Last week........

I finished work on the 3rd April for two weeks - I get school holidays.   Monday I had a dentist appointment and got back just in time to 'not' have to help MWM with the cleaning (wink).   Tuesday I went to visit my Dad and then went to see one of my nieces who has just failed her driving test and needed someone to sit with her while she practised her driving.   Her Dad (my brother) usually takes her out but he's in the Dominican Republic at the moment so it was down to me.     Her test centre is in Oldham, which I don't know at all so she set the SatNav to take us to the test centre and I just concentrated on the traffic.   Once we got to the test centre she just drove around the roads there following my instructions of 'take the next left' or 'turn right at the end of the road'.   Needless to say we got lost, neither of us having any clue where we were.  No probs, we set the SatNav to take us back to the test centre, then set it again to take us back to her house. She was pleased with the practise, I was pleased to get back in my own car, get home and have a stiff drink!    I have to do it again tomorrow!

The hightlight of our week was Wednesday.   I needed a few bits and pieces so we decided to go to Bury (Lancs) on the bus in the morning and have a mooch about.  MWM has a free bus pass now he's 60 so that's good, I had to buy a day saver for £4 but I intended getting my money's worth because I used it again in the afternoon . I managed to get everything I needed, which always puts me in a good mood..    We returned home for lunch and then caught the 2.45 pm bus to Manchester.  The buses aren't really reliable and to prove the point the express bus we inteded to catch didn't turn up so we got another one which took 20 minutes longer to reach our destination.  Anyway not to worry we weren't really in any rush.

We had an hour to kill, so we called in Cafe Rouge for a glass of vino then headed up to Chinatown for the meal we'd booked for 5 p.m.      We shared a bottle of wine with a delicious meal of Chicken & Sweetcorn Soup, Chicken with garlic and spring onions, Beef with Ginger and fried rice, followed by coffee and liqueurs.      Then we headed down to Oxford Road to the Palace Theatre for the highlight of our day - the hit show "We Will Rock You" where we had great seats just three rows from the front.

If you haven't heard of this show the basis is it's set in the future, the narrative tells of a society wherein 'real' music and all instruments are banned, and everyone is forced to resign themselves to the 'Computer Recorded Anodyne Pop'  (CRAP) distributed by huge corporations, peppered throughout with 'Queen' hits.   There's the Bohemians, the resistence if you like, looking for the holy grail ( a real musical instrument, a guitar in fact) to bring live music back to the masses.  Their life is blighted by The Killer Queen and Khashoggi and his Ga Ga men who round up the rebels and brainwash them before sending them to the Seven Seas of Rhye    The whole thing revolves around the hero 'Galileo Figaro' and his girlfriend 'Scaramouche' with more than a touch of pantomime - it is a great show.   We saw it in London a couple of years ago and promised ourselves if/when it came to Manchester we would go see it again.   We still haven't had enough so we will go again before it finishes in the summer.Emerging from the theatre at 10.30 p.m. and still buzzing we headed for a pub further up Oxford Road where we had another couple of drinks before calling a taxi to bring us home.



Thursday morning was food shopping and I spent an hour with my neighbour who is virtually housebound, this is a regular visit on Thursdays.


On Friday I did what I had promised myself and cleared out my wardrobes.   At this moment in time there are three, yes you heard me right THREE, binliners of clothes waiting to go to the charity shop.   I
Saturday we picked up my eldest son's children and took them to see 'Big Grandad' (my dad) and Granny (MWM's Mum) in the afternoon then had a night out at a local working men's club with our friends K&T.

Yesterday we went on the East Lancs Railway, had lunch out and called to the pub on the way home.

We've had a busy week.

Now, where's me credit card I've got loads of room in my wardrobe!