I hate Motorways.

Well I am a little tired today so no doubt my grammar will be suitably poor. My husband and I returned from Greenwich at 2.45am, it was long day but was educational as always. We departed at 10am and I had every intention of buying some nice healthy food for the journey but as usual time did not seem to be on my side. I raced to Tj's sandwich bar to get a prawn and avocado sandwich on granary bread to keep me going for a while, it was breakfast / lunch and it was more than adequate.

As you can imagine a sandwich does not fill one up for the entire day and sooner or later my stomach started to grumble, we stopped at a motorway service station to peruse the menu. As most of you will know service stations are neither cheap nor particularly healthy. For the first time in several years I indulged in fast food!!! The spicy beanburger pictured left was not quite as bad as a thought it was going to be but was hot and was better than starving, I washed it down with a cup of green tea, peppermint and milk thistle in the hope that it would make the bean burger more nutritious (I somehowalways carry a few herbal tea bags in my handbag as motorway service stations will usually give you a cup of boiling water for nothing!). My husband and one of his fighters Mick Kileen (pictured left found time to try the slightly disturbing massage chairs. The chairs are meant to be relaxing yet feel more like someone is jabbing you in the back and neck with a small stick.

The Spicy beanburger was actually a bit of a god send because when we arrived at the venue, Kidbrooke School in Greenwich, there was a very limited amount of food on offer although I have to give credit to the school for the way they looked after us and they managed to offer fresh apples and bananas for sale. I ventured to the local co-op which turned out to be quite a scary experience. Remember this is inner city London, you could have cut the atmosphere in the supermarket with a knife, in fact I worried that a knife may be about to be the exact object in question. A polite man behind the counter was trying to explain to a young man (By just calling him a man I am being extremely polite) that he needed ID to buy alcohol, the 'man' started shouting and swearing trying to intimidate the poor member of staff, I though that the situation was going to escalate but it didn't. Then the next customer was equally abusive to the cashier over the price of sweets for his children. I really wanted to say something but didn't want to aggravate things further. Instead I was just over friendly to the cashier and smiled and made conversation which was not reciprocated. I do worry about the road our society seems to be travelling down, I found this article written in 2003 which highlights few of my concerns.

I returned to the venue happy to be away from said supermarket. I will report fully on the fight night when I get some pictures, it was a very interesting night with lots of memories. It was also strange to be in an inner city London classroom surrounded by GCSE course work and battered filing cabinets, not the usual venue for a fight night.

The journey back was very laborious, 4 and a half hours of motorway, I stayed awake throughout trying to make sure my husband was not too tired to drive but he seemed fine and was far more alert than me.

Nixi and Jo have updated their blogs and Rosanna will be adding pictures to her blog soon from May's Run to the Sun event.

Sorry to cut this blog short but I have just found out that one of my mum's best friends died yesterday, Sue was a lovely woman of whom I have very fond memories. As a young girl I spent many nights with Sue and her family and her lovely three sons. My mum is on her way down to see me so I will stop writing for now and write some more on Wednesday. As I sign off I can hear the sound of guns in the back ground, they are sounding for national Veterans day giving us a chance to remember those who have fought in wars across the world. My thoughts also go out to the families of the soldiers killed n Afghanistan in the past 24 hours.

Stay healthy,

Sam x