Antiques and Flowers

Monday 23rd May started out well enough.  The sun was shining and apart from a bit of a traffic holdup on the M25, the drive to Faversham in Kent was pleasant enough.  Kim was born in the town and although it’s not on the tourist map, Faversham has some interesting old buildings and a lot of history.  The old market square  building is almost a thousand years old

Mike used to sail there but now Faversham creek has been cleaned up a bit and presents tranquil scenes of boats and riverside dwellings.  However, it’s still all mud when the tide goes out!

The journey back left something to be desired.  Completely blocked motorways, traffic chaos on minor roads exacerbated by schools turning out and large trucks endeavouring to manoeuvre on country lanes made for a slow going.  Almost at journey’s end a text call alerted that Mike’s brother Malcolm had suffered a serious accident and was in hospital.  The details will be omitted here but suffice it to say that much of the rest of their ‘UK holiday’ was spent in dealing with hospital and social care people, and cleaning up Malcolm’s house that looked like a scene from a horror movie.

There were lighter moments.  There was time to visit the Antiques Roadshow which was being filmed at Audley End house, not very far distant.  Attending with Paul and Sue, they watched the filming and saw some of the presenters and specialists identifying and valuing antiques, all taking place in the warmth of a beautiful spring afternoon.  If you are a fan of the show, you should be able to recognise a couple of the ‘celebrities’– there were lots more.

Kim took time out to attend the Chelsea Flower Show with Ros, a good friend of hers.  From the reports and photographs (over 600 of them) it would appear that they had a good time, checked out quality of the Pimms and once again played ‘celebrity spotting’.  Now it’s an impossible task to pick out a couple of representative pictures from the hundreds on the computer, so at great personal risk here are a few that Mike likes (he’ll be in trouble now).

In the final couple of days there was time to have dinner with some friends, enjoy a short walk in the Essex countryside and visit a country pub or two.

Then it was off to London for two nights.  They took in a show – Beautiful, the Carole King musical (a fabulous show that leaves the audience singing as they leave).  Mike had a Nostalgia Lunch (he’s a Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists – the 100th City livery company) and met up with some old work colleagues.  Meanwhile Kim needed to catch up with some late shopping.  Then it was off to Heathrow for Frankfurt, change planes and on to Hong Kong.