Geraldine: 2nd and 3rd days of the Holiday

Notes written on 8.11.12 

After we left Waitaki Waters, we stopped not much further up the road for a cuppa.  It was an official rest area, situated right next to a river - but I'm not sure what river it was.  It may have been the Waitaki.

After we'd had our drink, we walked down to the river, onto the pebbly beach, and finished up playing at throwing sticks in the water and seeing whether they got into the main current or not, and then throwing stones at them to shift them. This wonderfully childlike operation took quite some time, but as the preacher at church had been saying on the previous Sunday, there are times when Time isn't of any importance.  This was one of those.


We had plenty of time between Waitaki and Geraldine, so we took the detour into Waimate, a place we’ve never given more than a passing glance to before.  We stayed there for about an hour all up; I discovered the lovely church, and Celia bought herself a pair of secondhand jandals for $2 (that she subsequently never used because they hurt her toes; once upon a time the only thing she wore was jandals!).  We went to the supermarket and found the statue of the man sitting on a log of wood; there were two rather aggressive bull mastiff type dogs sitting nearby, chained, but tending to growl at passers-by 

Church in Waimate

We travelled on and stopped in Makikihi (where they make the chips) to have some lunch (I'd always thought the spelling was Mahikihi, but Google tells me I'm wrong).  We could see the sea in the distance but couldn't quite find the road to it, which didn't matter.  In the end we stopped on a bit of grass on the side of the road across from a field utterly full of some wheat kind of growth, still green and only about two foot high, got the new gas stove out (that Celia's been dying to use) and had boiled eggs.  Delicious! (though a little difficult to hold, since we didn't have egg cups.  Celia improvised, as she always does, using a rubber glove that is intended to holding hot items from the oven.  Not sure what that was doing on board, but...)

Gas stove with billy boiling (eggs inside)

We lunched on a long deserted piece of road, but in spite of that two women walked past at different times. One, a Dutch lady, had a relation of Marley, our dog (we'd had to leave him behind with a good friend).

In Timaru I finally managed to get to see the Aigantighe Gallery - it's pronounced Egg and Tie, apparently. I've always missed making the detour to it before.  It had an exhibition of Aoraki Polytechnic students' work on in its main gallery, and that was pretty good, but the permanent collection was more interesting.  Some Frances Hodgkins, which as always didn't greatly appeal, some lovely works by C F Goldie, and three or four Colin McCahon, one of which was four tiny paintings in a black surround: two of them just glowed. Quite the most appealing McCahon I've seen, I think.

And onto Geraldine where the large camping area is in the middle of town (like the other place it's not very full, which is nice) and where this morning the birds have been singing their hearts out since 5.30.  One blackbird was doing a solo about 4.30, which is when I was first awake. It was a glorious phrase by phrase song with each phrase quite different.  (We'd gone to bed about 9.30, I think, so being awake that early wasn't entirely surprising.

This camp is rather more full of signs telling you not to do things than the very welcoming Waitaki Waters (and you had to ask at the office for any cutlery or crockery, rather like kids going to their Mum for permission), but it's a good site, and the weather has been great.  It gets very cold at night at present, so last night we added an extra blanket each - Celia of course insisted on bringing these and of course was right! - and that made a big difference.  We're going to stay another day here: we found that there's a big garden area along by the river with rhododendrons and places to walk and sit so we'll go over there and just take it easy.

Getting the tent up hasn't been fraught with trauma even though it's a bit of task but in general.  It doesn't take too long, though I actually had to lie down after I'd been hammering in the pegs, as I was feeling a bit dizzy.  I lay down on the seat on the outside table next to our tent, got Celia to pull me up because I couldn't manage it myself and then felt as if I was falling off the edge of the world.  Very odd feeling.

The birds are still going strong - it's nearly seven-thirty, and I'm looking out while I type this at the wonderful green grass, the massive trees, the bushes.  What a wonderful spell of weather we've been blessed with considering that it was hailing and raining and utterly cold on Monday!

Later on the 8th (Thursday)

We've just spent about an hour talking to a couple from Cornwall who've been touring around NZ.  They're retired teachers and one of their sons is a teacher by trade as well, although I don't think he's been doing it for some time; it's more lucrative in the IT world into which he fell by default.  They've got a son who's just moved to Qatar as well, and they've spent a big of time in a small town in Uganda with an ongoing project assisting women with adult education.  They were interested the Kiva loan scheme as something that might help them support the people in Uganda.

We've had a fairly quiet day, not going far.  Spent the morning mostly just reading in the sun - it's been beautiful today - and then we walked down by the river and read down there for a bit, and then went and visited the 1066 shop where they sell handmade knitted garments in the front sections, beautiful stuff with a variety of colours woven into them, (as well as the biggest woollen pullover in the world) and in the back is this metal mosaic copy of the Bayeux Tapestry, of all things!  This guy, Michael Linton, has spent 20 years and about two million tiny metal pieces (which came from parts of commercial knitting machines) putting this thing together.  Wikipedia notes that Linton's creation is an approximately half scale mosaic version of the Bayeux Tapestry.  It was created over a period of twenty years from 1979. The work includes a hypothetical reconstruction of the missing final section of the Tapestry—events up to the coronation of William the Conqueror on Christmas Day 1066.

Linton is a man with a mind that enjoys puzzles, and he's included an intricate puzzle in the tapestry copy that no one has solved yet, though a couple of schoolboys made great strides into it one day.  He also invented half a dozen puzzles that are distinctly difficult.  We somehow managed to buy one, as well as the DVD Rom on a pen drive which not only has all the tapestry on it, but all the books he consulted, illuminated manuscripts, puzzles, games, brass rubbings and much, much more.  And then on top of that we bought a book of puzzles in which you have to decode letters into numbers by deduction.  We spent about two hours this afternoon and only finished two of them!

