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When I found out Cesca and David were coming home early from their travels, I was SO excited to get my friends back. But then I found out they were only home for 1 week, before going off again on another adventure – the 900 mile walk from Land’s End to John O’Groats.  Knowing they were a bit bummed about having to come home, and only having a week to catch up with everyone, I messaged her mum and between us we planned a surprise coming home party.

It was brilliant!! A lot of planning went in to keeping it a surprise, with her mum pretending she was away for the week so that Cesca wouldn’t turn up at her house, friends putting them off the scent by making excuses as to why they couldn’t see her that day, I even had to pretend to David that I needed his Dad to come and look at my boiler as an excuse to get his Dad in my house for the party.

Everyone really pulled together and brought masses of food and drink and when they arrived and we shouted ‘surprise’, the look on both David and Cesca’s faces was priceless.  Cesca dealt with it slightly better than David, who went ‘what the hell’ before dashing outside to have a cigarette to calm his nerves, bless him.

I was so impressed we all managed to keep it a secret, it was a complete surprise for them.  There were additional surprises during the night when her dad turned up, having flown in from Sweden that night to be there, and then later on when her eldest brother joined the party, flying up from Cornwall after having pretended he couldn’t make it.  He’d managed to keep it a complete secret from everyone except Johan, so it was a surprise to the rest of the family too! It showed how much they had been missed and how much their friends and family loved them – we successfully managed to unite two families who for various reasons hadn’t been in the same room as each other in a very long time and it was heart warming to see :-)

Welcome home guys!!! Glad to have you back (don’t expect another party when you finish your walk though – we’re all partied out!)

On Saturday after post party cleaning, me Sepha and Dan had a picnic in the park with all the left-over food (benefits of being the party host!) and I managed to burn half of my face and nose and one arm and my back. Clever!  In the evening I headed to Putney for a chilled evening watching TV and eating food with Bex.  We watched the first episode of The Affair, which was quite good, but I don't have Sky so can't watch any more - lame!

On Sunday Sepha had convinced me to go for a refreshing swim in Brockwell Lido. IT WAS SO COLD!! We then cycled to hot yoga and did a 90 min sesh which I really struggled with, but it felt good to be back at the Clapham HPY place. Afterwards we cycled to the wetherspoons in Streatham for a well deserved (and very cheap!) roast dinner before heading back to our respective houses and vegging out for the rest of the day.  I like to think we did a modern day, hipsters triathlon of cycling , yoga and lido swimming.  Swish. Posted by godzilla at Monday, June 29, 2015