HEDDON STAFF VISIT LONDON

A girly weekend!

What fun, but who's idea was it to put fourteen loud, giggly women into the QUIET COMPARTMENT on the train? We'd all rocked up with enough provisions to last normal people lifetime ready to enjoy a champagne breakfast en route, only for some miserable git to complain about the volume of noise emanating from our direction and for us to be ejected before we even reached Durham! (When we texted our kids with this news they were all, without exeption really proud of us!) We were unceremoniously hustled into the canteen car where we entertained the more receptive and lighthearted passengers, many of whom returned again and again to join in the laughs and some of whom wanted to sign up to our next trip away!

The weekend was fab - Lion King, shopping, eating and plenty of wine in Covent Garden and a trip to the London Eye.

There we all were in the pod admiring th view, when a voice came over the tannoy telling us that we could have a photo taken as a momento of our visit. There followed a few minutes of frantic hair brushing (it had been raining and we were all wearing hurriedly purchased, but matching, Union Flag ponchos. Not a good look!) and general tidying up, arranging ourselves in height order and posing in front of the camera, which we were helpfully informed was positioned to the EAST of the pod.

Well, we posed and posed and waited and waited for ages, in fact for so long that our smile muscles began to ache and we ended up missing half of the sights. Just as we were getting a bit restless, the camera DID actually flash and the photo was duly taken.

However...

... The thing that we had all been smiling at was in fact an air vent and the camera went off...

... BEHIND US!

At this point we all fell about, stumbled out of the pod, collapsed in giggles at the photo booth where others in the queue were able to gaze in awe at the backsides of the staff from Heddon First School.

At this point I made a mental note to arrange some serious retraining for the geography coordinator. (I also noticed that one or two members of the team were assuring bemused onlookers that we were actually from Darras Hall First School - which was a little wheeze we used to employ when we'd been out for an evening and made a bit of a show of ourselves.)

So, I have a fabulous and hilarious momento of our trip to the London Eye!!

(And when we all went to Dublin the following year, we visited the Guinness factory and asked a Japanese tourist to take our picture under the Guinness sign. She agreed quite happily, but was somewhat startled when she got us all lined up...

...and then we all turned our back on her, but hey it's tradition after all!!)