Ouch, ouch, ouch

I'm just tottering along through life at the moment.

I do literally mean tottering by the way - I'm reeeeally stiff after Body Pump last night, and combined with the lingering stiffness from my back, I'm walking with about as much agility as the average 80 year old. With arthritis.

This week's looking like being a fairly quiet one for me, for which I'm profoundly grateful, as I'm sodding knackered at the moment! My quiet weekend plans of not doing anything at all were somewhat foiled by receiving invitations from 3 different folks (why, they must like me - oooh, I have friends!), but it wasn't brutally busy.

We spent Saturday at the Three Counties Show in Malvern, which was a bit of a change of pace. Happily, we were supplied with some free tickets (saving ourselves the princely sum of £16 each), and the weather just about held, so it was a pretty good day out. The show is a large agricultural / country show held over a long weekend, with all sorts of stuff going on. There's oodles of stalls from all sorts of business - clothing, furniture, anything you can imagine for animals, and god knows what besides, stacks and stacks of food stores (including our friends' milkshake van - hence the free tickets!). There's livestock competitions, demonstrations of everything possible including formation parachute jumping from the paratroopers, and crazy stunts on quad bikes (he jumped 2 Morgan cars, 2 lorries, and 2 more Morgan cars all in one go - that's a lot!). There's animals all over the shop, including errant foxhounds that have gone AWOL from the hunt, 6 week old baby ferrets (can't tell you how cute they are!), lots of horses, and huuuuuuuge eagles in a display of birds of prey (literally came up to my knee or higher - that's a lot of very mean looking bird!). There were blacksmithing demos and horse-shoe-ing races (we stopped for a minute to drool over the manly men doing there thing, all sweaty and muscly), and a big fairground. All in all, it was a really good laugh.

I managed to lose my sunglasses on the waltzers in the fairground, because I didn't think we'd be going so fast that they'd literally fly off my head. We did, and they did. I spent most of the rest of the ride whipping my head round, trying to see where they'd gone. I'm sure there was a wimpering sound as I saw them slide into the gap in the undulating boardwalk and slowly disappear, surely crushed, but lo and behold, they'd fallen into a void and were flukily still in one piece at the end when I went to inspect their fate!

We saw Richard Hammond (Top Gear presenter) out for the day with his family. I always think it's weird seeing famous people in real life, as if I somehow expect them to be bigger or "realer" in the non-tv world. Strange. Anyway, we didn't make a nuisance of ourselves, as everyone was being polite and leaving them to there day out (which I approve of).

We eventually staggered home after a long day on our feet, and much nice nosh from the trade stands, which left me just enough time to have a shower and get changed before my friend Jo came over. We went to a local Italian restaurant in town for dinner and had a good, giggly catch-up. It was all really nice, apart from the fact that apparently the dress I wore was quite see through in the light, so god knows what sort of display I inadvertantly put on! Eeeeeeeeek!

Sunday was a lazing in the park, listening to the local band playing kind of afternoon. Very chilled although a little sun wouldn't have gone amiss.

I felt pretty guilty, as I'd bought a Fathers Day card for my Dad, and a little present for him, but then completely forgot to either call him or drop round to see him, until 10.30pm, by which time it was obviously too late. So I went round with gratuitous apologies yesterday to give those to him. Why am I such a terrible daughter??? It's not like it would have taken long out of day to do either, and there's only me, and yet I didn't even manage a phone call. I suck.