Despite small child being only a couple of weeks old, we decided that the best thing to do in the middle of May was to drive from London to Bournemouth to spend a weekend in the sun.
Well, wife number one and my little monster spent the weekend in the sun – I spent it sat indoors attending the annual BECTU Conference.
The journey down was just what you’d expect of a sunny Friday afternoon – sadly. Cue several hours of not travelling very fast, or far, slowly baking in the sun and discovering that baby girl doesn’t like to be in her car seat at speeds below 40mph. Our new secondhand car was also a little full – amazing what you can get in a Yaris.
Yes, I was the guy driving with wife and daughter in the back and the pram in the passenger seat – it was belted though!
We also discovered that Fleet services on the M3 doesn’t sign post the baby changing facilities very well. For those that may ever need to know, there are changing facilities in both male and female toilets in the disabled cubicles.
Our first change was done on the shelf in the shower.
Still there was cake afterwards (hands extremely washed).
We stayed in the Royal Bath Hotel, part of the De Vere chain and it was a pretty nice hotel. We were given a family room for the cost only of wife number one – though they did think we were bringing TWO children (give us a chance – we only just got the first one and it’s not working properly yet. Just where is the snooze button on a baby?) They did helpfully provide a cot – for a toddler.
That saw me getting the concierge getting the car back out so I could reclaim the pram and use that for a bed for the next couple of nights. Still managed to leave the sat nav in the car though.
The hotel also had no problem with me wandering down to the buffet provided for the delegates and loading a plate or two of hot food to return to the room with. I even got one of them to snag me a tray.
Got a few interesting looks the next morning when we came down for breakfast and I was wearing small child. Also got dirty looks from one family when they realised that wife number one and I had managed to steal the honour of youngest attending and best of all managed not to spill milk on small childs head from my cereal.
So my little monster generously split her milk on me instead.
There’s a lot of that these days.
I changed into smarter clothes and abandoned my ladies to find our what my union had been upto the last year, then joined a discussion group on internet piracy that got quite heated – think we solved a few societal issues in that session.
Then, rather than chose the free food on offer at the hotel, I walked down the road to meet up with wife number one and my little monster. They had managed to find Mr Ben and Mrs Mr Ben who were in Bournemouth for the day (in true student fashion, Mrs Mr Ben was avoiding doing her dissertation) and we ate at some random tourist pub near the pier.
I did get back in time to acquire a couple of (tiny!) pieces of a very nice apple and cinnamon sponge cake though, before the afternoon session resumed.
On the plus side, the union elected it’s first female president. On the bad side, we discovered that voter apathy in the union is even worse than in general elections.
The conference went well, though the variety of persons speaking meant that the sound guy was fighting a losing battle of gain before feedback and the one video segment first didn’t play and then locked up during playback – at least it wasn’t in front of people who do that sort of thing for a living … oops.
Dinner that night was not too bad – the deserts were a little lacking compared to the last couple of meals we had had – and the evening went quietly.
Odd thing when you know every couple of hours one end or the other ( or sometimes both together) of the baby is going to require attention, you don’t tend to ponder a visit to the hotel bar – particularly as we hadn’t brought enough washable nappies along and were going to have to switch to disposables.
My apologises to the cleaning staff for the next couple of days – but I did wash the worse off the towels before you got there …
Sunday morning was the divisional conference – a very low key event and was the most treasured of conferences.
Short!
Being in Bournemouth we were only the New Forest away from Mr Best Man and his family so we had arranged for him to come over and pick up my ladies.
Despite hosting 150+ guests, the hotel had decided to stick to it’s 11am check-out time. So that’s a whole bunch of people checking out before the divisional conferences began at 10am and leaving their bags with the concierge to look after until an unspecfied time when the four separate meetings came to a close.
Genius.
So Mr Best Man had come over to pick up my family while I sat in a conference that I didn’t know when was going to finish. As it turned out, he had barely got them back to his as I left the hotel.
A quick word of warning: if you are leaving the Royal Bath, there seems to be a bit of a black spot for the sat navs right at that point. It took several minutes for the TomTom to reestablish a connection by which point I had only taken one wrong turning and was idling in a resident parking zone til it sorted itself out.
The sat-nav has a wonderful posh accent, except for the word ’roundabout’ which is much more dialect filled, by the way.
The drive through the New Forest had some nice bits – having the car to myself with no passengers or bags was something of a relief but the A31 is not a pleasant road to drive along with traffic.
Got to Mr Best Mans house and was sent straight back out with him to locate lunch – the request for fish and chips ringing in our ears.
However, this wasn’t London so all three fish and chip shops we tried didn’t open until later – like Monday later.
A random pizzeria beckoned luckily and we returned with two 12″ feasts (insert your preferred innuendo here)
And before you panic, there was cake already baked and it was good.
As the day drew onwards, we left Mr Best Man and his family (and some of the cake …) and started the trek back from the New Forest to home. Drive was fine until we hit the M27 at which point the heavens opened, visibility closed and high speeds were definitely not acheived.
The rain continued unabated onto the M3, while we stopped at Fleet again for more (differently flavoured) cake, onto the M25 then switched off as soon as we turned off onto the A20. I went for the easy to navigate route that minimised the being in London – that and the airports were shutting down due to the Icelandic volcano dispersion system so the Gatwick turnoff shouldn’t have been all that bad. It wasn’t but it was a good thing that we were coming FROM Dartford else it may have been a little worse than shouldn’t have been all that bad.
So, first nights away from home for baby girl and things went mostly well.
The conference also went well – there was generally a good atmosphere amongst the delegates.
It was a little disappointing to learn about the voter apathy. This seems to come from a larger problem in that people view unions as ‘servicing organisations’, there to deal with problems of the workforce rather than viewing them as ‘part of my industrial community’. The unions are made up of their members and their policies and focus is determined by them. There may be paid officials there to help with administration and keeping an eye on things, but a union depends on it’s members for it’s direction and is only effective if all workers contribute, rather than just a few.
