MEDIA CENTRE - Off The Wall

Phil’s Travels – Nottingham, England (06.26)

Phil’s Travels – Nottingham, England (06.26)

It was the end of another academic year and time to bring our darling daughter back home, although she did seem to have been home more than at uni these past eight months, which of course meant we had no problem recognising her (despite the sore neck).

Our super son had recently acquired some wheels and we used his so called Batmobile to execute the darling daughter recovery mission (so called because it is black, I am guessing, and was so named by its previous owner, at least according to the onboard Bluetooth tech). The drive north and back the next day were the smoothest ever undertaken to/from Nottingham, in six years of doing so. If only all M1 trips could be so simple and swift.

The weather en route was rain, wind and sun in equal measure. A huge difference to the heat wave of the previous weeks. Was that our summer? We checked into our usual hotel and same room as last trip. The room was unchanged: compact and highly functional, and still equipped with oversized radio-alarm, desk light and old-fashioned fan. The view of the decommissioned Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station was as awe inspiring as ever. This erection of industrial grit, a memorial to a bygone coal-fired age, standing like a sentinel on the skyline is soon to be no longer. Its eight ginormous cooling towers and even taller chimneys are to be exploded in the coming years. For now, especially on a bright Sunday morning, I could not help but gawp at their magnificence.

Before dinner (our usual Mem Saab Indian, call us creatures of habit when in Nottingham), we walked to the Castle (closed sadly) and inspected the Robin Hood Statue. One day we will time a Nottingham visit so we can actually enter the Castle and see how the infamous Sheriff lived his life.

Breakfast in the hotel was from the small but perfectly formed buffet (sausage, bacon, eggs, mushrooms, beans, fruits, nuts, breads, cereals, juices, et al) in the tiny restaurant cum bar. Stuffed with Full English, we drove to our darling daughter’s digs and spent a couple of hours packing the Batmobile with laundry and sanitising her room in readiness for her re-occupation in October.

Full of our darling daughter’s landfill, the gritty Batmobile was not so nippy heading home. We returned with more laundry than my wonderful wife, super son and I generated in the same two-month period. Picture the illegal dump near the River Cherwell and you may begin to get a feel for the scale of the issue. Suffice to say, there was barely enough room for her and her laundry in her room at home.

The Batmobile was an effortless drive and our darling daughter eventually figured out the Bluetooth tech (hence how we know its name) and subjected us to her playlist for the two-hour journey south. The car was so easy to drive, no backaches. My reward for such weekend exertions was to watch the wacky racers of F1 in their somewhat more high-tech, faster and much more backache-inducing cars hurtle around the narrow streets of Monaco. Maybe I should take the Batmobile down there one day and truly put it through its paces. In my dreams!