I am happy again. Toby is hoooomee! He gave up with the miserable surroundings of Cumbria. I was following him on here all the time he was away, so I knew where he was. This is where he was staying:

The grey dot on the right is where their cottage was, and Alston on the left is the blue marker below. The pink marker is where I am. It’s a long way, especially when there was no phone signal.

Having to use the field outside for number-twos was not nice either. And I am not joking, they block the septic tank. There were also frequent power cuts, meaning they couldn’t charge phones and things and cooking failed, as did keeping food.
He gave up with it and got the train back yesterday.

Whilst he was on the train alone (well, not alone. Dave came back too, but got off at Birmingham so Toby was alone after that), I was scuba diving in Wraysbury. It was really good.

I went with Mum, Emily and her Dad. Mum hadn’t finished the Open Water course when we did it back in December, so was going this weekend to finish it. Emily and I were invited by one of the instructors and her Dad, Chris, decided to come along as well. It was our first dive without the control of an instructor. We’d planned a big route around the lake, looking at a few things along the way, which depended on the use of our compasses. Dave, the instructor, followed us on our first dive to make sure we weren’t doing anything stupid or dangerous. The compass navigation would have worked well if it was a bit less murky. We couldn’t see more than a foot or two in front of us, which didn’t help when Emily’s compass was broken and I couldn’t get mine to work because it was on my gauge, so in an awkward place. We were following Chris, but we fell behind and he disappeared into the murk. I know that Emily gets more nervous than I do about a lot of things, and when I couldn’t see Chris or anything else except Emily and a mass of greeny brown, I was a bit edgy. I looked at her and signalled ‘up?’, and we surfaced. Once we got there, Dave said we’d done the perfect thing, so that made us feel a bit better. Chris surfaced as well a minute or so later. We went back down once we’d sorted ourselves out, but weren’t there for long as I was getting really cold. There’s things called thermoclines, one at 6m down (we were at 9m), that are layers in the water where the temperature changes. We’d gone past that and it was a lot colder, so I was shivering. We got out, dried off and had some lunch. After lunch, Dave had a plan to surprise Mum. We were to pretend we weren’t going in again for ages before Mum and her group got in, but we then got kitted up as quick as we could and joined her in the water in time to see her pass the course. We got down to the platform and were watching her do the final skill, but she breathed in water when she removed her mask and was taken up by another instructor. We waited, and saw a crayfish in the mean time, and saw her return just before they all swam away. We joined them, but Emily found it hard to surface so I helped her up and we joined Mum on the shallower platform to cheer once she did the skill. Happy, we all packed up our kit and were filling in paperwork before Chris, Emily and I went home. Here’s some photos from the dives, click on them to see the full sized photo:

I got home and jumped straight in the shower, got dressed and made up and went for the bus faster than I think I ever have before. I was alone on the bus without even my iPod as I’d rushed to be on time to the station. I got off the bus at an earlier stop and walked through the town centre as it’s quicker than the bus route. My heart was pounding as I walked towards the arrivals board. I had ten minutes to calm down, or get more and more excited as each second ticked by, until Toby’s train arrived. I watched every face that walked off the platform, hunting for my lovely boyfriend. I was buzzing as the arrivals board said his train was there. Time seemed to slow so much as I was waiting for him to come round the corner. He came through the gate and I ran to him. It was like in a film when one person has been away for ages and there’s a romantic reunion with that passionate music playing in the background. I don’t think I took my arms off from around him for at least five minutes.
We got his Mum to pick us up from the station and I spent the rest of the evening attached to him. It was so good to have him back. We’re now spending the whole week together as he’s making the most of his week off work.

It’s all good now.