Friday, August 04, 2006

Thursday, I'm telling you- it's the best day of the week...

Without fail Thursday seems to produce the best day of activities of the week. And this week it had some competition but nothing it wasn't ready for.
Monday nite Mim and I decided to go and see Pirates of the Carribean. I LOVED the first Pirates movie that came out a couple of years back and so Dead Mans Chest was on my must see list this year. Despite several conversations about seeing it and several groups of people I knew going I had not managed to get to see it. Mim, just back from Albania and Greece, is pumped (in a jet-lagged sort of way) about getting stuck back into work and planning some stuff over the summer but was loving the down time at the minute and so we headed out to Aylesbury to see the film. My plan had always been to go dressed as a pirate (possibly the reason I did not recieve an invite to go with some of the others) and Mim is just crazy enough to take me up on the idea. So we borrowed some eye liner (if it's good enough for Jack Sparrow...) and grabbed our eye patches and a bandana, donned our most pirate like shirts and headed off. Grabbing tea in town before the film was interesting, we had borrowed the eye liner from the family I normally stay with and they were putting bets on whether or not we'd be beaten up or not, but we got through dinner and to the cinema but almost didn't get tickets. This was because we ordered the tickets in "pirate speak" and the girl behind the counter couldn't move for laughing. She told us not to speak coz everytime we did she lost it again, we of course leapt into a long conversation (in pirate) about which seats we wanted, the high-light of this was where Mim slipped back into normal speak causing the ticket girl to lose it once more. Her parting question to me was "So are you his (Mim's) carer or something?" I responded "Something like that"

Tuesday nite saw the boys gather for some Xbox, digeridoo (Trueman has one for some reason so I held a bit of a coroboree), food, farting and banter at Truemans place. Always good fun.

Wednesday I moved house twice.

And we come to Thursday... Simeon had a party for his second birthday and so Mim, me, Sozz, Matty and some others tagged along to help out (eat food and play with balloons!!). After we finished there I got a text asking if I wanted to go Punting in Oxford so Mim and I headed in to have a look. We stopped in Headington to grab some cash which turned into a race back to the river, pelting through Headington we scrambled for every chance to take the lead and ended up on opposite sides of the road crossing the bridge. Needing to be on Mim's side of the bridge to have any chance of getting to the Punting ahead of him I saw my chance and picked up pace before darting out in a traffic gap, pulling ahead to his surprise and beating him to the Punt dock by a good 27.6 seconds. We were late and the others had already left so we wandered up the river looking for people we knew and then called them when we were unsuccessful. Turns ou tthey'd gone the other direction up the river so we wandered back that way only to discover that there is no access to paths on that side of the river unless you happen to go to one of the colleges or are extremely rich and own a house up there. Giving up and about to head home I noticed some people in a park as we crossed the bridge. Now, there's no access to the parkland from this end of town but that does not mean you can't go there (you just have to walk several kilometres out of your way). Not inclined to do this Mim and I resolved that we would just have to climb down off the bridge into the park. The group of uni students picnicing in the park ceased their discussion to watch with wide mouthed disbelief at our daring and blatant disregard for "proper English conduct" I gave them a wink as we walked past into the so-thought "unaccessable" park.
We went exploring and eventually came to another river with a big barbed wire fence on the other side and no way of crossing that just screamed "Challenge!!" to my Aussie mindset. We found a decent spot and jumped the river (Quite a feat if I do say so myself) before finding a gap in the fence to slip through. Our explorations continued into what later turned out to be Private College Grounds (more the better) and we jumped a fence and stopped our exploration short mainly because Mim was being doubled up with waves of pain he compared to labour due to his need to use a toilet. I told him that the entire female world would probably debate that claim using baseball bats but he insisted that that was what it was like to... In the process of jumping the final fence on our way out another wave of pain hit Mim and he paused rather awkwardly atop a spiked fence for a few moments before we were able to sneak out of a college which was rather further away from the car than we had expected. Fortunately it was just across the road from the Oxford Vineyard Church offices where we have some friends and so we made a pit stop for Mim to release the demon (which he named "Angry Bear").
We trekked it back into Oxford to retrieve the car and then went home to sleep after a great evening adventure. I'm considering taking a group of people exploring again next week...

And now back to work!! Ciao!!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Tip: Before jumping a fence into private grounds, always check for patrolling Dobermans.

Jacqui said...

Hi Zac,
what great memories you will have.
love nan