A vegetable massala with rice and garlic naam. Terry had a chickem korma and liz had a vegetable biryani. Poppadoms, other naams, all kinds of stuff as well. A real Indian banquet from the takeaway in … errr … Folkestone. No point in letting a flying (or tunneling, even) visit to the UK go to waste.
So a nice early start to the Eurotunnel depot, blagging my way onto an earlier shuttle and I was in the Sainsbury’s with a plate of beans and chips before 09:00 UK time.
As soon as Screwfix opened, I was there. Only half of the mastic we needed, one of the saws wasn’t in stock, most of everything else was there, but “the tile saw is only available on 7-day order. Come back next week”
And so a frantic call to Terry back in Belgium and he tracked down an even more powerful tile cutter for just £20 more – in Crawley! So seeing as I was halfway there, what’s another 80 miles between friends?
It took three of us (me and the two guys in the shop) to load this machine into Caliburn.
Once I’d organised that, I went to the seaside for lunch. A nice bag of chips (and malt vinegar) on the seafront at Hastings overlooking the ruins of the pier.
After lunch, back to Ashford and the Tesco’s there for the pile of food shopping (you didn’t REALLY think that I had just come all this way for an industrial tile cutter and nothing else, did you?) and then to the Sainsbury’s at Folkestone again for whatever I couldn’t get at Tesco.
Final job was the Indian takeaway and it’s a good job that the staff arrived early, otherwise I would have been pushing it to catch my train back. They cooked while I babysat their kids (the things I have to do to keep my staff happy) and then a thrash through the traffic onto the train, and a thrash back home.
708 kilometres, a mere trifle you might think. It’s about the same distance as going back home again. But it was a lovely day out though, and the meal put the icing on the cake as it were.
