Cough, cough, cough…

Cough.

Cough.

That was me ALL NIGHT BLOODY LONG! 🙁 And I hate coughs. I hate me coughing and I hate other people coughing. I particularly hate coughs that keep me awake when I should be asleep.

I tossed and turned, hit the pillow, got up for a drink, got up for the toilet, threw the covers off, snuggled into the covers, took my nightie off, blew my nose, had another drink, considered turning the light back on and reading my book, pondered giving up on sleep and going back downstairs…I listened to Ady snoring, people walking home drunkenly at 3am, and the birds singing at about 430am. I listened to the cockerels crowing at dawn and then finally I fell asleep.

As a consequence, when I did wake, at 930am I was feeling pretty rough 🙁 My throat was sore, my head was pounding, my nose was still running, my cough was still very active and I was tired too :(.

But we had a full day planned, the sun was shining and so we headed off to Ady’s work to test our new tent on the nice big field next to the greenhouses. The plan was to test how long it took to put up, whether I could do it on my own and to check it was all intact and fine. So Ady’s job was to stand and time me and not get involved at all in tent errection. Which is the very best thing for Ady really as he calls the Outwell ‘the divorce tent’ and still believes it is black magic that transforms a pile of poles and nylon into a 3d object we can live in for a week. His utter ineptness in tent putting up just irritates me so he is far better staying in the background and keeping busy passing me pegs and opening my bottle of ‘tent’s up!’ cider afterwards.

So first ever time up I got from still in the bag to outer tent up in just over 20 minutes.

I did get Ady to come and hold a pole twice but either of the kids could have done that easily as it literally was just keeping a pole still. I didn’t bother guying the tent but did put the inner and ground sheet in to be sure it was all okay and I also put up the canopy too. Really pleased with how it went up :). Will reserve ‘chuffed-ness’ till we’ve slept in it (having had fingers burnt with declaring myself chuffed way too early with a tent once before and failing to heed the warnings of an old hand in all things tenting-related 😉 ) but am tentatively (see what I did there?) pleased :).

Davies and Scarlett put Davies’ little one man tent up while we were doing that and did a pretty good job of that. Then did some bug catching and identifying using the net and insect ID books they’d brought along. They found various bees and butterflies, several ladybirds and other bugs. Ady and I sat in the new tent and discussed what other camping stuff we want to acquire before taking it down and packing it all away again. Felt sad not to actually be sleeping in it really. Can’t wait for May :).

Next stop was Sainsburys for some ice lollies as suggested by Ady to soothe my throat. He also bought me some fancy cough medicine and some energy drink to try and see me through the rest of the day. Then we visited a couple of garden centres for Ady to take photos for work (thus shaving off some time he needs to spend at work next week in order for him to be home on Thursday for childcare) before meeting up with Julie and co for a walk round the woods at Slindon. Suspect it qualifies as a proper Spring Walk (but we’re doing a full on Spring Walk tomorrow so don’t want to peak too early today).

That was a really nice hour or so with Ady, Julie, Lorna and I walking at Lorna pace with the four older cousins went off ahead into the woods. Every so often Ady would whistle and Tarly (who was dressed in dolphin trainer outfit again today, complete with hat and whistle) would whistle back so we could track them. Who needs mobile phones all the time you are within whistle range…

We came home via Sainsburys again for picnic supplies for tomorrow and I was feeling really quite rough having had several coughing fits in the car (possibly brought on by the air con) so I went and had a nice long bath, blow dried my hair (which made it Carol-crazy) and got ready to go out. Ady fed the kids and they watched Total Wipeout and Doctor Who. Then I was picked up by a colleague and we collected another two colleagues and headed over to Brighton for a meal to say goodbye to a colleague who has left. It was a nice evening and I had several interesting conversations with some of the important library people who were there. The food was passable (although I should perhaps make allowances for taste buds dulled by the coughing?), the service, as is so often the case with large groups (21 of us) was pretty dire with long waits and several reminders before getting most of the things we asked for like drinks.

We said our goodbyes to Abi has left and then came home again. I’ve given Ady enough time to get to sleep before I go up and start coughing so I’m off to bed with fairly futile hopes of a better nights sleep.