Christmas in England Part 1 The North

My short week in Runcorn was pretty insane.

I'm unsure whether I like flying anymore? I used to love flying loads. But my last few trips have been plagued by cramped conditions (although the missus forward thinking prebooked us extra leg room on one journey) and getting very dry eyes and mouth from the recycled air.

But there is still something childishly exciting about being a few thousand feet in the air flying over cities.
But I'm quite sad to say the very first thing we did when we arrived in to Manchester was to head to the nearest McDonalds. You can take the man out of England but you can't take English out of the man (or something like that)

Trying to squeeze in seeing my mum was a hard task as she had made plans to go to Leeds for two days and Liverpool for one whole day during the six days I returned from Spain.
Trying to get work (we work from home and in this case holiday) done while having two screaming and very loud kids in the house was really difficult (although easily more managed when one of them went back to school).
Almost as difficult as trying to find a place to put our laptops.

Count 'em. Five laptops.

Most of my time though was spent catching up with my 10 month old nephew, who misses out on sharing a birthday with my by 24 hours.
And we did get a lot of photos of him including

Him enjoying his new booster chair so he can have toast at the table like everyone else.


And his thoughts on girls....or Chelsea's awful awful home game against Cluj (I was making pretty much the same face at that game)

In my first week my poor tolerence of alcohol seemed to take over when I had to cut short a night out with a friend after only two drinks due to meeting up with my dad earlier that afternoon for a few pints.
And I'm pretty sure one very slurred conversation over curry with another friend. But that one is ok as it wasn't just me that was drunk.

Although good things do come from drinking with my dad, including this Holiday season Christmas card-esque photo


I did spend some time in Liverpool myself so the missus could do exactly 1.75 hours worth of shopping before exploding at the sheer amount of people cashing in on early sales.
I got to see my stepbrother who I hadn't seen in a while. Almost swear at a few bus drivers, first one closed the doors and drove off just as we were about to get on. Second one was driving close to the speed of sound on the way back.
And we also spotted this guy out early

Aren't there supposed to be reindeers?

But almost too quickly my time was over and we had to head down South to the missus parents. Although we almost saved the best till last.
We got first class tickets down to London and enjoyed lots of free foods and drinks, loads of leg room and more importantly lots of peace and quite and calm.