Calais town hall, November 2008

I’m a little bit knackered right now, having really got out of my normal (lack of) sleep patterns.   Mostly this is the result of popping over to France for the day only a day or so after getting back from there - also from missing out on my now-traditional Friday afternoon snooze.

Where I work we knock off at lunch time on Fridays.  Normally I will use this free afternoon to go out and have a late breakfast, buy Jayne a present and then snooze on the sofa for a couple of hours but this week, when I really needed it most, I had some chores to do - arranging car insurance renewal and stuff like that where I needed to call places during office hours.

I could have done with that re-charge of my batteries because we were up at 5am on Saturday to go and join a coach trip to France arranged by my company.   They did the same thing last year, which we enjoyed, but this year seemed like more of a rush.  The reason is that fire in the channel tunnel which has disrupted and reduced services, so we didn’t have as much time in France as before.

No problem for most people who were happy to stay in the Cite Europe shopping centre and stock up on booze, but we wanted to go into town as well.  By the time we had taken a bus into Calais, looked around a bit, had some lunch, and taken a bus back there was not a whole lot of time to go around the shops.  Fortunately we were not there for booze cruising: we got a dozen bottles last November and still have about ten bottles left.  Must try to increase my alcohol consumption…

I had intended to take loads of photos, but Calais is not the most photogenic of places…  it might have been different if we had time to wander around the seafront area.  Not to worry, we did get some snails for Charlie, a couple of CDs and some clothes for Jayne.  It was a change of scenery and a break in the normal routine.