Our fourth ever visit to Gilly and Darrell's in Winchester came after our stay in Norwich and via London:
We very quickly fell into our old slothful Winchestrian habits once we arrived, but this time had the excuse of our collective infirmity. I'd caught a cold from Sam in Norwich, which he contracted from Liam, which he contracted from some guy at work. From me it moved to Til, and then possibly Gilly, and Darrell was also home from work sick. This meant we watched a lot of TV and movies on G&D's beautiful projector, including sex-addicted Fassbending in Shame, the classics Star Wars parts IV and V (which Til hadn't seen before), the impressive Downton 'Downtown' Abbey, the surprisingly enjoyable Crazy, Stupid Love, the pleasantly bizarre Moonrise Kingdom, and the entire first season of Fresh Meat. Also we were subjected to the cheesiness of Strictly Come Dancing.
But we did manage to get in some activity before the illness really took hold. On our first day we revisited the New Forest with the latest additions to the Grundy family, their American spaniels Rufus and Barney.
A pleasant introduction to Rufus and Barney.
Rambling about the New Forest.
Barney is a few months younger than his big brother Rufus and can't keep up with him when he goes tearing off into the distance, so instead he does this adorable thing where he waits for Rufus to start running back, hunkers down and tries to pounce on him as he runs past, as we can see below:
'I'm a part of this as well.'
The next day was G&D's niece Amy's birthday, and we tagged along to their pub lunch after walking 'the boys' again. I still can't get over how good my hair looked that day. I literally wanted to lick my own face in the mirror. [That last bit was an interjection by Til, which she made without my knowing. What would you call that? A blape? Like, blog-rape? I'm going to leave it in because it's funny]. But what I was actually going to say was I still can't get over the risotto I had ...
Our waitress at the pub had a really weird accent I couldn't place. She said 'DessEURT' instead of dessert. We worked out she was a kiwi, which started us talking about accents. When I did an exaggerated Aussie accent, we noticed another waitress smirking and wondered if she was Australian too. As we were leaving she asked if we were from Australia, and it turned out she was from BULLI. What are the chances?
Watching the dogs on the pre-prandial walk.
A very English field across the road from the pub.
Some cows all the girls were cooing over until I guilted them for eating beef for lunch.
Backseat bandits.
Our greatest accomplishments over the next few days were venturing outside for food and medicine.
Gilly's street, Clifton Terrace, the prettiest in Winchester.
The upstairs of an amazing pasty place in Winchester. It's like a hobbit house.
I can't even stand up!
Some serious reading.
The day before Gilly very kindly drove us to the airport to fly to New York, she, Tilly and I were sitting in the lounge room discussing our novels when Tilly said, 'Hey, where's all that water coming from?' It had been 'hossing down' all night, to take up an English expression, and it turned out a drain in G&D's backyard was blocked and it had filled up with water, which began streaming under the door. Unfortunately Gilly had to open the door to get to the drain, and this let even more water in. It was CRAY.
And it turned out we were lucky we were so sick, because otherwise we would've been at Gilly's friend's party and no one would've been there to see the flooding and it could've been a lot worse!
Note: the resolution of some of these pics sucks because I'm on crappy hotel wifi. Might fix it later.
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