In October I bought JC a pre-Christmas treat of a theatre production of "I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue" in Bournemouth. A few days after, he realised he had to be in Luxembourg that weekend as his sister was home and, due to Covid, he hadn't seen for years. Fortunately Caitlin was able to join me - Riona was on nights in Cardiff so definitely ruled herself out there.
Not being a fan of driving, I decided to catch the train from Cranbrook to Bournemouth. The Cranbrook to Salisbury and Salisbury to Southampton legs worked smoothly. We were held up entering Southampton Central, and I joked to the guy next to me that I might miss my connection. What I didn't realise is that all connections to Bournemouth had been cancelled. I stepped off the train at Southampton Central into semi-chaos, as the line from Southampton to Bournemouth had gone down due to a failure of the electric 3rd rail. I asked a station assistant what the plan was and they pointed me towards the exit stating "taxi replacement service". So there we were - about 200 of us trying to exit the station to join a not-yet-formed queue, others were trying to exit to simply leave and more were trying to enter for another train.
I called my friend, Rosey, who lives in Southampton, who nearly came out to rescue me and drive me to Bournemouth. Meanwhile I'd made friends with other frustrated passengers in the static queue - Ran, Rob, Nick. I stuck with it, as I really wanted to get to Bournemouth that night and I didn't want to put Rosey out. After an hour or so, success! - we got to the front of the queue, did a shout out for "who wants to go to Bournemouth?" and myself and my now 7 new Bournemouth buddies were whizzed off westwards. Ran's wife collected him from Bournemouth station and kindly dropped me to my hotel so I managed to reach my destination 5 hours after leaving Cranbrook. Meanwhile, JC had gone to Luxembourg that morning from Cranbrook, via Waterloo, London City Airport and arrived home in 7 hours.
On Saturday I headed for the sea. I found Boscombe Pier and wandered up and down it.
I then headed off towards Bournemouth Pier. I loved the rainbow of beach huts.
There is a lot of sand at Bournemouth - so much so that there are numerous steps down from the promenade to the beach where only the tops of the step railings appear. The sand has accreted that much. I'm far more used to shingle ;-)
Caitlin arrived on time, no such train fandango for her, and we strolled by the sea on the way to our supper. There's always a reason to walk via the sea to go somewhere.
We ate at a lovely Sri Lankan restuarant, The Coconut Tree, then saw the show. The show itself was fine although a lot more scripted than I remember: so much so that the cast were walking around the stage with their written scripts. What made it unpleasant for me, though, was that the BIC's loop system didn't work. It turns out that analogue T-loop are incompatible with digital hearing aids. As I pointed out, the NHS have been providing digital hearing aids for over a decade so it's crazy that they haven't upgraded their technology. Caitlin wonderfully switched on live-listen for me on her phone, so I kind of read that and kind of listened. Not being able to hear didn't ruin the evening for me, but it made it an experience I would not hasten to repeat, and I won't trust BIC again with their T-loop offering.
On Sunday we had a lazy first thing, then brunch in town. Bizarrely, we ended up in exactly the same place I'd had lunch the day before - which just goes to show it was a Ruth-friendly cafe (the veggie + gluten free is an offering too far for many establishments). We sat and ate, drank and did the obligatory puzzle. Happy days :-)
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