Alphabet 2020 : A is for (not) Away

I am feeling a little foolish at the moment.

I was intending to join in Blogging A to Z challenge but I obviously did not read the instructions at all. You see the challenge is to post every day through April except Sundays. What I read was every second weeks for the rest of the year - not even close, and it doesn't even add up!

Given how tired I am at the end of every working day I don't have it in me to come up with that many posts in a short period, so instead I am going to do my own alphabet thing. It's not my first go around at this. Years ago I used to do the A to Z of Historical Fiction, which was hosted at Historical Tapestry.

So what I am intending is to post every couple of weeks until I run out of steam, reach the end of the year or the alphabet! There's no theme as such, but there's a fair chance that it will be mostly about books and bakes or whatever else I come up.

For the first post I thought I would start with a post about what we would be doing if the world hadn't gone practically into lockdown. If all the borders of weren't closed and if we weren't all practicing social isolation we would currently be in London, then heading to France, Kuwait and Singapore.

I used to live in London in another life time. but this would have been my first time back in London since 1999. Our intention whilst in London was to visit the British Museum, the Imperial War Museum and just generally soak up the atmosphere.

We were then heading to Stafford to see a friend that I shared a flat when I lived in London. It would have been our first time catching up since either late 1998 to 1999. One of my strong memories of this friend relates to when Princess Di died. I was staying with her that weekend so on when we woke up on that Sunday morning we were shocked and we spent the whole day in our pyjamas just watching the news. Admittedly, it's not a fun memory, and I do have lots of them, but it does mean that every year I think of her.

From there we would have visiting Sheffield because that is where I lived for 4 years and then back down to the town where my husband's daughter lives. It's not too far from Oxford so we would have been visiting there.

Next stop, we were planning to catch the Eurostar train from London to Calais. We were going to be spending time in Northern France with stays in Beauville, Bayeux and near Mont St Michel. The main focus was to be the D day beaches of Normandy with a visit to see the famous tapestry and monastery included.

And then Paris.....oh Paris. I last visited in 1994 and I have been dreaming of visiting again for many, many years. Sigh.....oh Paris. You only need to search the word Paris on my blog to see how long I have been thinking about visiting Paris.

From there we  were going to Kuwait, to visit my brother in law and his family. We haven't seen them since we were in South Africa a couple of years ago, and this would have been the first time I would have seen them since we got married.

Our last stop would have been Singapore. Really we were going to Singapore to hang out at the airport there because there is so much cool stuff to do there but I am sure that I would manage to find time to have a Singapore Sling.

Over the next week or so I am still going to post some of the posts that I had pre-scheduled ready for when I go away. They are already written after all!

The sign post photo that I have included in this post was one that we took when we were at the end of the famous jetty in Busselton in Western Australia. It was New Year's Eve and the world was a very different place. It feels like a different world and yet it is just over 3 month ago.

Once this is all over there will be opportunities to do this trip, or something similar. We have been lucky and got most of the money back that we spent, although we ended up with

So, there is A for (not) Away. Hopefully I will be back next fortnight with a B for something post as opposed to not being for something.