Another visit to Southend

If we don't get out of the house by about mid-afternoon on a Sunday things slowly but surely start to turn pear-shaped.  The kids get increasingly antsy and I start to get narrow eyes and deeper than usual frown lines.  Best for everyone to vamoose out of the hoose - hence Sunday's trip to Southend on Sea (although technically speaking Southend is not on the sea, it's on the banks of the river Thames).

Anyway, despite being an estuary-side and not sea-side town Southend is nice.  It has a happy feel to it and it was good to get out of the house and into the fresh (and yes cold and damp) air.  Again we played on the penny pushing machines, discovering a couple of new designs - one that catapulted coins at ledges stacked high with 2 ps and another with 8 or so individual pushers instead of one big one.  And I noticed, for the first time, a sneaky little slot on each side of the machines filtering off a mass of coins that would otherwise contribute to a win for the player.  You can imagine my disappointment.   I pointed this out to Daniel and Jem and they gave me the "Der Mum" look and said they knew they were there from the beginning.  Oh well.

Then (gasp, shock, horror) the sun came out and transformed the drab landscape into something that bore a smidge of resemblance to a tropical island, at least the sunset bit did (a bit).