Last days of work, plus Dolly Does London

The last day of work for both of us was the seventh of July. I had two full weeks with my replacement, the lovely Ella, and I think I did as good a job as anyone could have done under the circumstances. Poor thing; she had an awful lot to learn all at once. I had a very nice sendoff from my colleagues, with a sunny Italian lunch provided by Nigel, and lots of cards and hugs and good wishes. I was exhausted by the time I got home, but I didn’t have any time to dilly dally, because I had to transform myself into a Dolly Parton lookalike for my book club hen do. A hen do is like a bachelorette party, and we had no fewer than five bachelorettes in our group at the moment, plus several of us were moving away over the summer, so we had a big blowout party with barbecue and all the trimmings catered by Jamie and me, and all 15 of us dressed in checked shirts and denim miniskirts with lots of blue eye shadow and matching blond wigs. After stuffing our faces with the delicious food, we all headed out together on the bus and made our way over to a club on Regents Street. We got just a few interested and incredulous looks along the way. It was great fun! The club was kind of lame, but we sort of embraced it, and we all danced and took silly pictures and generally made moderate fools of ourselves. After all that, I really was exhausted, and by the time I got home, it was off with my Dolly wig and on with my hostess hat, because Zack had arrived, and we were on to our last round of visitors before leaving the UK.