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Down to Cheddar this weekend for my mum's 80th birthday (plus an early celebration of my 50th), but only after we'd been up to Hertfordshire to see how things are going at the new house. The original plan had been to move in today, but luckily we postponed that, as it's nowhere near ready - not that it's likely to be much closer in two weeks time when our possessions (but not us) will move in. Luckily/unluckily (depending on whether you are a 1970s comedian or not) we are going to be able to stay with our in-laws until we all head up to Edinburgh.
I still can't quite get my head around the fact that we are moving or that this empty partial building site is where we're going to be living from September (hopefully) but I think it will be fun out here. We saw some kind of weasel or something running across the road as we approached the village. That's got to make up for there not being a Nandos for miles, right?
We picked up the people carrier for the journey. This has been sitting on my in-laws' drive for a month waiting for us to move to the countryside (and avoiding the parking fees in Shepherd's Bush). I am doing a routine about the car's search for Ryan's iPhone and how I worry that my car is pining for Ryan and incredibly, in the month that has passed my car had forgotten that my phone exist (even though I had connected it up properly) and was again searching for Ryan's phone. I think my car is going to kill me for not being Ryan. Or make me dress up as Ryan when I am driving it.
Some weird fungus has also found its way into the door mechanism and had grown around the little bolt where the sliding door meets the frame of the car.
My car is definitely haunted.
The drive to Cheddar was arduous. We were a bit caught up in the Friday night exodus from London (all these pricks who live in the country) and there was some kind of serious accident further up the road. My sat nav suggested coming off the M4 at Chippenham. We ended up coming down some pretty obscure country lanes and approaching Cheddar from a direction that I was unfamiliar with. Even five miles from home I didn't recognise the countryside or any of the names of the villages we were passing through. I guessed we were going to come down through the gorge, which is a route that no Cheddar resident would usually take, for fear of being consumed by the troll that lives on the cliffs at the very top.
We got past the troll uneaten and Phoebe enjoyed seeing the goats and I showed her where I used to drink cider with my friends when I was 13. I have a proud 37 year drinking career, which is why I am so good at it.
We got to my parents' house pretty late and had dinner and I knocked back some wine to prove to my daughter that I was still excellent at drinking. She got to stay up til after 9pm, which is a first for her, but she wasn't flagging too much. Unlike her dad. But that was down to the driving, not the wine, obviously. I did wake in the middle of the night having a panic attack too. But again the driving, not the booze. I am very good at drinking. The more you've drunk the better you are. Everyone knows that.
This was, in essence my day off. It was much more stressful and tiring than any other day this week.
