back up

Whilst the surfaces of the roads we needed to trundle along to get back home from back home were generally fine and un-iced the car parks of service areas such as Scotch Corner exhibited definite signs of not having been scraped by the operating entities. The slopier car park nearer the building had probably had something done to it to prevent all the cars ending up in a pile against the fence but it's a pain to get around at the best of times; there was more space at the Travelodge end, albeit lots more hard-packed ice underwheel and underfoot. There was a pound coin trapped within the pavement-ice next to the access ramp by the door, perhaps deliberately as a seasonal adjustment to the gluing-coins-to-the-pavement trick. Nicky reported that the women-toilets were fine but the taps in the male conveniences seemed to be struggling to do anything more than trickle slightly so that it took about five minutes to complete the soap-rinsing cycle.

I usually handle the Lincolnshire-based bits of driving so had handed over to Nicky when we stopped which unfortunately meant that she was stuck with inching through the traffic on the approach to the Metrocentre, to which much of the surrounding population appeared to be driving. Some may conceivably have been heading back into town for other purposes but the fact that he road completely cleared after the appropriate turn-off indicated that people might really have been heading by car to a nightmarishly large and busy retail agglomeration in the late afternoon. Perhaps the inevitability of then having to leave when the centre shut would be better than attempting to choose a time to leave when it might not be hellishly busy and then getting stuck in a car park for several hours anyway. Fortunately as soon as we were over the river the level of traffic sank back down to nearly nothing for the rest of the journey, though dingbats who don't dip their headlights and drive too close behind always tend to appear somewhere between Berwick and Edinburgh.

Although I'd been trying to fidget and shift about every now and then the strange left-hip-ache thing I'd noticed after the drive southwards last week (and which had almost entirely solved itself whilst in Parentville despite the relative lack of activity) had returned a bit by the first swap and a lot by the second swap in the car park of the Morrison near Berwick. On the way down I'd thought it was probably due to the seat not being pushed back as far as possible after putting the back seat down but before loading everything up, with the result that I was having to hold my left leg in a weird position when not operating any pedals with it. Cars tend to be uncomfortable things at the best of times and even the two-hour journey from Ayr to Edinburgh can result in discomforts of the knees. If it's exactly the same thing as occurred on the way down then it will be lessened by walking, though most of the walking performed last week consisted of small steps as I was practising walking along on the slippiest bits without falling over. The weird hip-ache thing mostly affects movement of the leg as it's swung past the vertical so only affects normal striding-walking. Though it will be inconvenient to have to limp slightly for the next few days it should hopefully only be the next few days for which limping slightly is necessary and I'll now have the ideal excuse for not going anywhere in the car if it can be proven that it is to blame.