27 March 2015, 10 am
The whale of a time continues. Mr Davies and I visit some patent attorneys
on the Isle of Wight. They claim that
they work there and are not really on holiday all the time, honest.
Visiting the Isle of Wight involves going on a
hovercraft. I am as excited as a little
kid. I almost forget to take notes in
the meeting. The Isle of Wight Pixies
have delivered garibaldi biscuits, so Mr Davies is as excited as a little kid
too. We very nearly buy ourselves a
stick of rock on the way back. But at
the last minute Mr Davies says no, he prefers a beer or two.
I have to say I am impressed with the hovercraft. It is a big and noisy beast but you can
reverse it out of its parking space quicker than I can turn my car round, and
you can drive it out of the parking space, down a pebble beach and straight
across the water, which I definitely cannot do in my car although I’m sure Top
Gear® would have tried.
The automated booking system which goes with the hovercraft
is, however, slightly less impressive and not particularly automated. It
involves somebody reading the email from Unlucky Gary, scribbling a note on a
couple of raffle tickets and shoving them into an envelope with Mr Davies’s
name on the front. The note on the
raffle tickets has the wrong date on it, and so we have to go back to the
man-in-the-kiosk, who is already quite busy selling jelly beans and other
hovercraft souvenirs, and ask him nicely to scribble on some new raffle tickets
so that we can travel across today as originally planned, and not last week as
written on the first set of raffle tickets.
Fortunately we manage to complete this complicated process just in time
to get on today’s hovercraft. It is
practically empty. Presumably this is
because lots of people are still queueing up to be issued incorrect tickets and
jelly beans.
27 March 2015, 4 pm
When I get home from the Isle of Wight, which is many
motorway miles later, my family remind me that I am supposed to be setting off
on a proper holiday to the Lake District and so I had better repack my
suitcase. Apparently it is not the done
thing to go to the Lake District with a folder full of meeting notes, a laptop
and a couple of posh suits.
They explain to me what the word “holiday” means, and what
the word “family” means when attached to the word “holiday”, and then they
explain to me about the terrain and the climate in the Lake District and point
me in the direction of my walking boots and kagoul. I am disappointed to learn that there are no
hovercrafting opportunities in the Lakes and that there will be no garibaldis
in our family picnics. This strikes me
as a pretty poor show but I am told to shut up and get in the car anyway. Even the souvenir hovercraft jelly beans are
not going to get me out of this one.