weekend at home

When I'm at home the pace of life is so much slower because neither of my parents works (much) and my brother is a student. Plus, they've lived in the same town for more than 30 years, and this can also slow things down.
For example, it takes at least half an hour longer than anticipated to go anywhere at all with my Dad, because it is impossible not to bump into someone he knows, or Mum knows, or his father used to know, or a relative of his nanny, or who is the parent of someone in my/my brother's/my sister's year at school. And after we've stopped and chatted for twenty minutes or so, we say goodbye and move on, and then I ask my Dad who it was:
-Oh what's the name... someone from the Conservatives/the Players/the Playgroup/Tesco in the town on a Sunday/the 8.04 to Cannon Street about ten years ago
Then we continue into town, realise that whatever we came up for is closed, or not to be found nearer than Tunbridge Wells, and we go for coffee.

Kent is lovely in the spring: today, having walked along a bridle path to a country pub for Kentish ale and scampi and chips, we ended up sitting in a friend's back garden sipping leaf tea and nibbling simnel cake in the late afternoon sunshine. I'm keeping this scene safely in the back of my mind somewhere, so that next time I'm stuck in a forty-minute queue at the post office, or trying to do anything complicated involving a French bank, or waiting far too long for my internet connection, or enmeshed in some particularly frustrating knot of Foreign Bureaucracy, I can bring it out and savour it.

My family are still doing the Weetabix diet, so the fridge is full of Weight-Watchers yoghurts. I managed to sabotage this to some extent by making them a fruit tart with creme patissiere, and bringing home a large box of Polish chocolate biscuits. However I have learnt, from my brother and my Dad, that there are 202 kcal in a hot cross bun and 11 per bread stick. There is something wrong with this but I can't put my finger on it.

I am very sad to be going off without my spaniel again tomorrow morning.