151 blogs across a number of categories. Now it’s your chance to vote for what you think is the best in each category. If you have a spare vote (assuming she has made it to this stage), perhaps you might like to consider casting a vote for Annie Mole’s London Underground Tube Diary in ‘Best British and Irish Blog’ and ‘Best Topical Blog’. My previous post explains a bit more.

Anyway, I shall return on Sunday. A special message to any fellow bloggers who read this: I would be grateful if you could write some engaging posts over the next 48 hours so that I can settle down with a nice cup of tea on Sunday afternoon and relax perusing your blog. Much appreciated.