On Sunday morning I used Google Earth to correct and expand my scant geographical knowledge. Our education began just before Keith and Marlene left. We knew their trip began in Vienna, ended in Prague, and went along the Danube but, wait a moment – Prague is on the Moldau (a.k.a. Vltava as in Má Vlast by Bedřich Smetana), isn’t it? Yes; they apparently float west up the Danube from Vienna to Nuremberg, then get bussed back east to Prague. I thought Prague would be east of Vienna whereas it’s north. I think I’d been confusing Prague and Budapest. Doh! Now I’d got that straight, we did their trip, albeit in reverse, on Google Earth and the clarity, detail and colours are quite staggering; boats, locks, weirs, marinas all crystal clear. The “beautiful blue Danube” actually does look blue. I must show them when they return.

However, Sunday soon descended into the dismally wet pattern established by Saturday, so we took the opportunity to do some PC maintenance. Having been given a wake-up call by Carol’s lap top crash on Friday, I made fresh back ups of all the data on my desk top PC. It’d been over a year since I did it (spot the former computer professional). Meanwhile, Carol used her recovery disk to restore and rebuild her lap top. We really had no idea what caused the cataclysmic crash (it wouldn’t boot as a result) and were a bit concerned that their might be an underlying hardware failure but eventually it staggered back into life and so far so good – I’m writing this on it now.

Well, what else are you going to do on a wet Sunday?

Keith and Marlene’s tour of London airports was to continue on Saturday morning with an 8:00 AM trip to Heathrow to begin their Danube cruise from Vienna. At 7:00 AM the house was a little more subdued than normal as the wisdom was questioned of the previous evening’s an attack on the European wine lake. The carnage in the kitchen revealed that the vanguard French Picpoul de Pinet troops suffered almost debilitating casualties (4) with losses also to the Italian Pinot Grigio (1), Spanish Cava (1) and related Chilean Carmenere (1) divisions. One officer of the Port battalion was critically but not fatally wounded and stretchered from the field of battle.

After various medicinal doses of coffee, tea or, in Marlene’s case, straight Pepsi, the trip to Heathrow was blissfully uneventful and we arrived at Terminal 4 by about 9:00 AM for the 10:50 AM flight to Vienna. It had started raining on the way down and that was set to continue and increase in intensity as the day progressed. I hoped the weather in Vienna would be better but the forecast didn’t look good.

While Carol was out Christmas shopping with her sister, the rest of the day was spent inside sheltering from the rain and investigating what appeared to be a fatal condition which befell Carol’s lap top PC the previous day (a missing “hal.dll” file that stops booting dead in its tracks). We suspected that a re-install would be necessary and hoped that a damaged hard drive was not the cause of the problem.

The house feels strangely empty.

Our neighbours, Paul and Liz, are currently in upheaval refitting their kitchen. So, Paul had readily accepted Carol’s invitation to dinner with us on Friday evening. That meant that almost all of Friday would be spent buying and preparing for the meal. I dragged Keith to Morrisons supermarket to see what luck I would have at their fish counter while Carol took the opportunity to start baking her second Christmas cake. There was a good selection of shellfish and the monkfish tails looked good, too – small but good. So, we settled on the following menu:

• Seafood risotto (with prawns, mussels, scallops and langoustines)
• Monkfish with pink peppercorn sauce
• Mince pies and ice cream
• Cheese board

As I made the seafood and monkfish stocks, Keith appeared and declared that the fish aromas didn’t go particularly well with the smell of the Christmas cake, which was still baking. He was, of course, quite right. There are times when I wish we had an extractor hood.

After all the preparation, we managed a swift trip over to Woburn to see its Christmas lights (which are a quite vivid blue) before Paul and Liz arrived armed with suitable ice-breaking liquids. These were very welcome but unnecessary as no ice needed to be broken – they instantly got on very well with Keith and Marlene. I think a good time was had by all and we finally managed to retire in preparation for the morning’s drive to Heathrow for Keith and Marlene’s flight to Vienna to begin their 8-day Danube cruise.

When we invaded Keith and Marlene’s families in Virginia last year for Thanksgiving, Keith seemed particularly keen on Carol’s rich fruit cake. It was actually a Christmas cake, of course, but it seemed appropriate for any celebration feast. In honour of this year’s return match, Carol decided to make two similar cakes, one to keep Keith happy before Christmas and one for Christmas itself, and had begun steeping the fruit just prior to the Gatwick Express. Thursday was time to bake the first cake.

Making the cake is a four hour process so, while Keith and Marlene slept on after their being route-marched around London, Carol got to work. As folks eventually began to face the day with tea, coffee, breakfast, tea and coffee, the kitchen began to smell as if Christmas may be just around the corner.

I was left guarding the still baking cake, lest it try to escape from the oven, while the others went on a brief local shopping trip to Leighton Buzzard. After the cake was pronounced finished and removed from the oven, it was time to return to the delights of Milton Keynes to collect a pair of new bar stools that would enable us all to sit while gathered in the kitchen. It was also a good opportunity to see the Christmas decorations in the shopping arcade which, each year, has a themed set of scenes and illuminations. This year the theme is Wind in the Willows, though it seems a little more sparse than previous years. Photographically, Carol was particularly taken with a splendid illuminated carousel.

Everyone was freed from further cooking duty in the evening as we were off to get another of Keith’s favourites, real English fish and chips traditionally cooked by Orientals.

Thursday was a dreadful morning on the weather front but we went ahead with our planned trip into London. The previous day, Carol had spotted an attractive “four for two” deal on travel cards (which include the otherwise-outrageously-priced Underground: £4 a journey, indeed).

