The Big Weekender

Wow, well, what a fun-packed weekend that was. I’m going to have to provide a summary version of recent events because my ‘net connection is currently not working. BT are, apparently, dealing. Joy.

We had a debrief about the various callouts from last week on Thursday night, and an update on the Milford Haven chap and the location he was found. Apparently, the BBC got it slightly wrong (on purpose?) – he was found just North of our search area. In a post-game analysis back at base, with the benefit of hindsight and input of a number of highly experienced search managers, the result came out the same. We did what we should have done, especially bearing in mind the limited resources we had available to us. Had we been asked to carry on searching on Sunday, the area where he was found would have been within our area of attention and its likely we would have found him. As always, some small lessons learned from each callout, but we did our best and received grateful and heartfelt thanks for it.

Friday night my new tenant arrived – Alex. From Portsmouth, he seems like a nice enough guy and he had cash for me, so he’s gone up in my book already. He got himself settled in and we had a few drinks to get to know each other. He’s off job-hunting next week.

Saturday dawned overcast with the promise of sunshine later, so Alex and I headed into Cardiff to meet up with  and missus and headed off to the cash and carry to grab “stuff”, some of which was for ‘s birthday party. I picked up some meat at the farm shop and we headed home where I frantically cleaned and re-arranged the house ready for guests. Sean unfortunately couldn’t get here until about 1700 – which is when I said I’d start cooking, so a frantic drive in and out of Cardiff to pick him up and I was back at the house cooking. The BBQ went well, with quite a few team members turning up and some old friends. Sean, poor thing, is suffering from his recent Meningitis C vaccination, so he crawled into bed feeling nauseous. I was knackered and when I checked on him about midnight, I fell asleep where I was sat. Fortunately, nobody much worried (or noticed?) and carried on partying until about 0400. So a good night all around.

Sunday morning and coffee and toast was the order of the day to settle a number of stomachs. Sean, Mal, Louisa and I all headed up to the climbing centre where Lee works, and we headed off for some fun on the climbing wall. After a few hours of mooching around the walls (including a fun attempt at climbing a nicely put-together chimney), we headed into the man-made caves. Two hours later, soaking wet, battered, bruised, squished and pulled, we emerged into the bright sunshine having thoroughly enjoyed the experience. I’m aching today in muscles I didn’t know I had and my knees are very bruised. Chips and a drunk later and we headed home to relax.

Monday was veg-out day. Matt and Yudit turned up and we sat around just chilling out on the sofa for most of the day. Mark turned up about 1800 and we talked for a bit until we finally got our selves together and headed into Charleston’s to meet Mal about 2100. Once again a great steak – we did manage to find a piece of gristle between our four steaks, but I think I’ll forgive them that one – the first either Mal or I have ever found in there.

Finally we headed home for bed (though a quick detour to Mark’s place for Matt to fix broken things at work was required). This morning I’m tired, well-fed and aching all over, so I think tonight I’ll just relax for a bit.

What a cracking weekend.