Joel was much better today – that Calpol is a life saver. He was packed up and off to school at the usual time this morning, leaving me with a good most-of-day to try and catch up with stuff.

I got my walk in at lunchtime – 30+ minutes around town and back home, with another hour and a half before picking up the children. Nothing too exciting to report, and I’m still waiting on something from the doctors that might give a clue to when I can start exercising properly again.

The plan was to pick up the children at 3:30, get them to their grandparents for 4:30ish – have a leisurely cuppa and then drive to Liverpool for 6:30 to catch a couple of films in the evening.

Three hours to get all that done seemed more than enough time. Cue hollow laugh.

Firstly, as I was driving over to the school I could hear something odd from the back of the car. Turned out the back tyre of the car was flat. I’d checked them yesterday and they were fine, but now it wasn’t. Nor would it be inflated – so I took a quick detour via a garage to get it replaced. I was on the road again by 4:30.

The drive to Lymm was pretty clear and I thought there would be plenty of time for a brew and a quick look at the ipad – a bit of tech support in exchange for the children being looked after seemed a fair deal to me! Back on the road with less time than I’d planned, but I hadn’t factored in adverts, trailers and suchlike.

Without thinking I swung onto the M6 and ground to a halt.

It turns out that 5:30pm on a Friday is not the best time to be crossing the Thelwall viaduct, especially when there has been an accident and two lanes have been closed. I very quickly resigned myself to missing the first of the two films I was going to watch – Birdman would have to wait.

On top of the super slow crawling, my iphone had decided that today it would gobble up as much power as possible. What had been a nearly full battery at lunchtime had chimed to say it was at 20% on the way to Lymm and had now hit 10%. This would normally be fine, I know my way to Hanover Street in Liverpool, but I had used the swanky Passbook thing on the iphone and my cinema tickets were on there. I turned off anything that might drain power (i.e. almost everything) and kept my fingers crossed that the traffic would start to move at some point.

As it was, I got to FACT about 10 minutes after the start of Birdman. There was just enough juice to change turn my passbook tickets into real ones – so I quickly found a seat and picked up the plot. It’s really not that complicated a story. That finished at 8:30, just as the ads were starting for Whiplash. Finally everything was slipping into place.

Whiplash was on “The Box” screen, which is a wonderful room with 25 two-person sofas, a cinema screen and little else. It was a very comfy and a very pleasant way to finally get to relax. If you could call Whiplash a relaxing film, which frankly it isn’t.

Back home for about 11:30. Bed before midnight and a lie-in in the morning. No children until 5ish tomorrow. This all sounds too good to be true!