Into Tenby

We have once again been very lucky with the weather which held out just long enough for us to take a trip into Tenby. In the summer sunshine, it is beautiful enough to rival many of the European cities with clean beaches and fabulous views. Out of the sun however, the attraction fades and it becomes like many of the other seaside towns in Britain that are so reliant on the changeable weather. We managed a good two hours and had a look round some of the shops, a sit down in a café and by overlooking the harbour. Another chance for my mum to play with her new camera of which the smile detection element came in very handy taking some of the photos when we were squinting away from the sun.

As we got back, the heavens opened and it has hardly stopped raining since. I'm not at all envious of my mum who has the displeasure of driving back all that way tomorrow in the rain. It's a shame I still can't drive other cars on my insurance otherwise we'd have split it and my car isn't big enough to fit everyone in comfortably for such a long journey.

To pass the afternoon, we dug out Trivial Pursuit and I played with my grandma whilst the others went for a nap. I thought I did pretty well considering that the game was made in 1988 (before I was born) and I was managing to answer some of the questions from the adults box rather than the 'youth' box. The younger questions were designed for the under 14s but in 1988 I would have been -1 years old so perhaps I should have been using those instead. My worst category was history or 'Yesterdays' as it was called. I think I only managed to get one of those questions right when it was time to get my piece of the counter. My favourites were Created World (Science and Nature), Arts and Culture and PINK (Entertainment). It's odd when you find that there are some questions that you don't realise you know the answer to until you think about them. I got quite a few right that way and surprised myself a great deal when I did. I was also fairly embarrassed when my grandma read out some questions and told me that I would get the answers to them easily and then revealed to having no clue as to who or what the question was referring.

I managed to fluke my way to winning in the end by picking very difficult categories for my opponent on the winning square. I had a bit of luck by racing straight to the hub square straight after getting my last piece. I think she was being lenient by asking me an arts and culture question of which I had been answering quite a few correctly. Anyone who knows me will know that sport is one of my weakest subjects and from playing this game, you would have always asked me a history question if you wanted any chance of winning. By this point however, the game had been going for several hours and had got a little bit tedious and so my final question was "Which book is describes as a trilogy in four parts" to which any self-respecting sci-fi buff will know is the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

This evening I decided (rather bravely) to introduce my grandma to the world of computers. Only my mum's dad out of my four grandparents ever used a computer but he was a BBC engineer and so had one of the early BBC computers. The others just sat in marvel as us "young'ns" sat playing with them. My dad's dad was the worst and couldn't even change a VHS tape. She got on surprisingly well really and took to the trackpad on my laptop much better than she took to the mouse the last time we tried. She ended up playing a game of Mahjong Titans - one of the simplest games I could find for her to try out. Solitaire would have been okay but there was dragging involved with that which I'm not sure she would have mastered without a mouse. Even I struggle with that on a trackpad and end up wearing out my fingers if I do it too much. Still, she got down to about 12 tiles before losing which is pretty good going since she couldn't see well enough to see which tiles were on top and had never used a computer before!