The Random Bad Luck of the Snell-Pym’s (by sarah)
Sunday was the day of our departure from Highgate back to the rural sticks of Gloucestershire and what happens? Al becomes ill - he is headachy and cant think that straight and felt a bit feverish. A few paracetamol sorted most of it out so that about 5 hours late we could actually set out for our trip to Essex to pick up the Jeany who had been visiting mum and dad as this week mum starts her radiotherapy so Jean has spent most of christmas etc... with them.
Once Jean was picked up we headed out onto the road once more and all was going well until....
We discovered M25 south to M4 west interchange was closed - arg! Never fear we thought there'll be some sort of way to loop back on ourselves so that we could go via Reading instead of Oxford or there'll be diversion signs and we'll be fine.... hahahahahahaha. Well there where diversion signs and they took us to a round about where it was obvious that we had to go round and double back on ourselves - easy right? Well it would have been except that it was one of those major ones that has lanes that spiral outwards and you have to pick the correct lane for your destination - except there is no such lane for doubling back on yourself so that we where having to guess and suddenly we where one lane too far over and before we could correct it a barrier divided us off and we had no choice other than to follow the route - to Heathrow Airport :/
We thought there must be some round abouts where we can turn around surely? Right? There's always round abouts - this is England.... no round abouts - we thought we'd found one with lots of glittering lights on short polls around it but no this turned out not to be a round about and took us into a one way system which lead us to a carpart - with barriers that had a minimium charge of £2.30 for half an hour. No way to reverse, no where to turn around - nothing so we paid our £2.30 and left.
This then took a turn towards the strange (especially as the previous night we had watched a Stephen King film) we where directed into a tunnel that looked like was too small for cars and was father long and square in cross section with a green circle lane right down the middle of it and signs sayng the cyclists had priority. Once in this system we had no coice of where to go so we entered this tunnel in the van and too our relief exited without any creepy horror movie antiiques!
We then resumed our journy on wards towards Gloucestershire only now Al was starting to feel sick again - combine this with our windscreen washer deciding to die and random greasy dirt appearing on the windscreen and we where stopping more than we normally would 🙁
We got home about 3 ish and pretty much fell into bed. I awoke in time for us to get Jean to nursery and for me to go to Cheltenham to do the mirade of things that needed to be done today but... it never happened becuase it turned out that I had slept through Al being sick and he was doubled uo with stomache cramps and weak and pasty looking. Not good. After some thought over why he was sick and I wasnt seeing as I am the one who gets sick not him we worked out that he had typed out the contence of the left over non-alchoholic mulled wine I had made on saturday. He had drunk a mug of the stuff with the dregs of the spices and CLOVES that I had used - and becuase time was short he'd downed the stuff including the sluge that contianed all the CLOVES I had put a brew for about 15 people :/
Can anyone else see where this is going?
Yes - I have managed to poison my husband with CLOVES - he says its not my fualt but mew :'( It took until about 4 this afternoon before he could contemplate eating anything at all and he still hurts. Of course this has put us realy teally behind for the week and doesn't feel like a particually good start to the new year :/
Mon 7th Jan 2008 10:31 pm 
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By Mark, Tue 8th Jan 2008 @ 11:32 am
Hmm.. clove poisoning has got some pretty severe symptoms. Sure Al hasn't caught the dreaded norovirus? In other more joyous news - Happy New Year to you both! Sorry we couldn't make saturday in the end - had the whole family round for dinner on Sunday - so saturday completely evaporated into a day of cleaning and cooking..
By alaric, Tue 8th Jan 2008 @ 11:35 am
Yeah, once we'd gotten into the airport, every lane was just labelled with which terminal's car park it went to.
So I picked one at random, and the next thing I knew, I was on a one-way road into a car park's entry barriers 🙁