Lovely long weekend away ringing with The Fods in and around Exeter and then going on to stay with a friend from SAS down in Cornwall, when co-incidentally, a lot of other SASsers were down there too.

Lots of driving, and a very stressful few minutes on the way home via my parents trying to find a cash machine before crossing the Severn Bridge, during which I damaged my car paintwork.

But apart from that, a blissful relaxing holiday. Lots of nice Fodsers in the first bit, and some interesting churches. Completely ran out of energy by the end of the evening – particularly after the huge long climb to the ringing chamber in Exeter Cathedral – so stayed in and had a hot bath and an early night, along with a sneaky bottle of local cider.

And in the second bit, it was very nice to see a beautiful part of the country with friends I normally only sing with. Spending a few days in and around Bude, Boscastle and Tintagel, even at this time of year when the weather is a wee bit variable, was great. Spending a little bit of time getting to know some friends a little better was also greatly appreciated.

I do have a feeling of “shore leave now cancelled” – I’ve had my last holiday for a while. I’ve been trying to work out whether I can spare a long weekend in December for a pop over to Germany – Berlin? Cologne? – for some Christmas markets, but I probably won’t be able to fit it in. We’re working hard at planning next year’s elections: both the easy-to-plan local elections in May and the oh-my-god-surely-not prospect of a General Election in October, in the early days of a Brown Government. Getting Lib Dems elected and re-elected is harder work than getting people from the other two main parties back in, so we have to start a bit earlier.

One other thing from the weekend away – I was away from t’internet for four whole days.  So I was trying to post-to-blog using my mobile phone and Flickr, and often thwarted by there being no suitable 3G signal in rural Cornwall or Devon.  My phone gets unreliable if there are too many emails with attachments sitting around, and there were a number of emails stuck in my outbox for days.  Or so I thought.  It turns out that Flickr has received hundreds and hundreds of copies of a few pictures that I thought were stuck.  It’s going to take days to delete them all, and I’m going to get stuck with a huge data bill this month.  Bah!