Canterbury tales

Mini holiday over and we set off home via Canterbury after breakfast. Neither of us had ever been to Canterbury before so we were looking forward to it. Although not very far from Margate it feels a million miles away with all the posh shops, book shops and ancient architecture. Judging from the local paper, the house prices seem to have at least doubled by this short drive and it’s not even by the coast.

We found the entrance to Canterbury cathedral, I got Claire to stand in front and a mail van pulls up right outside making the shot. It was difficult to even get a shot of the inside without paying the £7.50 entrance fee as nobody wanted to move out the way or pay the fee. We walked around for a while and both forgot that we were going to look for the restaurant owned by that Michelin chef with only one arm called Michael Caines. Well he has the right name anyway. If we had remembered to look for it or stumbled across it we would have had to find the car and put more money in first. The parking and traffic in this area is ridiculous and you spend most of your time driving in heavy traffic looking for a parking spot and most of your money paying for it when you do find one. I think we are spoilt for parking in Milton Keynes.

It started raining after we had got ourselves disorientated and lost trying to find our way back to the car. We jumped into one of those expensive departmental stores where I had to pay 50 pence to go to the toilet. Seems to have been hit by inflation even more than house prices to spend a penny; should have put my money into toilets and parking rather than property. Anyway we managed to find the car 2 minutes before our ticket ran out and headed home.

We had an awful journey home with the usual Friday afternoon problems on the M25. While I stopped for fuel we decided to stay off the M25 and find an alternative as the last 10 miles would have taken us longer than a detour. It’s easy to do that these days because of satnav’s; trouble is everyone has one and does the same making the surrounding areas just as congested. We talked about stopping for lunch at St Albums but, as it was Friday, decided to get up the M1 home before the traffic got even worse.

We were starving by the time we eventually got back and stopped off at the Indian next to Waitrose called “Shiraz” that are advertising a three course lunch for £8. It turned out not to be an Indian at all but Persian so don’t be fooled by the front, it doesn’t say Persian. Not really our cup of tea, chicken and prunes, lamb and lentils and they had very strange starters of Greek dishes. Quite disappointing really, so we won’t be going back there again in a hurry. The food is neither spicy or tasty to my pallet and reminded both of us of our trip around the Emirates where we spent 3 weeks over Christmas and New Year driving looking for sensible priced hotels.

Sorry to end on a downer but that’s the way it goes sometimes. Looks like we will have to intensify our search for a property in Milton Keynes. Never mind it’s a Grand Prix weekend but a real shame that Michael decided not to come back, come on Lewis!