I’m on holiday

As-Salaamu ‘alaikum everyone,

I’m writing this from a public terminal in Keswick, which is in the English Lake District where I’m on holiday for a couple of days with my mum & dad. I intend to return, insha Allah, on Tuesday. For some reason, Yahoo Mail is playing up, so I’ve been unable to use this facility to check it – I don’t think I’ll be able to get to the ‘net again before Tuesday if it’s not back before the end of my session, because internet access round here is hard to come by and expensive. And I’ve had the same sidebar problem which was commented about a few days back – it seems it’s a problem with Internet Explorer, particularly on pre-XP versions of the software. It didn’t happen on Explorer on the Mac or XP, or with any other browser. Perhaps someone could alert the designer (Becca Wei, here’s her blog) to the problem.

The weather, ma sha Allah, has so far been pretty good. (I.e. no rain!) It took us the usual six hours to get up here yesterday (including two breaks at Warwick and Lancaster) and there were no serious problems – the usual delays around Stoke on Trent, but nothing else. I have to say I’m not impressed with the standard of provision for anyone’s dietary needs at Britain’s motorway service stations, the vast majority of which are in the hands of three big companies. My mum & dad were able to eat at the station outside Lancaster, but I had to make do with some fruit and a cup of tea (and after being a coffee drinker for a couple of years, tea has started to seem like it’s got no taste). I did manage to get some rather nice local walnut shortbread, which was in a local produce shop inside the Lancaster service station. Get this – it’s walnut shortbread, and you can see the walnuts through the clear packaging, but just for the benefit of allergy sufferers, the label says “this product may contain nuts”.

The Lake District would never be my first choice of places to go on holiday (as we’ve been there so many times before and I’d prefer to go to Wales, preferably near Aberystwyth where I went to college), it’s a really beautiful and spectacular place. We’re in a village a few miles outside Penrith, and besides the well-established sheep there are alpacas in the fields, which are a species imported from South America which are kept for their wool (and you can probably eat them too). They’re a member of the camel family, but are somewhere between the sheep and the cow in size and don’t have a hump. (We thought they were llamas – I’m not sure if my mum had heard of alpacas, but I thought they were smaller than these animals.) And they’re not just here in the north – we saw some in the fields by the A3 near Esher on the way, and there are also alpaca farms in Sussex.

Anyway, in a minute I’m going off to join my parents for coffee, so see you all Tuesday, insha Allah.