Dirty

The weather in London was astoundingly awful today. Dirty, dirty weather. It seems to have done nothing but rain. Typical, really, for a day when loads of people will be trying to take their families on holiday. Worst perhaps because there's mayhem at the Cinque Ports as a result of the migrant crisis, so you can't escape the British weather even if you want to.

This has been our first day off together in what seems an age. We were very sad not to have been able to take ourselves off to Highgate Woods or something. Instead we stayed inside whilst I watched endless clips on YouTube about Liverpool in the 1960s on the Internet. We also signed off all the art work for the Pepys album and sent that off to the CD manufacturers. Now comes the task of trying to get people to buy it when it's released. The task I hate more than any other!

We had lunch at the local greasy spoon and made the decision to head west this evening rather than tomorrow morning. We have a wedding to attend in Wiltshire and decided to treat ourselves to a Premier Inn this evening to avoid the hell of getting up at 7am and getting unbelievably stressed in the ghastly traffic which the first day of school holidays invariably brings.

We left Highgate late enough to avoid rush hour traffic, but drove straight into a massive rain storm and traffic jams on the North Circular brought about by heavy flooding. It took an hour to reach the M25, although God knows I was relieved not to have been one of the poor drivers in the surprising number of abandoned cars we saw by the sides of the road. A wheel had fallen off one of them. In another, a woman driver looked extremely frightened. Horrible.

We listened first to the hits of the Pet Shop Boys on our journey and then the Waterloo album by ABBA before trying some Tori Amos which we couldn't hear above the sound of the rain whacking down on the windscreen, so we had Deacon Blue, the BeeGees and a load more ABBA and arrived in Wiltshire at 10pm.

We arrived with a flat tyre on the car. Joy. These things are best left till the morning!