Later a photographer came by wanting some footage for a promo on Geraldine that she's making and so we became temporary film stars. We've also been high on the popularity list of a particular blackbird that's been cheeky enough to sit on the table while we're feeding.

Not the best shot, but it gives some idea of what we saw. 

Before we had our tea we drove up the hill nearby and discovered a walk through the bush.  I went on my own and Celia picked me up at the other end - after she'd discovered a beautiful view of the Alps nearby.  So we haven't gone far but have fitted in quite a bit of reading and talking and puzzling.   And puzzling over the way the camp manager approached us and implied that we'd been using the power without paying for it.  We told him that we'd paid what the person at the desk told us was the cost, yesterday, but he gave the impression we'd tried to hide using it because Celia put the cord away before we went a walk!  I felt quite niggled at being unjustly accused, and even when I went over to sort it out at the office the women there (not the one who'd served us yesterday) still ignored what I had to say and basically gave the impression it was somehow our fault they'd undercharged us!  All this fuss over $3 a day.  It would have been better for their PR if they'd just said there was a misunderstanding and told us to forget about the additional money.

Nice and tidy as this place is, we've been a bit underwhelmed by the kind of 'punitive' attitude the signage takes around the place; this bit of nonsense over the power confirmed our feeling that this wasn't our favourite camping ground....

Third day in London

Third and last day in London and a bit muddly. First we drove up the road until we found a couple of churches: we decided on the Methodist one. At first thought there wasn’t going to be anyone there, but in fact it was quite full - and it was a fairly new building. And talk about welcomed. We hadn’t even got out of the car before an elderly couple who’d parked in front of us came up and greeted us, talked about New Zealand, told us about collecting NZ postal items, and gathered us up. Inside it was the same; people didn’t just say hullo, they actually spoke to you, both before and after the service. It was Remembrance Day and at eleven o’clock the radio was turned on for a few minutes and we listened in to the service (with the Royal family) at the Cenotaph. The rest of the service consisted of various people talking about their war experiences, and especially the many people who hadn’t necessarily served at the front but had been back-up workers in various places: firemen, voluntary constables, nurses and so on. They also had communion which was good, as we haven’t been to many services in England where there’s been a communion (except last week as well!)
We were going to go to the movies after lunch but it took too long to get there so we went right into London central again and pottered around a bit. Celia wanted to get some of the artificial snow from Hamley’s (not Hambley's as I think I wrote previously) - you add water to it and it grows to ten times its original size. The place was still abuzz with people, far more than in most of the other shops along Regent St. (Though when we came back along the street later in the evening, the streets were packed again.)
We couldn’t decide what we wanted to do so in the end we got on a bus and went for a ride. Wound up at the Albert Hall and found that there was a concert on in the evening at 6.30. And there were tickets going at a reasonable price. So we bought some, got back on the bus, went and had something to eat (Celia had a little snooze in the café!) and got the tube and bus back again. (The joys of one day passes.) The concert was wonderful - I’ve written about it in more detail on myother blog.

All quiet on the East Anglia front

We went back to Sheringham yesterday. Sheringham, as you might remember, is Celia’s other ‘home.’ On the way we called in at Gresham Church where her parents are buried, along with her grandparents and aunts and uncles. We’d been there once before, back at the beginning of our English stay. Yet again we forgot to take the camera - or rather I did. It’s in my man bag which I haven’t been using much since we got back to England.
Celia dropped her handbag out of the car while we were there, and only discovered later that she didn’t have her cellphone. She’d picked up everything that had dropped, she thought, but obviously the cellphone went somewhere different. Anyway, we weren’t aware of having left it in Gresham until this morning when I tried ringing the phone to see if it was in the car somewhere or around the house. A woman answered, instead. She said she’d found the phone yesterday and had picked it up, thinking it probably belonged to one of the locals. We’ve arranged to go and get it when we get back from our London/Northampton trip. (We leave tomorrow and come back Wednesday.)
We didn’t do anything particularly exciting in Sheringham. Celia just wanted to ‘breath it in’ again. Even managed to avoid picking up anything in the op shops, though we did find four Ian Rankin books that we haven’t read going at £2.50 each.

Quiet

Things are a little quiet on the travel front, so there’s not much to report here in the blog. Spent most of Saturday resting after our long exertion on the Friday, watched X-Factor in the evening and disagreed entirely with the judges and then watched some odd pilot and the second episode which was showed straight after it. It was a tv series called Shooting the Past, and it turns out it was made back in 1999. More about that on my other blog.

Today we’ve done nothing more than go to church, have lunch with our niece and her family, and come home.

Life may get more interesting –who knows?

