We hadn't really done anything very interesting in the week between this entry and my last one, apart from my birthday. We went into Tunbridge Wells to do some birthday shopping, as there seems to be a good selection of shops there. Since we were shopping, there are no photographs. But it is an interesting and quite historic place, so we'll have to make a tourist visit with a camera and take some.
I got a new camera for my birthday, so I am experimenting with it a bit to see if I like it. I'm not sure yet. I'm not convinced it compensates for my shaky hand quite as well as the last one did, but it has a reasonable zoom and a viewfinder as well as the usual digital screen in which you can't see anything if the sun is too bright. I'm hoping the viewfinder will come into its own when we are on holiday. My son and his wife and my sister came to my birthday lunch, but it poured with rain.
The following weekend, we went up to Manchester, as it was my other son's birthday. It's a bit like Christmas in our family at this time of year; all four of us have birthdays within 12 days. As well as seeing our son, it was a good opportunity to visit our grandson so he doesn't forget us; also, our daughter-in-law has pneumonia, so it gave her a chance to rest while we looked after our grandson.
Our grandson had a new scooter, and can scoot up and down all over the place. He has really good balance for a child of only 17 months - you can see his left foot is off the floor and I assure you he's moving quite fast!
Paul took him to the park to play with the scooter, which he really enjoyed. Apparently, my son had to buy him one of his own to stop him mugging other children and trying to take theirs, he was so anxious to have one. He didn't worry about the size of the child either!
It was a bit hard to entertain him when it rained - which it did a lot - but the solution has been to visit friends who still have a flat in the converted church where we all lived; he can scoot up and down the corridor which used to be the aisle of the church.
I got another birthday present, I was booked in for a facial which was very nice - though my daughter-in-law pretended they had booked me in for a bungy jump, which nearly caused me to have a fit!
My son dropped me a little early for the facial, so while I was waiting, I took a walk around. This is at the end of a canal in what was clearly an industrial area. Some of the canal boats here are residential ones. I must say I wouldn't particularly like to live here on one of them myself, though the area probably looks more cheerful on a brighter day.
Some of the old factory buildings have been recycled into the Museum of Science and Industry, which you may be able to see at the back of my photo, on the left. I didn't have the new camera with me, so this is the camera on the phone again.
This photograph is looking in the other direction
Even the rather ugly new building tacked on to the end of the old one has been constructed in the same red brick, so it blends in slightly better. You can see the city has made great efforts to regenerate the old factory area.
I don't have too many photos of the weekend, we were really too busy. On Monday, we caught a morning train back down to London. I couldn't face travelling on Sunday, there's only one train an hour back to Oxted, so you could have a very long wait at Victoria Station.
I'm not sure I like this new blogging software, it frequently closes unexpectedly; and there's no spell checker or auto correct, so I have to be really eagle-eyed to pick up all the mistakes, now they aren't underlined in red!
No comments:
Post a Comment