Nicktor called me from the car on his way over today. This is very rare. Normally he just sends me a text to say he’s on his way, so I can be ready for him but, today, he called. To be fair, he’d already texted me which merely served to make the phone call stranger.
He was on his way to pick me up for our two days in Grimsby. Aldershot is due to play tomorrow and, because he’s doing every game this season, and no-one else wanted to go with him, I volunteered to sit in the passenger seat and keep him awake by talking as much nonsense as I could in 4.5 hours.
Anyway, he called asking if I could grab a pack of cards and a cribbage board to bring with me. I was sceptical but found a pack of cards. I told him straight up that I didn’t own a cribbage board, something which caused him equal amounts of surprise and horror.
Obviously, I know how to play cribbage. My grandfather was a fanatic and made sure I knew how. Also, I’ve played with Nicktor before. But that doesn’t mean I have a board. It was decided that we could score by hand given he has the maths.
I was doubtful that we’d play much cards. How wrong I was. After drinking too much and finding a great tapas type restaurant where we also drank too much, we discovered there’s not a lot to do in Grimsby, so we returned to our hotel and played cribbage over a convenient bottle of whiskey.
Then, in a day of few decisions, I had to figure out which of these cards to discard.
Obviously I chose correctly because I was playing very well and won two out of three games. I don’t think Nicktor was best pleased.
Something else he wasn’t particularly pleased about was what to Blip. We have this every time we go away. He HAS to Blip and, as the day winds down, he is constantly searching for something, anything to post on Blipfoto.com.
There then entails directions for me to take photos of various things, his reasoning being that I can send him something if he’s that desperate. I’m fairly certain he’s never used one of the odd photos I’ve taken for him, which I think is good and right because the Blips are HIS daily record.
Still, this was today’s emergency Nicktor Blip.
Of course, this gave us conversation fodder for a few miles. We discussed and wondered what Middle Rasen was surrounded by. Was there an Upper and Lower Rasen? Or a North and South; East and West? Good and Bad? Turns out it’s all very confusing.
Doomsday lists West Rasen, Middle Rasen and Market Rasen. In all, there’s ten Rasens in Doomsday. The one that exists today was a merger of two villages: Middle Rasen Drax and Middle Rasen Tupholme. I don’t know who (or what) Drax and Tupholme were.
Sadly, we didn’t know any of that at the time we were driving through it, otherwise, it could have kept us going for a lot longer. Though time seemed to be fluctuating in the car, so maybe it wouldn’t have lasted longer. Theresa (Nicktor’s not always helpful satnav) kept amending the Time to Destination because of all the red lines during our journey. And there were heaps.
The thing is, though, rather than take us longer, the hold-ups seemed to have made our journey shorter and quicker. As I kept telling Nicktor, time was fluid on this trip and, if we’d had more traffic problems, we’d have probably arrived before we left.
But arrive we did, though finding the hotel was a bit difficult. Theresa had us heading into a supermarket car park. When we stopped and reset her, we looked across the way to find the hotel right next to us, a block in the opposite direction. It was very big and hard to miss. Though Theresa did.
The other thing that Theresa did on the way up north was to suddenly decide to play the remastered version of Paranoid on Spotify. At no time had we made her voice activated but, for reasons known only to her, when I said the word paranoid, the music changed and she asked what else we’d like to play.
It was a weird moment and, while I may be right to feel a bit paranoid about it, I told her that I hadn’t asked for the remastered version, which made her go and sulk in the corner for a bit.
In the meanwhilst and back at the St James Hotel: We checked in, dumped our stuff then headed into Grimsby. There is a great lack of pubs in town. We found ourselves at the Boston Brothers Liquor Company, which is a bar with very loud music but helpful bar staff.
This was where we started our long decline into inebriation.
I was going to include a link to Nicktor’s Blip for today but, at the time of writing, he hasn’t managed to upload anything yet. Maybe tomorrow…