Sacreda Familia

Yesterday we got to Sacreda Familia (Holy Family) rather late, so didn’t go in. It’s Barcelona’s Cathedral, and is still being finished - after more than a hundred years! This isn’t for want of trying - there may have been some patches of inactivity since it was begun in the 1880s, such as during the Spanish Civil War (when the Cathedral was damaged) but in general it’s been on the go since day one.
It was the dream of a Barcelona bookseller, but I don’t suppose he ever dreamt he’d get what is now in existence. The first architect got as far as building the crypt area, which is substantial in itself, and now houses a museum to the second architect, Gaudi, who between other projects made it his life’s work to design the most remarkable cathedral in Christendom. He sometimes lived in the Cathedral; he had his workshop there at times, and he’s buried there. He’s so honoured that I’m sure most Barcelonians know his name. And he deserves all the honour heaped on him. Somehow he managed to create a monument to God, to Christ (and Mary) and to creation that is so strange and so remarkable that at first you just don’t know what to make of it.
Our first view of it, from across the street, made us wonder what the heck the place actually was. Because it’s still being built, there are cranes everywhere, and scaffolding. Several of the twenty odd towers that will eventually exist are there, and some of them have been there for more than a century. But your first impression of the building is of towers that are full of strange holes, and of a surface that’s so decorated you can’t grasp anything.
Fortunately, when you get up close you realise what’s going on. The way the surface seems to be sliding off itself, like icing melting on a cake, isn’t the case at all: the surface is covered with natural things such as plants and animals. Sculptured vines and creepers cover the building; there are dozens of sculptures of animals and people: stories from the Bible, and liturgical symbols. Each spire has a different top, and nothing is repeated anywhere. At present the tallest tower is 120 metres; in due course the one that focuses on Christ will be 170 metres, making the Cathedral not only the tallest building in Barcelona, but also the tallest church in the world.
Gaudi said: to be original go back to the Origin. And he has done. He continually studied plants and animals to see how things were structured, and used the designs in his buildings. (Not just the Cathedral but also all of his other architectural pursuits.) This created enormous problems for his sculptors, his engineers, his stonemasons, and everyone else connected with the building. But so loyal were they to Gaudi, and to his vision, that they overcome the problems again and again. Gaudi himself made intricate models of the most difficult parts of the structure, and many of these are on display in the museum in the crypt. Unfortunately most of his drawings and plans were destroyed in the Civil War, but subsequent architects and others have worked hard to discover exactly what he intended and to make sure his intentions are carried out.
The inside of the cathedral is at present full of scaffolding, but some areas are complete. In due course all the windows will have stained glass in them, but for now only two of these are finished, and they are both kaleidoscopes of colour. The inner columns weave up to the ceiling area like great plant stalks. None of them are simply round: they have been built so that they almost spiral upwards. In the ceiling itself, the stone is shaped like flowers and leaves, and these hang out over the columns. The balcony, which is high above the floor, and goes along both sides of the building, will hold 1200 to 1500 singers one day - when the place is complete. It’s shaped in a great wave, weaving in and out. The staircases are spiral, and you can already climb far up to the top of what’s completed - or take a lift. Celia reckoned Health and Safety would have something to say about thousands of tourists coming into a building site - which is what it is. Most of the floor is covered with moulds, and great pieces of stone, and building materials.
Outside what is currently the front entrance, are some of Gaudi’s famous leaning columns. These start out some distance from the wall, and fall back onto it, as it were. And over the doors are sculptures of the fourteen stations of the Cross. They’re not in the usual order - Christ naked on the cross is at the centre - but they wonderfully vivid, and striking.
As you can see, the place made quite an impression on us. And then we got a bus to Parc Guell, which was originally intended to be a place where sixty of Gaudi’s designed houses would be built. In the end only two (and a gatehouse) were finished. It’s now been turned into a park for the public, and has more of his almost outrageous designs scattered about. Perhaps more on those in the next post.

Different links

We went to the local Attleborough Anglican church this morning. Think I’ve mentioned visiting it before, though I can’t find the post at the moment. (It has the grand title of The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, by the way, but I think is called St Mary's, locally.)

It’s full of history, as so many Norfolk churches are, and there is evidence everywhere of the many Christians who’ve gone before, from the faded paintings on the reredos to the almost as faded paintings high up on the wall above the altar; from the stones showing where people are buried beneath the stone floor to the extraordinary design of the ‘other’ pulpit (the one that was nicked from another local church, if I remember rightly).

There’s something about worshipping in a place that’s been inhabited by Christian brethren for centuries.

The other good thing about the Norfolk churches is that all seem to be open all the time; further north we found churches were more likely to be closed to the general public.

And, while I think about it, there’s the way England and NZ are so inextricably linked: everywhere you go you find someone who’s got a relative in NZ (think I’ve mentioned this before too). We were at the 30^th birthday party of our niece last night, and Celia spoke to at least three people who had relatives in NZ. This morning, after the service, we had coffee with a couple who’d travelled throughout NZ, and then met another group who all had connections, including one couple who’s son had studied at the Otago Medical School.

Mamble and Crowl, Worcs

Finally got to Mamble, which was a bit of a disappointment, to say the least. A little place with its most open area on a downward piece of the hill, a pub and a church and almost nothing else. Plainly we’ll have to rewrite the song:
Now we’ve been to Mamble
That lies above the Teme,
And there’s no one much in Mamble,
At least as we have seen.
No doubt they breed and brew there,
Still lazy as the claim,
But I doubt that any song there
Sets the local pub aflame.
However, we also went to the other Crowle, in Worcestshire. This has a totally different atmosphere to the Crowle up north, which seemed run down and devitalised. Crowle, Worcs, is probably a dormitory suburb, but the houses are both old thatched roof style and modern, the church has a sense of quiet about it, and there’s a modern parish hall at one end of the village. No sign of any Crowls in the church graveyard, so maybe we’re a hardy lot!
This morning, however, we went to church at the local place just down the road, in the village of Wolverley. This was a fairly High Anglican place, seemingly occupied by widows (only a couple of blokes that I could see) and not very many of them. There was a choir, however, all in heavenly-blue robes, and there were a couple of guys in amongst them too, so that supplemented the numbers on both sides.
The minister was a woman, but she isn’t the vicar, apparently. He was away doing a service elsewhere. She spoke well in her short sermon, and made a good point about reaching out to others in her comments on John’s Gospel.
At the end we took a brief look around the place, and there was a list of former vicars, going way back to the 13th century. One John Crowle stood out among them. He was vicar around 1545, and had an alias: Yewes. Not sure what that had to do with anything!
Of course he may have no connection with my part of the family, but it’s good to see someone in the wider clan doing a good job all that time ago.
Anyway, both the Wolverley church and the Crowle church are named after St John the Baptist. The Wolverley one, which is in the picture, is built on a hill. This is probably a good thing, apart from its biblical significance, because in June this year, Wolverley's lower reaches were flooded twice. We saw a man digging out the stream that runs past his house, and replacing the rocks that had been shifted from his garden wall. He's planning on building a much higher wall around that side of the house, even though the stream is at present more than a metre below the foundations.

