Wine, dentists, tower

Sounds like the 'tennis, elbow, foot' game doesn't it, where you have to ping-pong a linked word back from the previous one.

The picture of the Spinnaker tower is slightly fuzzy I know, but it was the best one we took from the Gosport ferry whose engines were just not going to allow a still night time picture. Oh well.
I've mentioned both the Spinnaker tower and the Gosport ferry before, I know, but the tower is now fully operational, well, almost fully, apparently the outside lift doesn't work. That and the fact that it costs 3 pound 50 for a Stella were bits of info we gleaned from the cabbie, some bits of info can only be got from cabbies, google doesn't know everything.
As we watched, the tower changed from blue to green to pink to orange to red. Fabulous, and when we were in our hovel room in Bayswater, oops, hotel room, we found a leaflet for it.

We were returning from a visit to our friends' Karen and Steve. We had been discussing dentists because, well, basically because we're British and it is a topic that occupies many Brits. You may remember I had to visit my own dentist, the softly spoken Gabriel in January. For the exact same reason, Karen had to visit her own this afternoon. Both of us had had a crown come adrift, although Karen's was a temporary one, mine was the permanent Monty and had come out whilst I had been eating a turtle. In Britain we are being trained, weaned maybe, away from the National Health dentistry service and towards private practice. But this is a tough weaning. How do we find a private dentist, what questions do we ask? Karen tells me that only now that there are so few NHS dentists left, is there going to be an ombudsman for private dentists. We Brits do like our Ombudsmen, we like to know there's somewhere we can complain, somewhere to stamp our feet and that if enough of us do it, something will change.

We had some very good South African wine at Karen and Steve's. For years my son Austen has laboured to get me to drink wine other than just French and his toils have been rewarded, I do indeed now drink wines from many parts of the world. We got on to discussing wine boxes and how the French have trained us to the wine box. Steve said he remembered having good wine from wine boxes in Australia in the early 80's, when the rest of the world was not quite as familiar with Aussie wine as we are now. Kevin felt that Canadians were having a hard time accepting the wine box.

Wine, dentists, the tower, how I repeat myself with all my Brit obsessions, all this and I was able to hang washing out today, bliss, ah bliss.