As ever, time passes quickly and I realise it's been a while since posting, so here's a quick catch-up. After my last post on 15 Feb, Ros and I went out for a birthday meal at Restaurant 23 - we think it's the fourth night out we've had since Jess arrived. Another lovely meal there. Auntie Dave very kindly babysat for us.

Thursday was fairly uneventful, but on Friday I came down with a virus at lunchtime and had to come home from work and go to bed. It got worse, with full-on fever and chills, but mercifully I'd started to feel better by midday Saturday.

Ros started to come down with it on Tuesday evening, and Jess followed on Thursday. A fine backdrop to my bike test. Starting out on the bike again after a month off was a bit wobbly, but after about half an hour I was getting a bit more sorted. I decided to go back to the Kawasaki ER-5 that that I'd started learning on, as it was a bit less frisky - something I figured would be a good thing for the test. As we (Alex, of course had been doing his course this week too) headed across to Nuneaton, the rain really started coming down. We spent a couple of hours working around town, and up and down the A444 towards Coventry to get on the dual carriageway. The rain was driving hard, but our instructor, Dave, really wanted us to push to 70mph. Safe enough, but not much fun.

Back towards the area around the test centre, and we did some slow manoeuvres. I was fairly happy with my U-turns and stop, and so after a bit more riding, it was 1.30 and test-time. We went around the corner and pretty much straight to start the manoeuvres. Emergency stop was fine, and then it was the U-turn. Unfortunately for me, it was a side street with quite a big camber - all the practice I'd done was on pretty flat roads, and I got a bit caught out as I reached the top of the rise, and it ran away from me. That was a big annoyance. I knew there and then that I'd failed the test, but I'd still have half an hour to ride. That all went fairly smoothly - a few minor slip-ups, but nothing too critical, and it was back to the test centre for a debrief. There was one surprise which was that I'd also had another serious fault - speeding at 35 in a 30mph limit. It was a stretch of dual carriageway, where I was following a minibus, about 2 minutes after the U-turn. The minibus had been crawling at 20mph, but sped up to 35 on this stretch. I figured that I must've missed the 40mph sign, but at the end of the test he told me otherwise. A fair cop. To be honest, I was glad that I'd failed the U-turn at that point, as I'd have been really gutted to fail for the speed fault alone - if you've driven with me, you'll know I don't really do speeding. Having three school-friends die in a car crash at 17 tempers one's enthusiasm for hacking along for no good reason... So, I'll have to organise some more practise and a re-test at some point soon.

Since then, it's really been world of flu around here. It's Jessie's first real time being ill (teething excluded), and she's not been a happy bunny. She's not wanted to be left alone, night or day, which has been hard work, especially for Ros as she's been suffering herself. Whilst I seemed to shake it off in 24 hours, they've both had it for days now. Today, Jess is less feverish and behaving a lot more like herself, but she's got a sore throat, which means that when she tries to cry, it's a bit whimpery. Poor dab. We're both hoping that she sleeps better tonight. Incidentally, in the past week, she's started to get much better at sitting up herself - for instance in her cot. She's also starting to be able to pull herself up to standing. So, looks like we'll have to raise anything made of paper to a higher level again...