Today was my trip to The Mayflower in Southampton to see Les Miserables with choir girlies - I've never seen a big production of a major West End show before, so this was something I'd been looking forward to for ages. My concern was that C was going to be on his own though - but this was soon remedied by his sister Jill, as she said, "muscling in!" and taking him over for the day; his brother John is over from Finland for a few days with his wife, as I think I've mentioned, so the plan was to go off and entertain themselves, which they did in style! Ventnor seems to figure large with John when he comes home, so off they went to The Spyglass to start off with a spot of lunch overlooking the bay (very nice too).
Siv and C paddling in Ventnor Bay
This was followed by putting on the small green (which I was confused about as C texted me "We are putting in Ventnor" and I couldn't understand what they were putting and why they were putting it in Ventnor anyway). They then had tea and cake in the teashop, where there was much debate over the accuracy of the scorer's card, in that John appeared to have won, but had also kept score, and his competitors doubted the accuracy of the score keeping - sibling rivalry alive and well even at their age!!!!So while this was all going on, I was on my Les Mis trip - I realised first thing this morning that I was not going to fit in a long walk before having to leave, so scuppered that idea, and arranged to pick up my lovely soprano friend Tina and go to Cowes together to save taking two cars. Having thought I'd planned out the timing etc well, and would park in St Mary's Road car park, we duly arrived there and quickly realised it wasn't long stay enough and we'd run out of time on the ticket...there followed a mad dash up to the long stay at Park Road, finding what was possibly the last space, collating enough change for the ticket machine, then dashing to the Redjet with only five minutes to spare - I must plan better if we do this again!!!! Thankfully we made the Redjet where we met up with three other friends and off we went. We got the free bus up to the theatre.
RRuth
THannah (l), Tina and me
Tina had booked us into Joe's for lunch where we met up with more friends and enjoyed a delicious lunch -
:L-R: Cherry, Pam, Nicky, Sarah, Ruth
Another small panic ensued when the waitress got our bill wrong, and as time was ticking away we were starting to worry that we'd miss the last call for the show - thankfully we didn't, but by the time we arrived and got to our seats the lights were going down...skin of the teeth job!!
The show was amazing - the sets were fantastic and seemed to change so swiftly they almost floated in and out, and the singing was so inspiring; having done a couple of numbers from this show in our summer concert it was lovely to see it done professionally - I had goosebumps at the ones I knew! We didn't realise until we came out that the part of Marius had been played by one Gareth Gates - didn't recognise him! I will just say though that his rendition of 'Empty Chairs at Empty Tables' wasn't a patch on the one that our lovely Cyrus did in the summer concert....
And so home; we all felt quite drained - it takes a lot out of you to sit through three hours of amazing singing, choreography, set change and stage effects - but I couldn't sit down straight away! Romilly was off to Portsmouth with Dan and some friends to celebrate his 21st in style, so she'd asked me to give her a lift into Ryde. Now this would normally be fine, no problem, no hassle, until I remembered that it was Ryde Illuminated Carnival night and parts of Ryde are closed off. It was strange driving down Union Street where there were no parked cars!!! Into Tesco on the way home for some top up shopping and then home to flake out; C had a bit of a gippy tum tonight, possibly due to being overtired and/or eating too much, but he wasn't right so we turned in early.
A full day - the first day we've been apart for any length of time since the diagnosis, and it didn't come easy. But we must keep on, doing things, keeping other people involved and being as normal as we can while C is still fairly active - as we have discovered so well, you never know what's around the corner.....
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