Two hectic days

Two full-on days. We drove back down to Northampton yesterday, aiming to arrive for lunch at 12.30 but were already running late by the time we left, and finally got there at 12.45, which was pretty good considering that there’d been delays on the road. Nothing like the last time we went, though.
It was my oldest sister-in-law’s birthday, and Celia had made her a birthday cake, and bought a bunch of food to take. Far too much food, of course, but that’s always the way with any Crowl celebration. We stayed with my other sister-in-law and her husband, again, and I finally remembered to return the key we’d borrowed last time. It was a blisteringly hot day - the hottest we’ve had since we’ve been here perhaps - and major change after all the rain.
The birthday party went off well, though most of them had to retreat in out of the sun because it was too hot. It wasn’t much cooler inside, however. At the end of the day we offered to take my nephew back home to Milton Keynes. This set up a chorus of ways we should gon to take him there (he doesn’t have his own car at present), and we had to leave in the end, and rely on our Sat Nav as there would have been no consensus from the other four. We went via a back road rather than the M11, and that was much more pleasant, and quicker!
Came home to our hosts and watched Play Misty for Me, Clint Eastwood’s first outing as director. More of that on my other blog.
Slept in this morning, and finally got away about ten. Arrived home at Wicklewood some ten hours later!
We wanted to take a quieter route than the one we’d come down on, and also see some other places. Headed to Wellingborough, which was a pleasant town, with op shops, a church with a spire in the Market Square, and a market in progress. In the church there are a number of new stained-glass windows - new in the sense that they were made in the 20th century. The creator of a couple was John Piper, and these are startlingly beautiful in a modern way, when the sun is shining through them. The woman who greeted us and talked to us about the place said that the minister who’d been there for some forty years (if I remember rightly) had had a way with getting people to part with their money and help improve the church. Consequently it has a mural over one altar painted by a Dutchman called Hans Feibusch (the woman said she’d never got to like it, even though she’d been longer than it has), the several stained-glass windows and several other modern works. Unfortunately the church is in a bad way outside, with the stonework deteriorating rapidly.
We went on to Oundle - don’t ask me how to pronounce it - where all the houses and buildings seemed to made of the same light-grey stone. There was such a uniformity about the colour that it almost didn’t seem real. Probably a very pleasant place, but that stage it was very hot again, and we didn’t stay long. Another church with a spire. (The Norman and Saxon towers aren’t much in evidence around here.)
We were going to go to Peterborough, but didn’t make it due to the fact that we decided to look up my cousin who, with another woman, runs a Christmas tree business. She also works at a full-time job. It took us two or three attempts to get to the place: for some reason our Sat Nav took us to a completely wrong place, recommending we pull into a private driveway where three houses were situated. Two little dogs gave a sort of effort to warn me off, but it was too hot for them to be really bothered. The man gave me fairly clear instructions, and we allowed Malvina to offer to put us on the right road as well, and eventually we got to the place - after first driving up a farm road that ran straight into a field.
My cousin wasn’t home when we arrived, so we walked around the house - and found a photo of one of my NZ uncles was up on the wall, which confirmed that we had the right place at least. And then, after we’d had a cup of coffee, my cousin suddenly turned up as we were about to leave, telling us my NZ uncle was coming along behind with the other woman - on bikes. He’s only 82.
Finally, after this, we headed straight home. It was a couple of hours of travel, and finished up taking us back down the road we’d come from King’s Lynn on Thursday.

