Adventures of the NeverTooLate Girl

SUNDAY

I am not sure that getting to bed at 3am when one could be considered to be in the throes of middle-age is the done thing, but, in the past 4 weeks I have fallen into bed to the sounds of birds beginning the dawn chorus more than once. The night before my holiday was one of those occasions. Being invited to a gig at the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm in London (www.roundhouse.org.uk) was a fun enough prospect, arriving to find it was my friend's son's band took the fun to a whole different level. The Gentleman's Dub Club was that band (www.gentlemansdubclub.com). Imagine UB40 meets the Specials, meets Trance meets House and then mix in a bit of Speed. The place rocked.

Getting up at 7am with only 4 hours sleep I was surprisingly chipper. But then the prospect of beginning one of my NeverTooLate adventures always puts me in a positive mood. The house may have been strewn with furniture evacuated from the conservatory as it is replaced and remodelled and from rooms being cleared ready for the decorator to tackle during my holiday but this was all part of the Big Cambridge Plan which was nicely taking shape. A move at the end of February had become a very realistic expectation.

In the next week though, I was booked in at an astronomy centre in Portugal where I was going to be introduced to some of the wonders of our solar system and beyond, through the medium of a very large (by amateur standards) telescope.

My introduction to Portugal, however, did not start well.