Out and about in the UK

By the time we had woken up both Rhys and John had gone to work. Rhys leaves at 05:00 and John at 06:30 so it wasn't any surprise that we missed both of them. The only thing that we really had to do was to put the remaining money from our trip, not a whole lot as one can imagine, into an account. Doesn't sound too difficult but then I hadn't counted on the British way of banking which is especially difficult at the moment. The first bank we approached had effectively bought the actual bank into whose accounts we wanted to deposit but they couldn't help us but they were very helpful and pointed us across the way to the 'bought bank'. After waiting for some time in the queue we were eventually helped but the teller didn't know what to do because the account numbers, although correct, weren't compatible with his system. He phoned up his call desk for some help and they answered the call but refused to speak to him; 3 times in a row. Eventually we were holding up other customers so we were palmed off to a supervisor who also tried only to find out that in order to do a deposit we would have to make a deposit into a competing banks account and then it would arrive at the correct bank and into the correct account. This sounds very backwards to me but when we went to the competitor they didn't blink and promptly performed the transaction. I'm curious as to whether the money will actually arrive!

Having completed the only thing we had to do during the morning we went for coffee and I was halfway through coffee when I realised that we were a few minutes over the hour for the 'pay and display' parking so I rushed back to feed the meter only to find that the meter maid had beaten me to it. A 60GBP fine for 10 minutes saw an instantaneous rise in the blood pressure so I went back finished my coffee and then drove out thinking of how I could exact revenge. While we were driving out Caron happened to notice that the fine had been issued during the validity period of the pay and display ticket so the meter maid hadn't actually even looked at it, he had just issued a fine. On the way out we collared another meter maid who explained what we needed to do to get it rescinded which we proceeded to do. Phew, that was 60GBP close!

During the afternoon we drove around to Epsom Downs where Lane, Williams daughter, lives and had afternoon tea with her and her two children, anneke and william. We thoroughly enjoyed the visit and before we knew it, we had to rush back to John and Julies for supper. We were going to go out but everyone was quite knackered so we ended up just having some take-aways at home which turned out to be much better than expected. The TV happened to be on when the first reports started coming through that MJ had died which was really bad news for Julie because there were 50 concerts coming up in which she was involved that now wouldn't be taking place.