Manningtree

Today I went for lunch for four old school friends (and two partners) in the Manningtree Crown. Manningtree is only an 8 minute train ride from Colchester, but unfortunately it's a 25 minute bus journey from my house to the station, with the buses only running every half hour because it's a bank holiday and 15 minutes late because public transport is crap. Consequently I missed the first train, but thankfully I was on the same bus as Jasmin, so we were late together.

I wasn't very impressed with the meal itself either, to be honest. Granted, for under £4 I suppose you can't expect much; but we had to wait 50 minutes for our food, and when it came my baked potato was tough-skinned and not particularly hot. The portions were fairly small too.

Still, it was nice to catch up with people, many of whom I hadn't seen in almost a year (and meet George's partner, Steve). After lunch, we went for a short walk, and got ice cream. George was kind enough to give Jasmin and I a lift back to Colchester, meaning we could have a walk around town, including visiting our old school.

I also found Virgin were having quite a large clearance sale, with two whole racks of CDs down to £3.99. Unfortunately many of them were rather obscure, and quite a few I'd vaguely heard of but would have liked to have looked up online before buying, so I didn't. Others, however, I bought rather on chance, since I didn't think I'd be back before I leave for Oxford.