Wednesday, May 04, 2005

bank holiday comes 6 times a year

Soundtrack: Pulp - This is Hardcore



It was May Day bank holiday this weekend, so Thom, Sue and I ventured to Dan's in Cardiff to see university friends. It always feels strange calling Dan my sister's boyfriend when he was MY FRIEND FIRST, but I'll let her off.

It was pretty miserable when we left Windsor, but Cardiff was just bathed in sunshine. We sat outside a cute Sam Smith's pub in The Bay waiting for our food, and lucky me got extremely sunburned. It didn't occur to me to put lotion on, what with it being grey and May, but the sun decided to take me by surprise. I'm still in pain 4days later. The rest of the day was filled with park mischief and walking around town. Rather bizarrely I bumped into Londonite Gordon in Cardiff central train station, which was a pleasant surprise. I hope he comes to 'How does it feel to be loved?' on Friday.

The night started with Chinese food. I had vegetarian sweet & sour chicken. Sweet & sour chicken tended to be my dish of choice as a carnivore, but the veggie alternative is usually just vegetables in sweet & sour sauce. Blech. But 'Pearl of the Orient' was my second encounter with vegetarian-style sweet & sour chicken in 5 years (the other being in San Francisco in December), so I was in my element. And it was BEAUTIFUL. Really light and just enough. Yum yum. The rest of the night was spein a Bay bar after the 13 of us had collared a big table, and I had such a great time. That was until someone said 'let's go dancing'. Off we trooped. Firstly Thom wasn't let into the dance place because he was wearing trainers. Then Simon, in his boisterous drunken-mode, picked George up and spun her around. She didn't take too kindly to this and slapped him. She was really upset. Simon apologised, but she wouldn't apologise back. And now they've broken friends, which is just great. George is having a housewarming in Pontypridd early June, but Simon won't go because George won't apologise. And in my experience, acting like that will snowball into reasons not to go to the next meet-up, and then the next, and before we know it years will have passed. So that's it for all of our friendship, as far as I can see. The weekend in Cardiff was the last time we'll ever see each other. :(


After the atmosphere soured, Thom and I decided to drive back to Tooting, seeing as he had to work the next day. So off we set, 1am on Sunday morning.

*FLASH*

'Thom, are you speeding? A camera went off'
'No, I'm alright'

*FLASH*

'There's a lot of speeding tonight'

We approached the Severn Bridge, and then...

*CRACK*

A panoramic sheet of lightening was covering the whole of the sky. No lights on the M4 - we had to drive home by lightening. It was absolutely terrifying, and it didn't let up for 2hours. Thankfully it was just lightening, no rain, and although we could see it striking, we seemed to be safe. And then hail - huge bricks of hail. It sounded like the windscreen was about to smash. And we could not see a thing. Then we drove throuugh a deep puddle and nearly veered off the motorway. We were driving at about 20mph and I've never been so scared in my life. I was on the verge of tears! Thankfully the hail stopped after 10minutes, and the lightening just continued all the way back to Windsor. There was no way we were carrying on all the way to Tooting.

No comments:

Post a Comment