A shorter day in the storehouse today as it’s a Friday and they wanna go home early, so we were done by three and heading towards The Buzzard, at least that’s what we thought. For some reason, the sat nav was taking us to Bristol to get on the M32 and then the M4 instead of a more direct route that would take us on to the M4 closer to the A4 that led us to the Buzzard and onto Wing, our final destination. (It hadn’t occurred to me before that Buzzard and Wing might be connected?) We went with it anyway but then started to follow signposts instead of the machine and found ourselves missing Friday afternoon traffic anyway and swallowed the diversion telling ourselves that the quicker way may have been traffic-heavy and that’s why we were sent off in the wrong direction. We were off to Trev and Trish’s house for a couple of days and drive back to Wells on Sunday night for more days needed to finish what we started. Unfortunately, I had an ocular moment today where an oval-shaped twirl of colourful flashing diamonds turned and spiralled around in my eye forcing me to sit down, close my eyes, put on my sunglasses and my scarf and drink a cup of tea and a tin of coke with a 500mg paracetamol from Portugal – it’s the only cure. And as it turned out when the flashing lights had gone I was back on my feet digging into the boxes with fresh vigour, headache-free.

The trip was kind of non-eventful, chugging along in the slower lane, watching the faster cars in front drive too close to the car in front of them as we are overtaken by trucks, tractors, Reliant Robins and little old ladies on tricycles. We happily sit under the speed limit mostly because too fast seems to be too much of a strain on poor old Ariel’s engine. We do need to make it back to Porto so no need to push it now, we are only hoping that our simple vehicle has less complex things to go wrong and will keep on moving towards any chosen direction. Still, the heater not working had me wrapping up with coats and blankets, the windscreen wipers not functioning efficiently saw Olivia staring through the drizzle more intensely and the stereo broken meant musical silence. But if the engine keeps going that’s all we need.

The deep green fields of England whisked by, dotted with Holsteins, black and white dairy cows famous for the volume of milk they produce. Holsteins are Dutch/Friesian in origin, appearing about 2000 years ago and see in colour, except for red. This is why the myth of red rags to a bull is, well, a myth. Bulls don’t have the receptor to see red in their retina and the only reason a matador’s muleta is red is to conceal the blood spilt.

We finally made it to Boydyland at 7.45 PM and are glad that we didn’t attempt this trip tomorrow with a crucial trip to London tomorrow to see Mohamad, my computer man. Trish cooked one of her famous dinners and between us, we polished off 18 Cauldron veggie sausages, the best veggie sausages in the land – although everyone thinks I ate most of them. Nice to see Trev and Trish before they move to Bristol and exchange late birthday prezzies with Trevor – Focus X for Trevor, Courtney Barnett’s A Sea Of Split Peas for me.

Falling asleep standing up has been popular this week, as has falling asleep whilst typing, eating, drinking, sitting in the car or walking, and so to bed.

Music today was:

The Only Ones – Even Serpents Shine (1979)
Pink Fairies – Kings Of Oblivion (1973)
XTC – Black Sea (1980)
The Pretenders – Pretenders (1979)