Roman Catholic Cathedral

We finally made it to the RC Cathedral in Norwich today. The weather has been dull all day, and it was still overcast when we stepped inside the building. All of the rear part of the building was in gloom; the light was all up the front, most of it natural, some of it artificial.
It takes a good deal of time to find the detail in this large building. Unlike many churches, where things stand out the moment you enter, my first impression of this place was of the immense columns holding up the ceiling arches, columns a good metre or more in diameter. Only later on did I realise that each one has a different floral design around its base. And only later on did I realise there were small sculptured heads lining the walls. And that there were gargoyles on the outside of the building. Nothing seems to hit you at first; there’s just this lovely sense of peace. The place was empty apart from one man who sat in the pew for most of our visit, barely moving.
This isn’t a fussy church, somehow. There aren’t bits and pieces going off in various directions; instead there are a couple of small altars - maybe three - at the sides of the original main altar, and these are gloriously decorative affairs, Byzantine in their colour schemes. The main altar has been left isolated because of the shift in thinking about the altar being closer to the people, and the priest facing them. Consequently there’s a large gap between the painted screens that would have been behind the altar originally, and where the main altar is now.
There’s a sunken chapel off to one side, sunken in the sense that the floor is lower than that of the main building. And there are plans in the making to extend the building considerably out at one side. One part of the wall - two or three metres across - is going to be opened up and a new section built outside. This will include a shop, toilets, baby rooms and so on. It will also destroy the design of the building, but needs must, I suppose. Except that there’s an awful lot of space inside the building now, and somehow I can’t see it being filled to overflowing every Sunday.
The stained glass is lovely: there are two kinds. One is very demure, quiet, and almost colourless. You only see the patterning when you get up closer. The other is full of colour, with hundreds of pieces of coloured glass making up the pictures. It’s not the usual stained glass colouring somehow, but something much brighter and more cheerful which gives off a kaleidoscope effect. The main door is glass too, a wonderful smoky glass.
Outside, the building seems to be in a bit of trouble. Whatever stone has been used (and the building is only just over a 100 years old) is crumbling badly in places. The gargoyles are in for a fall if they’re not careful.
We wended our way down St Giles St (think it’s a Street) and came across an excellent secondhand bookshop, which had a copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I’d seen a copy of this in the Oxfam shop in Yarmouth (if I remember rightly) and had decided it was too expensive. I should have bought it as I’ve had trouble finding a copy ever since. It’s still a very popular book. Not sure why I want to read it, except that it’s one of those books that sticks in your mind and you keep saying…I must read that someday.

Fakenham

Yesterday was wet and blowy in the morning (as it had been the previous afternoon) so we didn’t decide to do anything until the afternoon. The National Trust choices weren’t good because most of the ones we hadn’t seen were quite a way away, so we finished up going to Fakenham (pronounced Fake-nam).
Whether it was the dull day that didn’t greatly encourage us about Fakenham or whether it was just the town itself was inspiring, we didn’t feel much enthused about the place. The church seemed untidy and dim, and there wasn’t much to write home about it in it (though we met a bellringer who was waiting for some other campanologists to arrive for a session on the bells), and the shops were okay. But everything had a down-at-heel feel about it, as though the town didn’t have much pride in itself. Even the secondhand bookshop, situated in the basement of a café, smelt mouldy and the books weren’t very exciting. This may all be a completely subjective impression, and there is a new mall in Fakenham that looks good - although two or three of the shops are untenanted.
However, the saving grace of Fakenham was a little teashop called the Tudor Tea Room - seating for about 25 at a pinch - which advertised tea for 60p and coffee for only a little more. In the end we actually had one cream tea and a coffee, which meant we got a scone with jam and mock cream as well as the drinks. We shared the scone and toppings (I had all the butter) which meant our points for the day were rapidly reduced. (Had vege soup and toast for tea to make up for it!)
The thirty-something bloke running the teashop kept all the orders in his head - I never forget an order, he claimed - and was working full bore to keep up with all the customers, because the place was nearly full when we arrived. Probably nobody actually bought a tea or coffee for the cheap prices, because the other items in the place were quite enticing!

Going abroad - or not

We haven’t made much progress on doing any planning for going on the Continent as yet. I suspect in part we’ve been a bit put off by trying to figure out whether it’s cheaper to fly to a place and back again, or to go somewhere and try and fly from there to a second destination. Doing it online ought to be the way to go but it never seems quite as easy as we’d like. And it was a disappointing, I think, to find that even Ryanair, which was so cheap in terms of the flight proceeded to add a pile of extra charges on once we’d actually booked. They don’t always do that, but you have to catch their super-duper-specials before you can get out of the extra costs.
We don’t want to take the car on the Continent: for one thing neither of us fancies driving on the wrong side of the road, and we’d have to hike the insurance up even further.
Anyway, we are going to Luxembourg early in September, to see a man who was only 12 or 13 when we left London in 1974. I was a kind of big brother (as they call it in NZ) to him for a while, and we used to get on very well. Hopefully after an absence of thirty-plus years we still will!
We’ve thought of going to Switzerland, because there’s a young fellow who used to be at our church in Dunedin now living there with his wife, and we’d like to go back to Rome, because we have such good memories of it. We were thinking about Venice too, but my niece has rather put us off the place: she felt it was overpriced, crowded, and that they tended to rip off the visitors. Florence is another possibility, and of course the Continent is so full of choices it’s hard to know where to start.
We haven’t even considered places further afield like Bahrain or Dubai, and I’ve just come across Egypt package holidays - I don’t know that either of us are keen on the heat or the type of atmosphere in those places. I think I stopped off in Bahrain briefly when I first came to England; my memory of it is that the airport had a toilet I couldn’t figure out how to use and oppressive muggy heat. I was happy to get back on the plane!
The company that does the package holidays, however, does have a lot of info on Continental holidays, so it's probably time Celia and I sat down and tried to work something out.

More on HitTail

I haven’t paid much attention to the results from HitTail for this blog so far because no one wants to read a post that contains the words Mike Crowl Travel several times over.
However, things have improved a bit and we’ve had people looking for some things that are a bit more interesting. Curiously, Buckley’s Canadiol Mixture turned up on the list, even though my post regarding it goes back to when the blog had nothing to do with travel but was more personal in tone. The Sally Army got a look in after I mentioned them in the beach service that took place in Sheringham. Another search result that came up was from a blog written by someone who’s doing a social work course and is having to do research on various Christian organisations, including *shudder* (her word) a Baptist website.
A search for Mike Crowl Blog plasters me all over the Google page, which is nice (egotism notwithstanding) and a search for Mundesley takes us straight to the top of the list. Whether finding out that Celia worked in Mundesley forty years ago is what the searcher was looking or not is another matter.
The Garvin Sat Nav that we borrowed made the list, being very close to the top of the results but my mention of Michael Crowl and Goldman Sachs in the same post didn’t even make the first page of Google results.
For those reading this blog for travel news, I’m afraid my interest in turning up on search results probably isn’t very interesting. So I give you full permission to skip these HitTail blogs if you want!

