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On a fine summers day in London, where better to be than at Wimbledon watching some tennis? We didn’t have tickets for the day, but they run such a wonderful system where there are always a large number of tickets available on the day for those that are keen enough to try their luck queueing.

After our disastrous effort last year when we got there a bit late, queued for ages only to find that we were about 20 people away from the front when they had sold out of on-the-day tickets and we had to wait until people left before we could get in only to have it rain about half an hour after we got in, we got there just a bit earlier this year at about 8:30am. The queuing took about 2.5 hours, so we were done with the queue and through all the security well in time to see the start of the days play. Whew!

Because so few of the courts are ticketed, you can wander around and see all the players you can find. And you can always spend a lot of the time up on the hill watching the big (huge!) screen there if there is a good game on one of the main courts. Which we did. Great place for drinking Pimms in the sun too, although there is not a lot of shade for when it gets just that little bit warm. But then you can go off and find some shade for a while.

A great day out.

Another stage of development down for the babies. Both of the big chilli plants had their first flowers open today. I suspect that the blooms still have a fair bit of expanding to do until they reach their full size, but exciting none the less. And it looks like there are many, many, many more getting ready to appear too. Far too many for me to be bothered to count at this stage! Yum, yum!

I was reading today that chilli flowers come out in a bit of a pattern/progession. One opens, then 2, then 4 etc until presumably some limit is reached. I’ll be interested to see if that’s actually true.

Now I just have to work out how/when to pollinate them by either giving the plant a good shake or rubbing the inside of the flowers gently with something. Gulp!

It finally happened! A sunny, warm, relatively windless day. And on a weekend day too! Yippee! Summer might have arrived at last. Which, considering it’s really only the first week of official summer time isn’t too bad!

So we had to make the most of it. A big walk (ok, so it wasn’t that big) around our local area, looking at all the pretty flowers that have sprung up. We followed that up with a BBQ in the local park. Vege sausages (hmm) and baby squid stuffed with feta and chorizo for me, and feta and peppers for Bec. Very posh!

Only thing that would have made it better would have been to get rid of the 14 yr olds drinking their alcopops nearby…

Well, looks like I can remember enough stats from a book to be considered for UK citizenship. 

Before you can put forward your full application for naturalisation here you have to do a short multi choice computer based test covering things that are really useful for living in the UK. Like knowing who it is that opens Parliament every year, how many people live in London, how much lower average women’s pay is, and where the most immigants to the UK have come from, etc, etc, etc.

All really essential stuff for life here!

But at least I remembered enough to reach the 75% pass mark out of 24ish questions, but they don’t tell you what your mark is, or what you got wrong, so I might still be misguided on a few things.

Now just to deal with the Home Office here for the rest of the process.  If anyone there is actaully doing this kind of work, and not out firefighting on all the other Home Office issues that have blown up in the papers lately.

Expect an update in 5.14 months, going by the average application times on the site!