Thursday, 24th June, 2021

[Day 465]

Today was the day upon which we had planned to visit Meg’s uncle and everything worked out as planned – or rather better than planned.Given we had our first night in a strange but very comfortable bed, we eventually got ourselves showered and ready for breakfast. We had been shown how to help ourselves so the cup of tea was particularly welcome and we complemented this with some cereal and slices of toast which is not our normal breakfast but very welcome all the same. By the time we had finished all of this, we washed up after ourselves and then went off to meet Meg’s Uncle Ken. Considering we had not seen him for about a year and a half we found him to be in remarkably good heart. At nearly 95, he is evidently very frail but not as frail as we suspected that he might be. We were joined almost immediately by a very close family friend who we knew very well and we chatted for most of the morning until it was decided by all of us that it would be nice to have a family meal together. We decided to have fish and chips so our family friend telephoned through the order and collected it half an hour later. We were then treated to some home-made ‘Bara Brith‘ (translated from the Welsh ‘Speckled Bread’) which is like a moist fruit loaf and which is one of the most delicious we had ever tasted (to a home-made recipe of course) So we took our leave of Uncle Ken and made our way to the classic little city of Conwy. There we parked in our usual spot and the sum had come out his afternoon so it was quite sunny. We repaired to our delightful but little known tearooms where we have several stairs to negotiate but if has a delightful, what I call a Jane Austin atmosphere inside. There we not only had a delicious pot of Earl Grey tea but treated ourselves to some fruit and ice cream. We also made a booking for lunch tomorrow about which we are delighted and although the owner does not know it yet, we are going to treat her to a bottle of our own damson gin (labelled up as ‘Chateau le Ceuf‘ or ‘Hart(=male deer) Chateau)‘ for evident reasons) After we had our afternoon tea, we popped into the camping shop to see if we could buy a little camping kettle (we couldn’t) but we saw some excellent bargain weather proof anoraks that we have bought before from that store and which has proved to be excellent. Then we popped round to a chemist’s shop and bought some toiletries and finally into a Spar supermarket where we bought a few things to eat in case we get hungry in the evening. If there had been a little hardware store, I would have bought a little cheap kettle to keep our blood diluted with tea during the evening. We will probably be able to manage now until Saturday morning when we depart. I must say we are quite looking forward to our little ‘poddle around’ Conwy in the morning. There is always a bit of sea wall to walk along if we want to get some fresh air but also the centre of the city is particularly compact. Of course we have our favourites, amongst we would number the National Trust shop (great for little gifts for people), the Welsh Wool Shop (the equivalent of Edinburgh Woollen Mills) and a range of little curio and antique type shops.

I have entertained myself this evening if ‘entertained’ is the right word manipulating the intricacies of a Sky box which is what controls the TV in our B&B. Apparently, the previous TV remote had gone walkabout (and this rather reminds me of what happened three years ago when the control to the TV in the hospital day-room had been pinched by past visitors, thus depriving the recovering patients of a much needed source of diversion). Meg is in bed (which is her wont after she has got over-tired throughout and I am rather struggling with the hit-and-miss vagaries of a control I do not really understand so quite a lot of trial and error is involved) At the moment, I happened upon an old recording of Fawlty Towers which I had seen only about a couple of weeks ago but any port in a storm. However, I now get a message on the system to say the system was going to turn itself off – which it did. So I am now watching another episode which I also happen to have seen in the last week or so – but again, I suppose I mustn’t grumble. Anyway, I am fairly used to making out in hotel rooms having survived a hotel in Jakarta whilst I was doing a stint of teaching out there for De Montfort University in the 1990’s.