In the country

Just been for a walk round a little of the village we‘re staying in. We‘re on the outer perimeter, I think, so that the line of houses on one side is contrasted with wide open fields on the other. Everywhere we’ve been lately the farmers have been cutting the wheat and then gathering the hay into large round bales. The dusty smell lingers in the air.
At the end of our Close is another of the innumerable old churches that dot the Norfolk/Suffolk countryside. This one has a square tower which makes it Norman, if I remember rightly. Inside it’s quite cramped compared to many of the old churches, and seems to have little to differentiate it from dozens of others. There is a turnstile at the gate, however.
Outside the grass is growing up amongst the older graves, some of which are on a lean, and will soon fall to the ground. Most gravestones only seem to go back to the late 18th century; perhaps the earth has swallowed up earlier ones, as it seems to be threatening to do to later ones, or perhaps gravestones weren’t large in the earlier days and the graves of the old saints are well and truly hidden from sight.

Footnote to the previous post

As I said in the previous post, we visited so many villages and towns today that my mind has got befuddled about which one was which. I think it was at Morsten that we visited the marshes. There was a windmill, I recall, and when we went to look around the other side of it we found the marshes, and a small stream, with a lock, running out to sea.
In Cley, we went around the back streets and alleyways between the houses. These were just delightful, particularly the alleys, where flowers grew up on both sides, and there were walls made of beach stones up high on either hand, and little arched doors into the back gardens of the people’s cottages.
The quay at Blakeney wasn’t too exciting, because the tide was out, and this meant that all the boats were sitting in the mud, This is normal each day, but not particularly attractive. Blakeney was crowded with lots of visitors, and was one of the places where we couldn’t get a park for love nor money. Well, we could have for money, but we weren’t going to pay £3 to park some distance away from the town for only a short period.
Going to Walsingham was a disappointment for me. When I was hitchhiking through England on my last visit to the country, I came across Walsingham almost by accident. I’d heard about it, I think, and it’s legend of the church being carried across from France (I think) by angels. I remember walking into the village and sensing a real atmosphere about the place. I wondered whether it was Little Walsingham that I’d visited last time, perhaps, because Walsingham itself struck me today as not very interesting and was certainly lacking in atmosphere.
We visited the Shrine, and the church that now surrounds it, and neither of us felt good about the place. The church is full of altars and chapels dedicated to different saints, and it’s very dark compared to the other English churches we’ve visited, as though light wasn’t somehow supposed to penetrate. I felt rather edgy in there, which was odd, and Celia came out saying it seemed idolatrous the way there was so much emphasis on saints. Hmm. Interesting that Walsingham has had a different effect on us this time!

I've just had a look at Walsingham on the Net and find that there are both Anglican and Catholic Shrines there. Seems like we went to the Anglican one, which being very high Anglican could easily have been mistaken for a Catholic church.

Birth and death

Yesterday we went to West Beckham, because that’s where Celia was born. In a maternity home that had formerly been a workhouse, supposedly. A workhouse is something that you’ll read about in Charles Dickens’ books, and they were pretty awful places then; somewhere for people who couldn’t afford to spend their last days in any comfort. By the mid-fifties of last century, the few that left were better, but still had a bad name.

Anyway, we found the West Beckham church, which is actually the East and West Beckham church, because the two parishes amalgamated sometime back in the late 19^th century, when the churches, which had fallen into great disrepair, were rebuilt on the West Beckham site. Unlike the rest of the churches around Norfolk, this one is built almost entirely of Sheringham beach stones – inside and out. I’ll add a photo in due course. It’s in good condition, being a lot newer than the average 900-year-old church, though apart from the stones it isn’t particularly distinguished in design. The arch over the front door was apparently rebuilt from leftovers of the East Beckham church.

Well, to get into the church, we had to go next door and get a key. The guy there went off to get his wife, who had the key, and when they came back, Celia asked about the maternity home, saying she’d been born there.

The guy’s reaction was that it was a wonder she survived: the place had been notorious for lack of care and infant mortality. And yes, it had been a workhouse once. And it still exists, except that the roof has all caved in, and it’s inaccessible. His wife was greatly amused that someone standing in front of her should have been born there.

The current owner is having long debates with the Council about what’s going to happen to it, so he’s put barbed wire all around. We managed to get a photo or two of some of it, but the hedges are very high around it as well. I’ll add these in due course.

Celia also wanted to track down a former teacher – her favourite. She’d met up with her former art teacher the night before, and decided to see if she could find this other man, who would now be in his eighties. We found his address in a phone book in Holt, put on the Sat Nav for Hunworth, and, after asking at two different houses in that village, found the house where he’d lived. But he’d gone onto a rest home in another village with the marvellous (and very English) name of Hindolveston. (I kid you not.)

Put Hindolveston in the Sat Nav, and again, after asking someone where the rest home was (none of these places have street addresses, only names), found it. Celia went in and there was her teacher, a skeleton of a man, still very alert (though he didn’t actually remember her) and pleased to have a visitor.

Finally, on the way home, we dropped in at Weyborne, a lovely village by the beach. It’s unspoilt, never having taken off like its great coastal cousins, Sheringham and Cromer. And the beach would be like any typical country beach in NZ if it weren’t for the fact that it’s all stones and no sand.

