What an ice day!

Alan's gone to Paris for the day for a meeting and was picked up at 6.30am this morning to get to Heathrow for his flight at 9am. Unfortunately, due to traffic he only just made it with 30 mins to spare, so it was a bit of a stressful start to what's a very long day for him as he won't be home until about 11pm. I didn't get back to sleep after he'd left, so ended up taking Louis for a walk to the beach at 8am. It was lovely as the sun shining, although it was very cold, but I'd much rather have sunshine and cold temperatures that the awful grey day from yesterday.

Once we got back I had breakfast, and then went to my French group before heading into town with my friend Barbara. We had lunch at Jamie's Italian, which was great as usual and I got an early Christmas present off Jamie - I have a gold membership card with which I get certain benefits and I received an email yesterday to say that there was a gift waiting for me, which was very nice apron.

After lunch we went ice skating at the Royal Pavilion, and although I blipped the ice rink last week, I couldn't resist this view taken just before we got on the ice. They'd just had the machine on it to make it smooth after the last session and I liked the colours and the reflections in the ice. It was great fun but although I used to ice skate when I was younger, I found it much harder than roller blading and nearly fell a couple of times!

Fortunately there weren't too many people on the ice, but there was one guy who was very good and he said he'd only be skating for two weeks! He's bought a season ticket as he's learning to skate because he wants to join an ice hockey team, and he'd been skating for 3 hours today - with his season ticket he can go as often as he wants, so it's good practice for him.

I've had a really nice day, and I'm now heading out again to meet my other friend Barbs as we're going to the cinema to watch the early evening showing of Philomena. Have a good evening and I'll catch up with you later.