We are back on the taxi rank, exhausted from our adventures and ready to have a peaceful evening.
So far it has been a very peaceful evening, which is handy. I feel as though I have spent a month jogging up mountains and doing cartwheels at the top.
Of course, when we woke up this morning we were still in Manchester.
Mark took the dogs out, and they dashed about snuffling out the rats under the railway bridge, which is one of their happy things about coming to Manchester, along with all of the bones saved from our International Buffet dinners. Mark said there were a lot of rats. There used to be a homeless man there on our past visits, but he has gone now, I hope he is all right.
The sun was shining, and the solar panel had charged the batteries splendidly. It will not do this for very much longer, because the little car park where we usually park is fast becoming overshadowed by a mammoth construction which appears to be flats, and quite probably by the next time we visit, the sunshine will not reach it any more.
The lift tower is at its full height, although everything else is still only at four or five floors high, and reaches up thirteen floors, it is going to be huge. We discovered today that Manchester has more cranes per capita than anywhere else in Europe, and we could easily believe this. The city is building blocks of apartments all over the place, if we had any cash I thought how nice it would be to buy one, we could have a town house and a country house, and look out over the world from an enormous height.
We watched them building whilst we had breakfast, and told stories of Great Health And Safety Perils We Have Known, because these days the world is clad in yellow vests and hard hats whenever any interesting dangling about is happening, and Lucy and Oliver have never known anything else. Theatre Clwyd used to have a terrifying construction called The Wall Of Death in my youth, I expect they have added safety ropes to it now.
We did not hang about for very long after breakfast, because apart from Mark, the rest of us get bored with watching building sites quite quickly. When Oliver was a very little boy he had a DVD of a building site, which he watched endlessly. We could all sing along with the Mass Excavator Song and the Safety Equipment Song. The interest waned eventually, and the DVD was lost, and actually I was a little bit sorry, it was a happy time.
We stopped briefly on the way home, for cups of tea and sandwiches, not because we were hungry, but because we wanted the holiday to last just a little bit longer. In the end, of course, we had to go home.
Going home was not horrible, though, of course it never is. When we are away in the camper van I never want to go back at all, until I get there, and then within minutes I am overwhelmed with the niceness and joy of being at home, of having all our things around us and not having to remember to be organised about water heaters and batteries.
We unpacked and cleaned the camper, so that it will be perfect and ready for the next time. This will be quite soon, because we have got to take Lucy to Northamptonshire in a couple of weeks, she has got to do the Bleep Test. I am very sympathetic about this, and glad that it is not me.
We were so weary from our week of excitements that we needed a little sleep before work. Waking up did not happen easily, I can tell you.
We made it in the end, and I took a picture out of the window of my taxi whilst I was on the taxi rank. It is not a bad place to be.
Even with a world full of adventures, it is nice to be home.
