Glorious Telford

Tuesday sees L sent home with PT homework. She has to practice press-ups. Ouch. I can’t see that happening but if it does I’m sure the Lad will help her with it.

We have booked a ‘dodgy’ electrician to sort out our smoke alarms. ‘Dodgy’ because he’s quoting less than what the alarms he’s fitting sell for online and he wants paying in cash. What could possibly go wrong?

‘Dodgy’ or not, he appears to do a good job. Now we just need Daughter to test them. She has been warned what will happen if she leaves something sizzling under the grill for too long. The two alarms are linked, so if one goes off they both go off. It’ll sound like Armageddon and the batteries are built in, so there’s no quick way of disabling them if they go off.

As it turns out the first thing to set the alarm is not Daughter’s sausages but our shower. Perhaps that’s why the alarms were cheap... Meanwhile one of our old alarms, that hasn’t gone off in years, issues a parting salvo from its new home in the wheelie bin.

Wednesday night is spent with my Dad and the lad in the New Inn. While on Thursday I run with L and the Lad during which he snaps his bungee lead. L makes it to 5k but the leadless Lad and I only make it to 4.5k.

Tennis goes ahead at Cliton again and afterwards we try the Ruddington Arms which is much nicer than the Framebreakers.

On Friday after work, or in L’s case after gym and swim, we head for a weekend away in glorious Telford. It doesn’t start too well when we find that the only evening options near our Holiday Inn are the main shopping centre or an estate pub called the Randlay Farmhouse that has no real ale and no food. So after a few bottled beers it’s back to the hotel for a meal.

One thing that Telford does have is a decent park. It’s called the Town Park and it’s where they have Parkrun which obviously we run, me with the Lad.

We then head back to the hotel, which now has a Jehovahs Witness conference going on next door, for coffee and to discuss the strategy for the rest of the weekend. Telford it appears is just one big retail complex that is not designed to be avoided and we can’t find anywhere for breakfast. We attempt to walk around the outside of it and are constantly boxed in by dual carriageways.

Eventually we find a footpath called the Silkin Way and walk to somewhere called Oakengates, allegedly the Heart of Telford but even that has an industrial estate in the middle of it. Telford is doing its best to make Derby look glamorous. I do however have two excellent pints at the Crown pub but where we also have to make do with pasties for lunch/breakfast while the Lad gets a new halti having snapped his second lead of the week. We’re back at the hotel for 6pm and spend the evening in the sanctuary of the hotel bar.

Sunday is better. L goes in the hotel gym while I walk the Lad and then we get breakfast in the hotel’s dog friendly area. After that we drive out to Ironbridge, the nice bit of ‘Telford’ five miles outside of it. We have a pleasant walk around the area, go for a coffee, to a bookshop and then end up in the All Nations pub which we last visited as part of Camra’s 25th Anniversary Beer trail back in 1997. That was all the pubs nationwide that had been in their guidebook for the whole 25 years that I dragged L to. Not sure how many pubs it was now. Might have been 25, might have been less than that. 

(Sunday 28^th July)