So, our social life here in lovely Slough is somewhat, well, limited. We don’t know anyone – that’s the easiest way to put it. So our social life tends to consist of going somewhere else. Unfortunately – at the moment we are without a road legal car, and have only one set of bike gear (not to mention the bike’s top speed when it’s warm is about 50mph; instead of the more normal 90).
So the sudden offers of visitation and a party was a bit of a coincidence. Then, to make it more odd, Nikki offered to visit too… So all in all, we had a crammed Saturday. First up, Alex, a very nice chap with a DAF came down to let us have a little ride in his DAF 33. This is the model before ours, and has a smaller engine and body. Having sat and generally chatted for a while he let me go out and drive the DAF.
Nikki, you’d love it – apart from it’s pollution producing engine it’s just like driving an EV. It’s completely smooth – you basically put your foot down (something I struggle with as I try and modulate the acceleration) and the car gets faster – there’s no clunky gearchanges. The 33’s apparently somewhat noiser than the 44 should be. And there’s a couple of tips he gave us and some advice (apparently the non-forced-air heating and cooling system isn’t hugely effective; and augmenting it with a dinky little 12V fan is a cunning plan). Also, the heat-exchanger which uses exhaust fumes to warm the carb is missing. It could be repaired, and I may at some point discuss doing so with an engineering workshop.
Anyhow, after our little journey in his ‘Little belter’, Nikki and Kate came round. We showed’em the local abandonment (mostly ‘cos when they arrived we were showing Alex the pain of having a workshop and a large garage feet away from the house completely in disrepair). They very kindly offered us lunch, and we grabbed some Pizza from the local pizzaria. A fine time was had showing them the progress on the house and chatting about their new Prius, and being reminded that I’d promised to make a music video for one of Nikki’s songs (but she’s not supplied the good-quality copy of the track yet. It’s only been a few years… I also need to find some actors to do the video).
Anyhow, the plan then was to hang around for a bit – Kathryn looking to see what we might do to kill time in London – before heading to a party (in London, obviously). She found this. I wish we’d’ve had more time to explore it – the live music we heard was good, and it looked like it’d’ve been a fun place for us to kill a few hours – but because it was so out of the way (it’s quite some distance from Mile End tube), we ended up only having around an hour there.
Unfortunately, someone spilled beer on Kathryn’s jacket – which was somewhat annoying. We headed out from there and across London to the party – which was with some of her University freinds. It’s ages since we’ve been to a party and I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed it. I was pretty nervous, not being good at meeting people outside work; but in the end it turned out to be a thorougly pleasant evening.Â
It was ostensibly a Eurovision party; but they were (perhaps thankfully) not playing any of the Eurovision music! Sadly, the host had cooked – and what looked like awesome food – but we’d filled up on burger and chips and flapjack at Paradise Park, not realising there’d be proper food at the party… They’d got homecooked flatbread and cous-cous and…. it looked so yummy. So we chilled out and chatted to people and so on for a while. Unfortunately, the trains being the trains we had to leave at 11pm to get home. Or so we thought.
The tube took us almost 50 minutes to get from North london to Paddington (we were about 5 minutes walk from a tube station) – meaning we pulled in to Paddington station and our alledged train was no longer on the noticeboard. Of course, there weren’t any people to ask. However, what we did note is the last train of the night which was meant to stop at Burnham, didn’t. Indeed, there were no trains that stopped at Burnham. The little paper timetable said Burnham, the computer said no. In the end we took the next train to Slough, and ended up forking out nearly 8 quid to not-quite-get-us-home. We didn’t have much change left – and the Sunday night rate on taxis here is extortionate. I’m pretty much convinced that we should stop getting (or attempting to get) the train in to London anymore – and go back to my old system; Drive in much of the way and the tube from there inwards. The train is so astonishingly unreliable that the minute benefit of being able to drink just doesn’t seem worth the hastle anymore.
Today, the plan was to sort out the Viva ready for blokie to collect it on Tuesday. Unfortunately it’s rained all day; and having taken us in excess of 2 hours to get back from London we’re both absolutely wrecked. We’ve both spent large chunks of the day asleep (Kathryn’s asleep up on the bed atm), and, well, that’s really all there has been to our Sunday. We watched Into the Woods – which was excellent, heartily recommend that to everyone. Haven’t even eaten lunch (which is handy, ‘cos we’re really short on food!).
