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Happy birthday to Mother Wingpig, 60 to-day at about a quarter to three in the morning. A conversation about times of birth and so on revealed that she was actually born in an hospital; I thought that in the olden days everyone was born at home on the kitchen table with the aid of various female relatives, Lux soap flakes and bowls of warm water. Hospital would have been a relatively safer bet as the female relatives would have included the chainsmoking Aunty Dilys. Despite supplying no clues whatsoever about what sort of thing she might like (fairly sparse even for normal birthdays and christmases) we had all managed to find something appropriate to be unwrapped after breakfast. Nicky spotted a garden gargoyle thing a couple of weeks back which we ended up getting though I'm faintly worried how it will be removed from the car when my parents get back home; it's probably best for father's back if he doesn't try to do it alone, mother probably wouldn't do much good taking one end despite her ability to lug postbags about all morning and both of them combined would probably start arguing and drop it. I wish that I'd weighed it during its brief stay at our flat though from rucksack-similarity-comparison it must be about 35 kilos or so though the high density is deceptive. I can't remember what he bought but Clare found her some well-liked clothes which was certainly an improvement on the idea she had about this time last year which involved buying tickets for an alleged Cliff Richard concert.

*shudder*

After a festive bacon sandwich we left (I wasn't the last out of the cottage) for Alnwick, partly with the intention of visiting stuff but also to sort out a supplementary present of some frames for some printyphotopics of the fambly and possibly to visit the allegedly famous (think it might be in the Rough Guide) secondhand bookshop, so famous it has its own wee pedestrian tourist-direction sign which I caught sight of on the way through on the way down last Saturday without knowing at the time that it was famous. Insofar as I can remember having visited the place before I was probably more concerned with scampering around the castle than being dragged sedately around the town. We ended up not going to the castle (though I like castles I dislike patronisation and Harry Potter so it was probably the best move) and just did the Gardens instead. As I was getting towards my last 220 or so picturesworth of memory one less thing to use them up on would be handy.

Rather than being posh-house-gardens the initial impression was that the entrance and approach facilities resembled those of the Eden Project: lots of hi-tech tentiness rather than standard building materials and a vaguely modern-looking sweep to the fountainythings visible from the entrance gates. Eden is definitely worth seeing though it was occasionally a little bare and nonsciencey outside the two main domes. This place only really has the front entrance bit, a little bamboo maze, the poison garden, the fountain bits, a couple of side bits, the treehouse, the main formal flowery bit featuring lots of benches for codgers to rest their weary skinny legs on whilst youngish people sneak round taking pictures of them whilst pretending to photograph insects and a nice newish-looking section featuring a few fancy fountains demonstrating a few of the interesting effects possible due to the magic of Van der Waals forces (the weak intermolecular attraction responsible for the hydrogen bonding responsible for water's high surface tension) which combined pretty sparkly lights for codgers to marvel at, physics for sciencey people to appreciate, reflective surfaces for narcissists and splashy water for childs. Much better than the entrance-fountains whose sole redeeming feature was their ability to soak the odd unsuspecting gawper including one of the people swanking around with a camera strap which might as well have read "two grand not including the optics" instead of the manufacturer and model. Surprising that he didn't hold his ground to test the weather-sealing. The poison garden was likewise a little not-quite-as-promised; a complete lack of explanatory science (How exactly will it kill you? What is the active ingredient and which component of the body does it attack?), a guide who should perhaps learn to vary the nature of her banter if the group she's leading contains no children and no codgers and the lack of a free take-home factsheet reminding people which of the popular garden plants they have in their gardens which can apparently kill people even without being imbibed in vast quantities. All was forgiven for the excellent lurking facilities in the central area which provided unlimited access to brightly-lit people in a range of tableaux, including "hastening the process" and "WHAT are you looking at?"

Unlike the Eden project the café didn't do lovely tasty pasties, hid bloody cherries in their allegedly chocolate muffins (which I selected as the apparently chocolate cake had nut-pieces splattered all over the side), spoiled their sandwiches with concealed mayonnaise and evidently have never drunk any decent coffee from which they might have discovered that the stuff they sell is decidedly odd. Their two-channel servery with split drink fridge and isolated cashpoint might have looked a good idea on paper but when it involves people with balance issues attempting to transport heavy trays between tray-pistes whilst children and other people with balance issues butt them it must make the clean-up staff mildly resentful. Very nice sinks in the toilets though.

The town itself looks very pleasant: about the size of Horncastle but without the smelly public toilets and with an order of magnitude greater genetic variation. I had spotted a picture-framery from the car on the way in so managed to get a frame and some mounting-card reasonably swiftly in the short split-up-and-meet-back-here-in-three-quarters-of-an-hour shopping-time. I managed a quick poke in the bookshop on the way back after hiding the purchases in the car but wasn't that impressed; it has about the same volume of stock as Reader's Rest in Lincoln (or the little collection of shops around the West Port in Edinburgh combined) but of a slightly less useful (to me) variety although the aisle-space and natural lighting beats the others by a long way. As a town it also lacked anywhere willing to sell me any extra camera-brains at an unlaughable price or the means to transfer things to optical had I had sufficient time to try.

After another short trundle round the gardens (including two targeted Blipcard distributions and one discreet secretion) we returned home for an extremely swift photo-mounting session before popping out for a lovely walk through the evening light for food at a vaguely Italianate pizza/pasta place which we spotted, inspected and booked a couple of days after being asked by a random tourist-couple if we knew whereabouts a vaguely Italian restaurant was within the town. We only spotted it by chance when looking for the garage recommended by the woman behind the till in the co-op as somewhere which might be able to fix the handbrake on Nicky's car; hopefully the random couple found it although they had been heading in the wrong direction after we advised them that we'd never heard of it. I believe it was called Q at the somethingorother Hotel and was perfectly edible although I like to be able to lean on tables whilst eating and was prevented from so doing by a wobbly table. A wander back up the road in the dark, further gift presentation, cake and drinks then preceded sleeps.