Dear me, I see I have got very behind again. This has been due to some very tedious periods when I have been working and have had my nose to the grindstone all day, and some very busy periods - like the Olympics, when I found it hard to tear myself away from the TV long enough to work.
The Olympics began while we were still up in Manchester, and only had a tiny TV about the same size as as a laptop screen. Fortunately, we were babysitting for my grandson the night of the opening ceremony, so we managed to see it on a normal sized TV screen at their house. Our grandson saw part of it as well, since he didn't want to go to bed, and we didn't want to be upstairs lying on the floor beside his cot singing nursery songs and lullabies when we could be watching the opening ceremony. So the little mite just watched it with us and eventually fell asleep - he can't have been terribly impressed, though we were - especially with the Queen parachuting in to the stadium! I found I had a lump in my throat quite often, particularly with the lighting of the cauldron, the design of which I found wonderful - what a very creative and uplifting idea.
I was desperate to get down to London and see some of the many events but Paul was up a ladder filling cracks or painting so I had to wait until that was finished before we could leave.
We had hoped to leave at the weekend, so missing only one week of the Olympics, but our son asked us to stay on to let in the Estate Agent for a valuation. The valuer came on Monday August 6th, so we didn't leave until Tuesday 7th.
Once we were back in Oxted, we found the weather was rather warmer and were able to have our breakfasts out on the terrace.
After breakfast, I went up to London to do some work in my old office, as I needed some on-site access so I could use some services controlled by an access control list. I didn't think I'd have much hope of succeeding if I asked for my home broadband's Internet address to be included in the access control list!
At least this meant I could go and watch the Olympics after work on the big screen in the Quad, which I enjoyed. It's always more exciting to watch events in a crowd, especially when there are British contestants, which there were. There was space to sit on a nice bench, which was a lot better than trying to get comfy on the grass at my age. I watched Taekwondo, some Boxing and some BMX biking, which was quite amazing. I was fortunate to be sitting in a crowd who were interested in and informed about Taekwondo, and of course there was a British contestant - though with such an international collection of students and staff, not everybody was supporting Jade Jones. However, I watched her win her semi-final, and was interested to find she won the gold medal later in the day. Watching Nicola Adams win the first ever gold medal for women's Boxing was even more exciting, because it soon became obvious she was going to win - boxing is slightly easier to understand! The crowd I was in were behind her and cheering her on, just as though they thought she would be able to hear!
After all that excitement, I went down to the South Bank to see what was happening there. The entertainments there have been added to with the London Wonderground, which includes the Spiegeltent for cabaret, lots of bars and food outlets, and plenty of circus and sideshow things. There are also some new rides - a rather tame looking roller coaster
and a terrifying huge pole thing which takes you up incredibly high on a chair, and then whizzes you round and round so that centrifugal forces send you and the chair horizontally outwards instead of dangling quietly. I didn't fancy it at all!
It goes right up to the top of the pole - it's only about half way up in my photo.
Instead of that, I went along to the National Theatre where there were free shows, and I watched a wonderful group of young men who juggled, did acrobatics and conjuring, and mixed cocktails - all great fun. I was too far away to take pictures though - or, unfortunately, to get one of the cocktails they handed out at the end.
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