Well, it’s been an interesting past few days! We went to a wedding down in Cornwall. Neither of us had been to Cornwall before, so it was a new experience!
Because we sold our car recently, Phil’s parents very kindly let us borrow their car (it was a lot cheaper to borrow their car than to hire a car). They dropped the car with us on Friday morning, and so after lunch on Friday we packed our stuff and headed off. We decided that it would be better to break the journey on the way rather than drive all the way to Cornwall in one go, so we stayed at the Exeter M5 Travelodge. The journey itself wasn’t bad: heavy traffic for much of the way down – as well as rain – but we made good time and got there at about 18:30.
On the Saturday morning, we headed off after breakfast and made good time. We got to our hotel at St Ives around 11:00 – it took a lot less time than Google seemed to think it would. We were staying at the Treloyhan Manor Hotel, which we can recommend: our room was very comfortable, very plush, and the place itself was beautiful.
Anyway, we headed down to St Ives itself for the wedding around midday, which gave us a little bit of time to have a wander beforehand. I took a few photos (one of which is above), and then we went to the St Ives Harbour Hotel for the wedding. The ceremony itself was a civil ceremony, and we enjoyed it. I’m not really a fan of civil ceremonies to be honest – only to be expected really! – but I think they did it well. Afterwards, we went up for the reception, where we remained for the rest of the day.
Phil and I didn’t really know anyone apart from the bridegroom, but we were sat at a table with a few of the bride’s university friends and we got chatting quite quickly. We also had a great time on the dancefloor afterwards – the DJ played a few songs which you hardly ever hear at weddings (e.g. Metallica – Enter Sandman and a Nirvana song, the name of which escapes me). Although I’m still annoyed that he didn’t play my request (‘Basket Case’ by Green Day), and he also managed to cut off the second half of ‘Sweet Child of Mine’ which wasn’t brilliant. Although that did mean we got ‘Paradise City’ so I guess that was a silver lining.
Anyway, we got back to our hotel about midnight, and crashed! We headed off the next morning after breakfast, and had a great journey back. We only stopped off for about half an hour to have lunch, and got back to Phil’s parents about 16:00. We had some dinner with them, left the car there and got the train back to ours – we finally arrived back home about 20:00.
All in all, a tiring weekend – but good! I feel much more rested now after having had a couple of good nights sleep.
That said… it was all a bit fraught yesterday evening. Phil went out for the evening, and I was inside working on my sermon for this Sunday. Around 20:30, everything went dark – there was a power cut! Fortunately my laptop had a fully battery so I was able to keep working on my sermon. But when after 15 minutes the power still hadn’t come on, I started worrying a bit: I could see lights in a few other houses in our road, and in particularly I could see that our next-door-neighbours both had lights working. So, I called up e.on energy and reported the power cut. At about 21:30, someone came round and took a look at our meter. We have a digital meter here – and it was dead, indicating that there was no power coming into the property at all. There was nothing he could do – he said they’d have to dig up the road!
So, today Mrs Phil stayed at home for the morning while I went up to college. I came back home about midday to let Phil go into work, and found that the workmen had discovered a fault outside our house. Apparently there’s a fault in the middle of the road – which means they will have to come back tomorrow and dig the road up, with all the problems that entails! For now, they’ve left us with a generator which is providing us with power. It’s a bit noisy outside, but at least we now have power and hopefully they’ll fix the problem tomorrow.
So, there you go! That’s been the last few days. A good weekend, followed by a slightly stressful start to the week. Hopefully it will be all sorted tomorrow, and there won’t be any other disasters for at least a month…
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