Busy week ahead

Lots to do: get jumble of washing ready to be turned into orderly packing, get scruffy car primed for a longish journey, get bribery-and-appeasement-standard shopping in for the team here, get spare bed made up and fridge filled for house-sitting boy, get grubby dog and her bed washed for her foster placement with the sainted Sandra, and get myself organised, calm and armed for any and every contingency, to the point where I can be away for almost a week without worrying myself to a frazzle about everyone else. And all because my friend Annie and I are off to Suffolk on Friday - hurrah! And what's more, taking a car means we can bring absolutely essential items like our favourite pillows and large towels. As both our dogs are prone to car-sickness ('prone' being an understatement for my dog) we can be joyously free of the blighters for the week - hurrah! again, but louder.

This trip is part of my retirement resolution to get to know my own country better by having short holidays in completely unfamiliar areas of it. I don't know much about Suffolk, but Annie does, and tells me we will have a fine time. She and I have had enough holidays together to know that we are tolerant of each other's infuriating foibles, like her inability to tell left from right, and my inability to read a map - yes, I know, I know, but we do eventually reach our destinations, honestly. We are capable of doing/seeing/shopping for lots of lovely things no matter what the weather, can abandon our diets completely and shamelessly, and share the same collapsing-into-slippers point in the evenings. And living as we do in the North-East, we are weather-hardy. (Though surely no English holiday could be as wet as our first visit to Amsterdam, where the ribs of one of our umbrellas actually rusted, probably because we spent so much time out in the rain trying to make sense of the sodden map, but which remains one of our best holidays to date.)

Suffolk, stand by: we're the Intrepid Travellers and we're coming for you....