Church services

Church this morning at the Baptists, the place where Celia used to go as a child. It was already up and running when we arrived, with an older guy leading the singing, which was buzzing along. He sat down around the time they were due to start, and someone else took over. The service went along well, with lots of good singing interspersed with notices and comments about a group from the church who’d gone to Calcutta and were working with children there for a time. There were prayers for older people in the church including one who’d fallen and another who’d had a stroke, and we were feeling good about the place. And then a younger girl led some more worship and wound up with one or two of those very uninspiring songs that have no melody and words strung together from a concordance. This rather dulled the mood, and then the guy who’d talked about the people in Calcutta got up again and began to preach. He turned out to be the pastor of the place, and sadly, he gave a very downbeat and rather longwinded message. It was about Gideon ostensibly, but brought in depression and lack of faith, and feeling a waste of space, and various other similar things, and then got repetitive and got Gideon confused with Joshua and in general sounded unprepared. It was like one of those Pentecostal messages that used to turn up when we were at the Assembly of God and which sounded as though they were made up on the spot. Usually the Holy Spirit got the credit for the words, but unfortunately He was probably off doing something else at the time.
So we came away feeling less positive about the place than we’d started. And there was no one still in the church who’d been in the place when Celia was there. She did find one older couple who remembered some of the people she knew, but that wasn’t quite so satisfactory as actually being remembered.
Tonight we went to the Sheringham Carnival Combined Church Service on the beach front. There were quite a lot of people there, and the Sally Army band came in with a whiz and a bang and got things moving. Good singing, and a great band. Even three SA women doing a timbrel thing - kind of dancing on the spot and waving and banging the instrument around in synchronisation. They were very good: did it all with an ease and confidence that was delightful. And then, I’m afraid, our friend from the morning turned out to be the preacher again. Oh, dear. Down went the mood of the service with a thud as he moved from the real floods in England to Noah’s Flood to a Flood of Rebellion that was flooding across England. No mention of the people getting together to celebrate, no joy in the wondrous sea throbbing alongside us, no excitement about the people of God actually still functioning, and functioning confidently in the country. Nope, only doom and gloom. Some people just don’t know the right thing to say at a time of celebration. Maybe the guy’s in the Jeremiah mould and finds it hard to uplift.
On the other hand, we went for a long walk along the front and into the lifeboat museum this afternoon. Now that was good.

Norwich Cathedral

I only realised after my brother-in-law queried it, that the dates on these posts are in NZ time, not British. Consequently we’re sometimes managing to do things eleven hours before they’ve happened.
Yesterday we finally went and had a look at Norwich Cathedral. It dwarfs all the other churches, even the big ones, that we’ve been to so far. Not only that, it’s like a collage: piece after piece and layer after layer has been added on. Other pieces have become hidden under Time, pillaging, spires falling, the Dissolution and so on. People who existed and died in one century lie cheek by jowl with those who died two centuries later. Brasses have been removed from most gravestones now, as seems the custom generally in England because they were getting rubbed away. Splendid art work from three or four centuries ago rubs shoulders with something done in the last few decades. A glittering museum of gold and silver plate is reached by a narrow spiral staircase inside stone, and there’s a rope, grimed with thousands of hands, to haul yourself up by.
We discovered that the innumerable bosses on the ceiling (not those sort of bosses – even in England they don’t banish bosses to the ceiling) are not all the same, but highly individualised. This discovery came about because each boss has been photographed and put on a CD Rom. It’s the only way you can see them clearly at all, since the Cathedral is virtually three storeys high.
It’s also like two separate churches. Half way down the centre is a kind of narrowing, a bottleneck almost between wooden structurings, and then the church opens out again into a second section as big as the first. I suppose you could have two separate services going on at once – quite apart from the services that could be going on in the Jesus Chapel and the Mary Chapel and the who knows what other chapel. All around the edge of the Cathedral is a kind of walkway, where there are doors and passageways and rooms. It would take a year to become familiar with the place. We were there for maybe an hour all up – and that included having tea in the Refectory: the name of the café but also the real name for the area that used to exist there where the priests and monks would have had their meals. It’s now a modern structure hung between the walls of the Cathedral on one side and the old Refectory wall on the other. A theological library sits up along the end of this section (this is all on a first floor level) and in the middle of the library is a piece of the original wall, about three foot by one foot in size.
It’s a church we’ll have to go back to. For starters we didn’t have the camera with us, so it just exists (barely) in memory at the moment.
We came out of there into Tombland, a street presumably named after an area that was once where graves were. Each shop in the street is called Tombland something (newsagent, bookshop, hairdresser). We went into the secondhand bookshop, but it was very expensive overall. Certainly there were some good books there, but it was geared for those with plenty of money in their pockets, like the old man who was buying up large and handing over wads of notes as he did so. We found a copy of one of the two boEllis Peters’ Brother Cadfael books we’re missing out of the series but at £10 it was just a bit pricey. Celia said, ‘Phew…!’ and that confirmed my feeling about the price!

Footnote: Norwich Cathedral is apparently named The Cathedral of the Holy and Undivided Trinity. And I forgot to mention that it has proper cloisters, in very good condition. Obviously Henry VIII didn't manage to get his nasty hands on those.

