By the time this post pops up I will be sitting in the audience at the British Library and enjoying a day long conference on crime fiction of the Golden Age to which I was invited. I will be meeting Martin Edwards and Rob Davies for the first time, though we have long been friends online and who are appearing at the Felixstowe Book Festival, and I expect lots of chat and fun.
I am driving up to London on Friday and parking my car at Kew and then training it back into Kings Cross. Much as I adore my darling grandchildren if I stay the night there I will get very little sleep, be woken up at the Crack Of and then have to shower and get ready and get out of the house by 9am. As those of us who have had children remember, early mornings are always total chaos in any household when small offspring have to be sorted and, as the conference starts at 10 am and I have no desire to fall off my chair into slumber mid-afternoon, I decided to stay overnight at the Premier Inn in Euston Road. This has the huge advantage of being slap bang opposite the British Library which means that I need not get up tooooo early. A good friend of mine is also attending and another book group member coming down by train from Leicester (she is young and working and used to getting up early...) and so we are all going to meet up for brekkie and chat before crossing the road. I am looking forward to this event hugely and will take lots of photos and report back in due course.
In the evening I then Tube it back to Kew to see family and have offered to babysit so Shattered Parents can go to the pub. Then on Sunday we are all going to celebrate the centenary of St Barnabas Church in Ealing which is where Helen's lovely in-laws are active. There are going to be celebrations all day, including a Bake Off, and this is just the kind of event that I always enjoy so a good family day out is in the offing.
I then drive home on Monday and have another busy week ahead of me before I am off to Yorkshire for a week at Robin Hood's Bay on the East Coast. My friend Daphne and I are now on our third visit as we simply love the place. We have a little cottage down a little narrow street and five minutes from the beach. We are both happy to explore, or read or potter or do whatever we want and, as we have known each other for some years now, are very much at ease in each other's company. If we are tired, we say so, if we want to stay indoors, we say so and it works out very well. She will be coming up from her home next week to Colchester and then we get in the car and off we go. We have had hold ups on our various journeying to and from so both of us are hoping that next week might be different, but we are not holding our breath..
Au reservoir
