Whenever I visit my parents in Southport I always envisage a relaxing few days of seeing friends and doing family activities, with plenty of time to spare for penning a few blogs in advance and catching up with Google Reader.

You’d think by now I’d know better. Within my first twenty-four hours I had been shopping (for clothes), shopping again (this time for food), out for dinner with one friend and out to the pub with another. I crawled in at 2am after discovering I can now stomach snakebite and black without getting hideously drunk or throwing up. That wasn’t the end of it, I woke just after 8am (surprisingly without a hangover!) to head out on a hike followed by lunch in what can only be described at the best pub I have ever been to.

The Bhurtpore Inn (Aston, Cheshire) does the most amazing home cooked pub food I think I have ever tasted. At one point I thought we might declare to the landlord that we wouldn’t be leaving until we’d tried everything on their menu. Despite being stuffed we managed to polish off desert too, well we didn’t want to live with the regret of “What if..?” It also seems to have every type of ale and cider. It is a CAMRA pub and a bloody brilliant one at that. It also has a beer festival that I can’t make this year, but will be pencilling in the diary for 2011.

But just to go back 24 hours and those hallowed first few steps into Southport. Durham may have the beauty, but Southport has the brains – well the amenities anyway. A couple of years ago I would have laughed if anyone had suggested that I would be hankering after Southport’s shops, not to mention the entertainment (the cinema, the pubs… perhaps not the bars and clubs though!) Spend eighteen months living in Durham and you will understand why. The shopping isn’t awful, but having been brought up on M&S I find myself struggling with the tiny offering that can be had on Silver Street. If I invested in a car I could just nip up the A1 to the Metro Centre or Newcastle, but public transport isn’t quite that easy. So within minutes of stepping back onto Merseyside turf (or as some people will still argue, Lancashire) I’m in M&S and enjoying every second. On this first visit I settled on a pair of Per Una jeans, and when asked by my mother “Would you like these as an early birthday present?” I found I couldn’t refuse.

Having eased myself into the M&S experience with the Southport store, a few days later in Liverpool I couldn’t resist heading into the full sized M&S to make the most of the lingerie department, which as most women know is the best place to find sensible, yet gorgeous, well fitting and very reasonably priced bits you can’t do without! Of course if Victoria Secret opened in the UK (oh go on…) they might have a fight for my loyalty on their hands. I left with a lighter purse, but not too much lighter, and a big smile on my face.
My trip over to the North West wasn’t all about M&S though. There was also the joy of purchasing my first pair of proper running trainers (a blog in itself!) And I did manage to cover quite a bit of ground in four days between Cheshire, Blackpool and Liverpool (that bit was in the car, I’m only just starting out with the marathon training!!!).

It all ended on Wednesday with the whole purpose of me being in the North West, to run a workshop on ‘Marketing for Everyone’ at a conference, which was a brilliant experience, and one I hope I’ll get to repeat in future. And now I’m back in the North East, enjoying the beautiful sunshine and hoping it lasts long enough to enjoy my birthday BBQ tomorrow!