well, iyanus and I didn’t do the nottingham run, but what we did do was stoat down to Cardiff to see our mate Jim on Friday evening with Ade and Martin. We left Cumbernauld about fiveish, had to detour round Clydebank then Paisley then Hamilton before we could continue the mass pilgrimage to the land of the leek :) We made it there around 3am-ish – thanks to Jim for getting us out of the depths of Roath to his place so we could get lagered pronto!

here’s the summary of the weekend I posted to my fellow staff at about 3am on Monday morning …

Have driven around 1,000mi in about 50-odd hours,
with much drinking, bowling, playstationing,
barbecuing, DVDing and card playing in between.
I've seen the best of service stations and the
worst of service stations. I've eaten cumberland
sausage on the M6 southbound and it tasted gorgeous.
I've had a chocolate pastry thing on the M5
northbound and it was a bit rubbery. I avoided
huge artics trying to kill me in the pitch black
driving rain at 95mph on the M74 northbound. I
skilfully traversed diversions through Licky End
in Worcestershire at 1am in the morning. I also
avoided reading my mail and came home to just
under 850 unreads. I got a stupid letter in the
post from the Bank of Scotland telling me how
shit my current account was with [insert bank name
here]. I've no idea what the TiVo has recorded for
me in those intervening 50-odd hours, after I
frantically tried to clear unwatched episodes of
Star Trek TNG and Japanorama on Thursday night.
I have some strange playing cards acquired after
buying this month's Esquire magazine (the one with
Sarah Michelle Gellar on the front), which I've yet
to open.

And now, I must crash.

It was Jim’s birthday on Saturday and Lena’s birthday on Sunday (Lena is Jim’s fiancée), so we went out bowling on Saturday night. I won the first game (by ONE point!!) and we all played miserably in the second game, due to the lane equipment sucking heinously – we had to constantly reset the lane from the controls, or get the staff to reset it from their master board. It also constantly missed out counting a skittle here and there – when you’re getting spares left, right and centre, and the game ends up being won by one point (the third place was one point behind the second place into the bargain!), you see how it quickly gets farcical!

So step up, Megabowl, you suck!

The rest of the weekend was mainly chilling out and being with mates – we had some fun with a barbecue and a Nerf dart, Lena tried to ply us with strange Czech booze, Jim and I got seriously pissed off with a Monsters Inc. bootleg, we played cards way too much, and Jim made us a stomping fry up. This seems to be a recurring theme with wasters – we are all pretty good at making Sunday morning fry ups. I still remember Stuart’s sheer class fry up of a few weeks ago – he just kept piling things onto plates, it was like feeding the five thousand, tho’ there were only five of us :)

A fun drive back finished off a pretty good weekend, the random artics and items of post waiting for me aside – I swear I’d slap that Angela bint off the Bank of Scotland ads if I met her!!