Friday, August 19, 2011

Catch up 3 Phones and flowers

On Wednesday throughout the summer Martin plays in a golf competition which means that een if it is his day off we can never go out far. The wednesday of his holiday was no exception, but I was surprised when he said he wanted a trip into Canterbury.

Turns out he wanted to go into the 3G shop to find out if his phone contract was ready for an upgrade.
It was, and not only that they could give him a discount on his contract if he took out a second hand set for me.

Now upgrading me has always been a problem because I have always been on PAYG and typically last August I put £10 on it, I still have £3 on it!! Yeah I admit, I am billy-nomates. But I really did want to join the smartphone set and it wasnt hard to pursuade me that £25 a month for 2 Samsung galaxy mini's with god alone knows how many free minutes, texts and internet access was worth it.


Of course with Martin being computer illiterate and my last upgrade being just after the start of the millenium, using them was always going to be a steep learning curve, but Laura came over and got us started, and we have been playing with our new toys eversince.


The carpets were put down on thursday, I cant get over how quick the guys were, two carpets down in under an hour and a half!


Kelly's fish tank had arrived and needed transporting to her house, but with the riots at the weekend (did I mention them, well its all over the web. The little row of shops a the end of Kelly's road was torched) Olli who is in charge of co-ordinating Sainsbury's emergency peoples was on nights making it difficult to pick a day to take it up. However he had quickly been changed back to days when they discovered how much they missed his brilliance on days and we were invited up for dinner on Friday.

Since Kelly didnt get home until 7 we decided to take in a visit to RHS Wisley for the day and then back track to Croydon afterwards.
It had taken us the best part of the the morning to make all these decisions, and to pack a picnic (we remembered from Harlow Carr just how hard getting food and drink in their gardens was) and to get there.

It was so worth it though.
As you walk in, you are greeted to a wonderfully preserved Tudor house (used as offices now) and a beautiful formal water feature with borders stuffed to the brim with summer flowers.




The place is huge, we picniced on the huge lawn, and then we wandered around all the various sections for 5 and a half hours and still only saw a portion of each part of the garden. There was a large proportion of mums pushing strollers visiting the gardens, and I have to say that considering the problems at the weekend with unruly children and teens terrorising the country, it restored our faith to see just how brilliantly well behaved every single child in the park was. The lake was full of ghost carp and huge golfish. I have seen big kio carp before but its the first time ever I have seen them actually attacking the ducks to get to the food.




The greenhouse was vast and housed a temperate zone, a dry zone and my favourites, a large variety of hibiscous.


Then there was the rockery garden, the rose garden that extended for as far as the eye coould see, the veggie garden (we whipped round that quick as it looked like rain) the alphine greenhouses ..... the list goes on and on.





Finally exhausted with our little leggies unable to walk anymore, we braved the M25 in rush hour back to Kelly's for our dinner.

She had decided on a takeaway dinner from the local harvester, and the good news was that Ollie was going to be home in time to join us. Our plans were foiled though when the Harvester staff informed us they were not doing take-outs as they didnt have any take-out boxes!! Poor Kez had to scrabble about in the fridge and make us a delish meal from nothing. Good ol' Kezzy!

And she was pleased with her fish tank, we were pleased with our day out!!


1 comment:

Unknown said...

That looks like a wonderful place.