Malvina

One of my regular readers wants to know how we came to name our Sat Nav Malvina.
It was a brief but convoluted process. We’d been calling our borrowed Sat Nav, Margarita. Our Sat Nav comes from Garmin, but I think initially I read the company name as Garvin. We couldn’t give our SN the same name as the previous one, so we came to call her Malvina, because of the V in Garvin, and because Malvina is the name of one of NZ’s greatest opera singers. Still confused? You should be!

My Sat Nav says...

I mentioned a while ago that we’d bought a Sat Nav (as they call them here) - in other words a GPS - for finding our way around the country. We called it Malvina.
Firstly, let me say she's been invaluable. We’d still be trying to find our way out of some back lanes without her. And she's user-friendly and mostly up to date. However, she also seems to have a mind of her own. When we asked her to take us from one large town to another, she would opt for the faster routes in terms of A roads, even though there were often shortcuts she could have used. When we started driving round some of the lanes nearby, on the other hand, she seemed to think that we’d like to go everywhere by back lanes, and we’ve had a frustrating couple of days trying to convince her that she needs to think about the best route, not the one that’s of the same kind as the last one we went on. Much and all as we enjoy country lanes, because there isn’t much traffic on them, they aren’t necessarily the fastest way to get to some places.

I've had to alter this post slightly, changing the pronouns, as I realised that I was calling Mavlina 'it' throughout. Oh, dear.

Traffic Jams

As I write this I’m sitting in a deckchair on the side of the A34. We were stuck in a very long queue of cars and trucks and decided to stop for a while to let the traffic clear. Of course, as soon as we pulled over (and I’d found some bush to go to the loo behind) the traffic got moving, and has been moving ever since. Never mind, the rest won’t do us any harm; it’s very tiring driving at 7 mph for half an hour on end.
We had the same problem this morning, driving to Oxford. The roads were chocker - on our side of the road. People going the other direction were away laughing. Now the people going in the opposite direction - again - are zipping along, and our lot of traffic has just come to a standstill once more. Frustrating way to drive, but I guess you get used to it.
When I came to England for the first time, some forty years ago, my uncle took me and his wife and daughter out on a Sunday afternoon drive. It was lovely on the way to wherever we went, but the return journey consisted of one long traffic jam that crawled along in the same way we’ve just been crawling along. I thought, if this is what a Sunday afternoon drive consists of, I’ll forego the pleasure from now on.
Forty years on and things haven’t changed, except now queues are a permanent feature of travel here. When we came down to Northampton from Norwich last week, we got caught in a long queue - there’d been an accident on one of the roundabouts - and were stuck in it while thunder thundered overhead and lightning flashed.
It’s been fine when we’ve gone on the quieter roads, of course, but our GPS likes to take us on the main roads, having the mistaken idea that they are the quicker roads. She’s refuses to take traffic jams into consideration.

Thetford

We went to Thetford today, which apparently used to be the chief town in Norfolk. It isn’t any more, and though it has the usual churches built in 1100 and such, it didn’t strike either of us as very interesting a town. Maybe we didn’t see enough of it. However we did find out that the Dad’s Army series was partly filmed there, that Thomas Paine the great political pamphleteer was born there, and that the place was burnt to the ground by some Viking whose name I’ve now forgotten.

We bought ourselves a GPS system today, (which was why we were in Thetford in the first place), one that’s a bit more user-friendly and that we can also use when we go back to New Zealand. It’ll help in those awful cities - Christchurch and Auckland - where we can never find our way around.

Thetford also turned out to be full of Eastern Europeans and Portuguese (amongst others), people who are there to work at jobs that Brits are no longer doing, but who, by all accounts, may not be very well off. I’m only hearing about it secondhand, so I don’t know the details, but the number of foreign-speaking people walking the streets of Thetford was rather high.

GPS: Go Pray Somewhere? You'll need to.

After almost two weeks of being with people, we’re starting to need space. We’re now babysitting the house belonging to our nephew and his wife and family, and the only other human company is their delightful labrador, Cissie. She’s about a year old, black, and very friendly. We’ve got to know her over the last couple of days, so she’s accepted us as being okay. The house is a lovely place out in the country, not far from a small town called Barford. There’s an enormous field out the back, all fenced in, so Cassie can’t escape but can have plenty of space to roam. The grounds round the house are also fairly extensive (I think the property’s a half acre or so all up) and full of English country flowers.
We’ve been using a GPS system that belongs to my brother-in-law, in the car. It nearly brought Celia and I to blows this morning (after church) when we tried to find our way back to my brother-in-law’s. What a job! It would have been okay, and was going well, until we struck a procession in the middle of Attleborough, and had to turn around and go a different way. From then on it was all downhill – not literally. The GPS voice, whom we called Margarita (though my brother-in-law has a much less polite name for her) led us on a merry dance around the countryside, back and forth, hither and yon, up a dead end (she’s slightly out of date on her facts) and finally caused us to ring the in-laws for help in absolute desperation as we were both going crazy and shouting at each other (in spite of a very positive sermon!). It probably would have got us home, but once we felt she wasn’t quite behaving according to Hoyle, we began to distrust her and each other and not listen to any of the three of us. Never mind, the in-laws came and rescued us – we were only about a mile away from home at that stage.
We used it again to find our way to the present house. It did get us here, but seemed to take us all the way around the mountains again (again, not quite literally). I’m sure Margarita knows what she’s up to, but she’s left us totally exhausted.

The church in the photo is St Mary, Attleborough - it's not the one we went to this morning, however.