Silence is not golden, it's fucking boring

My trip home to see Mother for Easter was not too bad, we didn't have any disasters or anything, but it wasn't exactly fun either.

Whenever I speak to her on the phone, she normally complains incessantly about how noisy the neighbours/neighbours' children/railway line/nearby school is, are, or have been being. Any noise basically means that she can't rest, and therefore feels worse than even her usual level, and so she is obliged to spread some of that misery out to adjacent parts of the world. And this happens all the time apparently, it's like a non-stop noisy hell.

So when I got home on Saturday I was expecting there to be at least a pneumatic drill going off in next door's garden and some sort of monster truck derby happening in the street. I was surprised therefore to find no pneumatic drills and instead just complete, uninterrupted silence. Like serious silence too, you could practically hear it. I'm sure at one point my heartbeat was the loudest thing on the street.

"It's never normally like this!" says she. "You won't believe us now will you? They're normally screaming at each other next door! And coughing! You can hear them coughing all the time!"

Erm... coughing?

Anyway, it was very, VERY quiet. So that's good for Mum, I suppose. They don't do anything in that silence, they wouldn't want to break its pristine completeness. So instead you just end up sitting there. Reading. Or talking, but only very quietly, otherwise Mum says "You're being very loud Thomas!" (that's my Dad) and he is obliged to apologise.

And it's BORING. I need some damn stimulation! They even have the lights down quite low, so it's like you've wandered into one of those sensory deprivation tanks.

I was only there for 24 hours, but I'd gone pretty stir crazy by the end of it. No doubt the endless noise started up again as soon as I left, or so they'll tell me. Or perhaps no it won't, because it's never actually THAT noisy, but they've got nothing better to do than bang on about it all the time.

On the plus side, I did receive six Cadbury Creme Eggs in memory of the Baby Jesus (or something), so it wasn't all bad.

And I'm off to New Yoooooooooooooooork on Thursday, so it's not all bad.

Also, the General Election has been announced today, so I shall blog about that tomorrow if I get time. It's terribly exciting! Sort of.

Six-day weekend

I had a lovely six-day weekend for Easter. Although it seemed like I did a lot of stuff and saw a lot of people, as always now that I'm back at work it feels like it went past too quickly.

We went up to London on Thursday to visit our families, which was nice enough. It was a bit boring at my parents' house as usual, but I was only there for one night. Mum is getting increasingly stressed about Dave's wedding now, but I think I'll have to save that for a separate blog post (and for when I can be bothered to think about it all. It's rather draining).

Then Friday I had a nice meal with Chris' family, and then another meal with his Dad on Saturday, before we scooted on up to Cambridge for a friend's 30th birthday party. It was for our friend who moved to Sweden about 18 months ago, he was over with his wife and kiddy to see all his friends for his birthday.

It was lovely to see them actually, as obviously we don't see them very often now. I think the last time was their wedding in August. It got me thinking about how we've pretty much lost a whole circle of friends since they moved away and since our other friend (from the same group) moved to Cambodia. They were our friends we used to go to the pub with, quite often actually, but now Chris and I hardly ever go to straight pubs because the circle of friends broke up a bit after they went. It's funny how that happens, but I'm not particularly surprised: they were the people who knew everyone in the group, so it was them that held it together. Once those people leave it's hard to maintain a relationship with the others you don't have a direct link with.

We do have some other new friends now of course, but I used to enjoy those nights in the pub playing silly drinking games.

So anyway, the 30th birthday party was spent drinking rather too much vodka and dancing by candlelight in his parents' garage. I felt a bit like a teenager again. It was good fun though.

And then the last couple of days of my long weekend I spent in Brighton, just loafing about really, and having a long walk up and down Devil's Dyke (see my rather nice photo in the previous post). I wish I could have been off for a bit longer, as Chris is off all week, but such is life when you are the wife of a teacher.

Right, I better get on with some work I suppose. Although it would be much more fun to start making the scoresheets for our annual Eurovision party, so maybe I'll do that instead. Only a month to go now! "It's myyyyy time, it's my time...."