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Monday, June 27, 2011

It's a well known fact that the brain is capable of blocking out painful memories to protect the individual from permanent mental damage caused by traumatic events. Which explains why I forgot to mention the car park charges at the Brighton Centre on Wednesday night.

Ordinarily, Lisa and I travel in style to our concerts by catching the bus there and back, but unfortunately that means walking to and from the bus stop, which, in my current condition, is a step too far. So throwing caution to the wind, we decided to drive to the Brighton Centre and park in the multi-storey car park next door. We knew they were bound to charge a lot - maybe, we thought, as much as three or four pounds an hour (no, really) - but with my foot still painful, I didn't have a leg to stand on, so it seemed like my sole option.

Anyhoo, if I thought the show came to a limp conclusion with Jai McDowall, it was nothing compared to the feeling I got when I hobbled back to the pay machine at the multi-storey and found that we were being charged £16 for two and a half hours parking. If we'd been under two hours, we could have escaped for the bargain price of only eight quid, but the penalty for the show running to 130 minutes was a price of sixteen smackeroonies. Frankly I was hopping mad. Quite literally. Next time I'll crawl there on my face.

But despite being taken to the cleaners by NCP last week, the good news is that we managed to scrape together enough cash for a thimble-full of petrol yesterday, and with a following wind, we succeeded in coasting along the coast to St Leonards. My parents spare no expense in their entertainment of Amelie, so having parted with £1.50 (I think that's inflation at the pound shop), they introduced her to the joys of Tiddlywinks yesterday afternoon. Here she is, ten minutes after first trying the game...


I don't know what's more scary: the fact that she can instantly play Tiddlywinks at the age of two-and-a-half, or the fact that she can spell it.

With her grandparents providing the kind of fun she can only dream of at home, we decided to wink goodbye to our tiddler, and leave her with my parents for a night or two. It meant that Lisa and I were able to stop off on our way home yesterday evening for a slap up meal at the Barley Mow pub in Alciston. To be honest, it was our fourth choice for a meal, but the first pub was shut, the second too posh, and the third charged a tenner for a sausage, egg & chips. Frankly if I had that kind of money, I'd be parking for an hour at the Brighton Centre.

By the time we arrived at the Barley Mow, we were so hungry, we'd have eaten anything. Well, almost anything. To be honest, Lisa wouldn't touch her handcrafted cucumber cup...

Cucumber Cup
She was worried the white stuff was E. coli.

2 comments:

Phil's Mum said...

and was it?

Phil said...

I don't know, she wouldn't eat it.