After a leisurely breakfast we headed for the station to catch the 9:25 AM where I dropped the passengers off to buy the tickets while I parked the car. “£5.50 please”, quoth the lady at barrier. “Can I plastic it?”, I enquired. “No, we don’t have that facility”, she responded. “What, for £5.50; you’re kidding”, I retorted, digging out my last tenner. Handing me the change, she now says, “go and try to get parked and, if there isn’t a place, come back and I’ll give you a refund; we’re getting full”. Strewth! Fortunately I manage to find a spot albeit surrounded by a sea of mud and water. If we seriously want people to stop driving, why on Earth don’t we supply enough decent car parking at the stations, especially for £5.50?

Meanwhile, Carol has the value Travel Cards, the train arrives on time and we get to Euston in 45 minutes and reasonable comfort (i.e. seated, since the main commute has finished). On to the Underground where the girls plan to visit Harrods while the boys go a stop further to see my favourite old boyhood attraction, the Science Museum. After about 90 minutes, I can’t help but think that it’s a pale shadow of its former self. Inside, the building now looks very modern and I couldn’t find the many “animated” display cases that I remembered being so much fun. “Inside the Spitfire”, which I was quite looking forward to, is simply a dissected Spitfire, looking like a large Airfix kit, and is so superficial as to seem pointless. I suspect anyone who has actually assembled the Airfix kit would already know more than this display tells them. I recall fondly the wonderful enormous pendulum that used to scribe the Earth’s rotation in a tray of sand but that no longer seems to exist, either. Now, the museum appears to contain mostly cafes, simulator rides and Imax cinema. Keith did find Stevenson’s Rocket to sate his train craving, though.

After that we had a quick 30 minutes in the adjoining Natural History Museum to see the dino bones in the mercifully still wonderful Central Hall, the architecture of which is stunning and still looks so. Then it was off up Brompton Road to meet the Harroding ladies for lunch in a pub. We were then encouraged into Harrods ourselves, I think mainly to see the Princess Di and Dodi memorial. However, a somewhat bizarre display of yarn fashioned into a flowing gown in the knitting department appeared a tad more interesting.

Back to the underground and up to Covent Garden, another of my favourite London haunts, largely because the street entertainers are so much fun. The legs were beginning to tire but a small purchase of some Thornton’s chocolate upped the blood sugar and gave us just about enough energy to divert to the recently revamped St. Pancras for another train enthusiast visit. It does look impressive on the inside and there was a Eurostar in port for Keith to see.

Finally, it was back to Euston for the 4:55 PM non-stop service to Leighton Buzzard where we salvaged the car from its muddy puddle to return for some long anticipated drinks and spaghetti Bolognese salvaged from our freezer.

Lord, we know how to entertain guests. Yesterday was washing the caravan and storing it for the winter, today was leaf clearing and seeing the sights of a real British Tidy Tip (sorry, Household Waste Recycling Centre). That darned oak tree next door is really beginning to drop its leaves now and I was afraid that, if I didn’t clear the box gutter while it was dry, I’d get damp problems when it rained heavily. After taking a load of leaves that Carol had bagged to the tip, I got the gutter done and Keith helped me bag up the mess I’d made. To repay him, I took him to the tip a second time. Keith being a train enthusiast, I also remembered to show him our local narrow gauge railway on the way back home.

Carol took Marlene food shopping again and we turned her and Keith loose in our kitchen. They did very well with strange ingredients, strange equipment and even stranger hosts.

Monday dawned bright and sunny and there was a job I needed to do that required dry weather: I had bought a caravan cover that needed installing but before that could happen, our caravan (Billy Bailey) would first need cleaning. So, while Carol took Marlene to sample the delights of Christmas shopping at Milton Keynes, Keith helped me collect and wash the caravan. If you think washing a car is bad, you should try washing a caravan. Keith was a great assistant, though, and made life much simpler; so much so that I’ll never want to do it without his help again.

Shortly after we finished, the ladies returned and, after a bite of lunch, we all went mob-handed to put Billy to bed for the winter and learn how to fit a 5.5 metre long, 2.4 metre high caravan cover. It ain’t easy! We eventually got it done, though, and Billy looks as cozy as it’s possible to be in a field beneath a filthy oak tree. I suppose that, with practice, it may get easier but I have no idea how Carol and I will manage it on future occasions without Keith and Marlene’s invaluable help.

A 4:00 AM alarm was a rude awakening on Sunday morning but the blow was softened by the fact that we were due to drive down to Gatwick to meet our friends, Keith and Marlene Stillman flying in from Virginia. I checked the Gatwick arrivals site and found their flight was expected 40 minutes earlier than timetabled (7:00 AM) at 6:20 AM ; no problem, still had plenty of time. The journey was blissfully uneventful – so little traffic I could even use the cruise control – and we were parking at Gatwick about 6:00 AM.

The AA flight actually landed at 6:30 and we amused ourselves with a Costa espresso until 7:00 before sauntering off to the international arrivals exit. By 7:30 we were thinking life must be busy in the immigration hall. By 7:45 we were beginning to question having the correct day. However, a rather weary, hot and fed-up Keith and Marlene did eventually emerge at 7:50 and we finally loaded the car and ferried them to our house to begin their long-anticipated visit.

We were back home by 9:30 and the remainder of the day was largely reserved for recovery both for the home and away teams. We did, however, manage to shop for some food, and some idiot managed to BBQ a duck in the dark. It’s wonderful how a snooze, a drink and some food can make people begin to feel human again.