Back in Brighton

I'm back in Brighton. I've been here for 3 days, I think. The Cranky Old Geezer arrives tomorrow. Getting through passport control was insane. I'd read about it in the papers, but I didn't realize it was true. It took nearly 2 hours of waiting in line. Bad for me after 14 hours of travel and no sleep, but much worse for the hundreds of people travelling from Australia, India and other far off places, who had been travelling for 30 hours or more. And worst of all for those with small children.

Apart from that, I arrived in Brighton uneventfully. I spent the first day in a nap, a walk, and a trip to the grocery store. I spent the second day going downtown to do some errands and get some more groceries at a bigger, better store. I was able to get a pay-as-you-go sim card for my old iphone 3GS for £10. That gives us 500mb of data and 300 UK texts (more than the sum total of both our texting lives). I also bought a nutmeg grater and nutmegs, a sifter, a shower cap, and some vanilla bean paste, which just looked intriguing.

 It's interesting what one considers to be essential enough to have in a minimal kitchen.

 Then I came back home and mounted a photo of the COGs that we had printed on canvas.


The third day, I went to Ikea. This is a long trip, not difficult, but bus to train to tramway to footpath, then the same returning heavily laden. I bought little stuff - some plastic bins, a wire rack for the vacuum hose, a wire rack for the iron, a hand towel, a bath mat, three little bud vases and three fake gerbera, another wooded stool, a bowl to replace a broken one, etc. Nothing exciting except (to me) the vacuum hose hanger thing.


During the night we had heavy rain and gale force winds, some Atlantic storm that has been travelling up the coast of America then up the coast of England from west to east. It's very windy today and the sea looks magnificent. I'll probably walk down to enjoy it a bit later. The sun has been out, but it's cloudy now. The Geezer and I say that the weather report in the UK is either 'partly cloudy with a chance of rain', or 'partly sunny with a chance of rain.' That would be today's forecast. No other pictures so far. Maybe I'll get one of the ocean today.