Friars Mill Pontoon

A slow morning with a slow brain and pills. Thankfully when I have a migraine I don’t loose my appetite. Mick cooked us a breakfast whilst the engine ran and the washing machine turned, being moored by a tap is a very handy thing.

Also having the engine running meant that the local pigeons stopped tap dancing on our roof. Well maybe it wasn’t tap dancing, more like football with a stone. They’d been running up and down above us for ages and what sounded like a stone kept being dropped and picked up.

We’d had plans of visiting all sorts of places whilst we were in Leicester. Visiting the Van Gogh Immersive Experience would have sent my head all over the shop. A walk to the National Space Centre too far and it didn’t appeal this time. We’ve walked past Richard III grave muttering that he should be in York on a previous visit. Paying to get into Richards visitor centre also didn’t appeal, after all I might get part way round and want to leave.

So what did we do instead?

We visited the Dulux Decorator Centre!

Why? I hear you say. Well when we were sorting out our new windows for the house I’d chosen a cream and a grey to match as close as possible to the existing paintwork. The wooden windows will come ready painted. For some reason the paint suppliers weren’t able to match our original colours, in fact Dulux don’t recognise our original paints either anymore. So back in March I’d collected together paint charts and compared them to what we already had. Finally we sorted the cream colour. Then we added a new door into the mix.

We gave the go ahead for the new door just last week and they have been ordering in materials including the paint. Of course for the same reason there had been with the cream, the paint suppliers couldn’t now match the grey, Dove. They could do Dove Grey or Dove White, maybe just Dove was too common! So today we needed to look at paints .

The poor young chap at Dulux. All I wanted to do was find three maybe four paints as close to my original choice as possible so I had options. Maybe I shouldn’t have told him why I wanted to match one of their colours, but I did. We went around the houses for ages before showing me a Sikkens chart of wood stains. No I wouldn’t be putting that on my nice new wooden windows. Today was not the best day for me to be doing this, at one point I nearly put everything down and walked out of the shop, but instead the young chap went and rang Sikkens returning saying they could match any paint colour. He soon returned with a RAL and BS colour chart and we found two good options, Mick had found other brands and I finally walked away (after apologising for maybe being a touch short with the assistant) with four options. Thankfully the best one got the thumbs up from the suppliers.

We sauntered into the city, a walk round the market. Then through an arcade to find some chilled medication and a sit down in the shade. Not bad medication, last years in Cambridge still out ranks most ice cream. Dark Chocolate, Salted Caramel, Strawberry and a nutty milk chocolate one were sampled between us.

We gained enough energy to have a look around the Guildhall behind the currently closed Cathedral. I’d like to tell you lots about it, recount tales from it’s history, but today I started to read the information boards, but quickly gave up, all those words were too much for me. So here is a little bit of info from the website.

Starting with its Great Hall built in about 1390, a tour of Leicester Guildhall will take you through the centuries and many uses of the site. From its first role as a meeting place for the Guild of Corpus Christi, to a public performance space where even Shakespeare may have acted, to the home of one of the oldest public libraries, the town hall and even a police station.

The hall with it’s stage, oak panelling, one section rather new and quite well stained to match.

The Mayors Parlour with more oak panelling, stained glass.

The Library with wonky floors and ancient heavy books all behind glass.

The cells where pick pocket Peter McVoye was held.

We then made our way back to Friars Mill to keep Tilly company. A nice Indian takeaway was enjoyed by us from Simply Indian. Hopefully tomorrow we’ll get to see something else.

0 locks, 0 miles, 2 loads washing, 4 greys, just not Dove, 1 poor assistant, 3 scoops each, 0 information retained, 0 axe throwing, 1 cuddle with p**ed of Tilly, 5-1, 1 speaker turned down, 1 speaker nudged up, 1 leftover takeaway rice in the fridge for fried rice.