The Birmingham Sojournal - Day Three

(As I have written this a full week after the fact, I can’t recall certain details, such as what we had for breakfast on any given day, but breakfast ranged from simple buttered toast with coffee, to toast with Marmite (think Vegemite), to Gipsy toast (slices of bread dipped in seasoned egg and grilled, with a layer of (cheddar?) cheese between them, and covered in HP Brown Sauce), which was actually quite good!)

Mark woke me up in the morning with a knock on the door and, after first asking permission to enter, brought in a cup of coffee with a small biscuit. Moments later, and dressed, I carried the cup down and joined Mark and Sue for more chat.

Later on, we loaded the dogs, rescued racing greyhounds Tom and Mia, into the Defender and headed for the Kingsbury Water Park for the dogs’ weekly Sunday walk. At the end of the walk, and about four poop-stops for Tom, we stopped at the little snack shop there and had a late breakfast of buttered toast and coffee.


Mark with Mia (the gray greyhound) and Tom (the black),
in their home.

We brought the dogs back home and chatted some more, and then we went back out (I think) to a garden store to pick up some dog food. This place was pretty huge, even by U.S. standards, and very diverse and eclectic. Not only a garden store, it was also a crafts store, clothing store (though limited to shoes and outer wear), pet supplies and fish store, snack shop, coffee shop, AND a Starbucks! Mark tossed a bag of dog food into the trolley, and then we wandered around a bit. It became annoyingly obvious here that, due to my sudden increased intake of coffee, I had to break away very often to pee. The problem is that, when I’m on the road, I like to have coffee. And Mark and Sue also make tea every day, so, in an effort to do as much as possible as the British do, I had whatever they were having when they were having it. Hence, lots of coffee and tea! And pee!

So we wandered into the snack shop area and got coffee for each of us, though not at Starbucks. We sat at a table in the seating area for a short while, chatting and sipping our coffee. From there we headed toward the checkout lines and made our way out.

Back home for a while, we readied to go out to supper at The Eastern Curry Inn, just a few “blocks” away in Sheldon. The food was very nice, though I am not at all versed in Indian cuisine. I pretty much let Mark and Sue act as my guides into the menu, and I stayed pretty conservative. The nan bread came with some sauces, one supposedly very spicy, which I did not try; one that was a minty, yogurt based thing; and another that was a sort of sour...well, I’m not sure what. The thing is, I didn’t really care for any of them. My appetizer was a few strips of chicken prepared in (Tandoori?) style. My meal was basically a mildly spiced lamb stew over steamed rice. It was very good. I sampled Mark’s dish (he and Sue each ordered the same thing as the other. It, too, was very good.)

After dinner we headed home, once again via the Off-Licence for some wine. This time we got one bottle of red and one of white. Once home we (I think) watched some telly. British television has some damn funny shows. I can’t remember the names of all of the programmes I liked, but one of them was called Q.I. One episode had Rich Hall (of Sniglets fame) on the panel; he really didn’t say a whole lot.

A fairly late night, we called it around midnight, I think.