St Nicholas

After we’d been to Ickworth yesterday, we took a bit of time wending along the back roads near where we’re staying. Came to Little Saxham and the church of St Nicholas, which has a round tower – a crenulated round tower in fact, for those who want to know such details. This means that it’s not just round, but has various indents and ‘windows’ in it.
It’s also been described as the most spectacular Norman round tower in Suffolk, by somebody called Pevsner. A man who ought to know, by the sound of it.
It’s a lovely little church, set amongst the quiet and peace of a graveyard (nothing like being reminded of where you’re heading when you go to church), and it’s in good condition, considering its age. It dates from the 12th century, though of course, as with all these buildings, there were various modifications over the centuries.
Inside, within the tower, is a small stained-glass window, made all the more effective by being set in walls that are a couple of feet thick, so that it shines out into the gloom.
The place was empty when we went inside, and we had to ourselves for the whole of our visit. I took a number of photos, though whether they’ll come out well is debatable; the flash wanted to keep flashing and made everything brighter than was helpful for detail. What I most wanted to try and photograph wasn’t the tower, which we couldn’t see well anyway (though I’ve included a photo from the Net here) but the wonderful carved animals on the ends of the pews. They were at both ends of each pew, and also at the place where you lean your arm, if you’re lucky enough to be sitting on the end of the row. Each one was different.
Unfortunately, a number of them have been worn away with time, and with children digging at them and various other mishaps, but the best remain. There are dogs, and lions, and sheep and various fierce exotic animals, all in height about the size of the full open stretch of a hand. They bring a delightful homeliness to the atmosphere of the place – even the exotic animals – rather like the pictures in a children’s book rounded out and made ‘real.’The Norman tower may be the architectural feature of the place, but I think we’re more likely to remember the animals a lot longer.

Broads, Cripps, Roys

Don’t think I’ve mentioned that we went to Wroxham - by accident. We were intending to go to Riverside in Norwich, and put in Riverside Shopping Centre on our GPS only to discover that Malvina (as we’ve named her - after a famous NZ opera singer) thought we meant the RSC in Wroxham. That was okay, as Wroxham is on ‘The Broads’ as the many waterways around Norfolk are called, and Celia wanted to go back and check them out. She’d sailed on them as a schoolgirl. They are lovely: houses built right down to the water’s edge, and boats galore. We debated hiring a boat for a week and exploring them, but that’s still up in the air at this stage, as it’s quite costly.
Anyway, the other interesting thing about Wroxham is that in the distant past a small corner shop named Roy’s once existed. Roy must have made a great deal of money as his name is now on a dozen shops, all within spitting distance of each other. The Riverside Shopping Centre is part of it, and there’s a DIY, a garden centre, a food hall, and you name it. All of them have “Roy’s” plastered over them. Obviously Roy was pretty canny with his money - and his buying up of properties. Anyway it gives Wroxham a very prosperous feel.
Roade has had a similar thing. Sir Humphrey Cripps began his working life as a very much underpaid factory worker. Over the course of his career he was able to buy out the Pianoforte Supplies business, which was at the time a very large company in Roade, and later took to making metal car parts when the piano scene quietened down. He owned an island in the Caribbean; he bought up Waterford Crystal in Ireland, and he owned companies in Canada and elsewhere. All in all he was a very wealthy man, He was also a very generous man. He built an entire secondary school; funded umpteen things at universities, old churches and the like (including doing a good deal of restoration work at the Roade Anglican Church: St Mary Virgin). There’s an old people’s home with his name on it up the road from where we’re staying, and no doubt there are dozens of other things that he paid for. The great blessing of a truly wealthy man is that he can give most of his wealth away.

The photo was taken at Horning, along the road from Wroxham - we forgot to get our camera out in the latter town.

Sheringham...at last!

We made it to Sheringham today, the place my wife has most wanted to come back to. It’s where she grew up, and she has a great fondness for it. Consequently I got a running commentary on everything we passed, things that were still there and things that weren’t (such as one of the hotels near the beach), things that had changed (like houses on Beeston Bump) and things that had improved (the way the lifeboats go in and out), people who’d lived in certain spots (like the boy who wet his bed – hopefully he doesn’t still after forty something years), and who’d married who.
She met up with at least five women who knew her or other members of the family, from the two elderly ladies who lived in the same ‘Close’ as her family, to a woman selling crab meat from a stall, to the librarian who at first claimed vehemently that there had never been a Methodist church on the corner near the library and then had to admit defeat when Celia found it in one of the library books, to a woman in a pet shop who had worked under Celia’s big sister.
The houses in Sheringham have been greatly improved over the last few decades: everywhere you find solid plastic window frames (instead of aluminium ones), and plastic decoration around the doors and so on. The picturesque feature of these houses (it’s common throughout the coastal area of Norfolk, I think) is that the houses have brick corners but the central area of the outside walls are made of beach stones set in concrete. Nearly all the houses are two storeys, and many of them are attached to other houses. Brick is everywhere. Those houses that aren’t built with the stones, are all brick. Brick, with tile roofs, so there’s an overwhelming red brick feel to all the housing. (The beach stones make a nice contrast).
I must say I liked the place – and didn’t remember anything about it at all, even though I have been there once before with Celia, thirty-odd years ago. The beach isn’t my style of beach, with it’s heavy pebbles and stones before you reach the sand – and the sand is more orange than white, and more gritty underfoot. But the buildings around the beach area are delightful, all squashed together, with little yards and alleys running between them. It’s all very clean, and it looks as though the place is prospering. Certainly it was busy, even though it’s not the ‘season’ yet.
Just while I remember: a curious piece of Norfolk speech is that they say things like, ‘Come round to ours,’ or, ‘we’re going round to his,’ the ours and the his referring to the person’s house in each case. We’d say, ‘come round to our place,’ but the place gets lost in Norfolk.