What we saw and didn't

I mentioned quite a while ago in this blog that while we were camping in a place in North London we saw a host of rabbits in the next field. Bunnies everywhere!
In fact, we saw quite a lot of wildlife while we were travelling around: a fox in a churchyard in Kentish Town (a London suburb); plenty of squirrels around the Norfolk lanes and even one in the backyard of my niece’s house in Braintree. He was running along the fence as if he owned the place, stopping when he felt like it, and taking stock of the situation.
We saw a deer one day – apparently they’re quite common in the forest areas on the sides of roads, and there are signs warning motorists to watch out for them in places. I’m told there are some deer in the woods at my great-nephew’s school in Taverham.
Pheasant were common hopping in and out of the hedgerows, and pigeons were everywhere on the country roads. They appeared to have no common sense. One of them flew up in front of us when we driving along one day, and instead of flying to the side, it kept going straight. It didn’t even go higher than the car – just straight. Fortunately at the last minute it swerved, but I thought we were going to make impact at some point.
At my other niece’s house, there were frogs in the garden, and even on the roadside near where she lives. And in the place we stayed in near Bury St Edmunds, there was an infestation of moles – though we never actually saw them, only what they left behind: large mounds in the grass.
Domestic animals were a different matter. We hardly ever saw a cat, though there were plenty of dogs around. Dogs everywhere: held in their owner’s arms, tangling up their owner’s feet; on the buses, on the tube; in the museums, and other public places.
And the only place we ever saw sparrows were in some of the cities. I never saw one in the gardens of the houses I stayed in. Isn’t that strange? I really missed the little critters.

This photo was taken by Tony Northrup; you can see a large version of it on his site, as well as other nature photography.

Back in our own bed

My rough calculations as to how many beds we slept in while we were away from home comes to just under thirty, some of which we slept in more than once.
Some were drastic, most were okay. Probably the best one was at my sister-in-law's place in Northampton. They'd bought a new bed before we came (I think for us, in fact), and it was very good to sleep in.
Perhaps the worst was in a room above a cafe we stayed at in West London. The middle leg was broken, and had to be propped back in place. Consequently sleeping on it was a bit of a ‘take care’ situation, in case it suddenly collapsed.
On the Continent we found that in Germany and Switzerland, they don’t have pillows the same shape as those at home. They’re large and almost square, and virtually flat, and it’s hard to know how they’re supposed to function. We never quite found out.
Some Continental hotels put two single beds together as though they were a double. You discovered the gap fairly quickly. Others were double beds, but they had separate covers on them. This worked quite well, except when Celia threw her cover over on mine. Still, it’s something she does at home anyway, so what’s the difference?
Many places don’t use a top sheet any more, including many of the places we stayed at in England. And they use duvets almost everywhere. I found the problem with these was they were often too heavy for the summertime, and I’ve lost count of the number of nights I woke up sweating.
The great thing about it all, I suppose, is that we became more flexible about just getting on and sleeping, whether it was in our tent with airbeds, or in a king size double bed in Valencia. Many places don’t have curtains heavy enough to keep out the light – many places, especially in Spain, don’t have curtains at all. So sleeping under these conditions is a test of how tired you are and whether you’re going to make a fuss about it.
Anyway, we’re home, and we’re back in the bed we belong in – and it’s great.

We're off! We're off!

Twenty years or more ago, I began writing a children's opera, in which the children sang a rousing chorus, We're off! We're off to the Fantabulous Mountains.
The song is buzzing round in my head. This is the last post I'll be writing from Attleborough (certainly in the foreseeable future), and in an hour we catch the bus to Heathrow, and not long after get on our plane for Korea.
The phrase, mixed emotions, doesn't cover it. We had a family tea here last night with all the family connected to the people we've stayed with the most, plus another of Celia's brothers and his wife. Last Tuesday we said goodbye to another couple, and Celia's just been on the phone to both her sisters. We're feeling keen to get off yet know that we won't see any of these people again in any hurry - in some cases we may not see them again at all. (The older members of Celia's family are getting up round the 70 mark.)
Four of the great-nieces and nephews were here last night, and two of them went home in tears, apparently. One of the little g/nephews did an anagram puzzle of his family's names for us, as well as a kind of poem of the important things he's done with us, and a maze, in which I was stuck at one end missing the flight, while Celia was on the plane. Help Mike get on the plane, was the instruction.
Both the nephews were here this morning for an informal breakfast, so we said goodbye to them again; one of them prayed for us as well. We're going to miss all these people we've got to know while we've been over here, as well as those we've known before.
There have been times when we thought we hadn't had much of a time here, but in fact, when we look back and remember things, it's been a great time. The bad days are nothing compared to the highlights and the general times of just enjoying other people's company. We've been very well cared for by the family, and we've met dozens of people both here in England and on the Continent who were friendly and helpful. It's been rare to be rebuffed by anyone.
How much longer this blog will carry on after we get on the flight is a question. No doubt my inveterate writing fingers will insist on adding some more, and no doubt we'll have other things to say about our travels.
Meantime, we watch the minutes go by and keep breathing.

Countdown

Well, it’s a week today till we head for home. We’ve changed our dates without difficulty from early December to the 24^th November, meaning we’ll be home before the end of the month. That gives us a bit of breathing space at the other end, before we head back into work.

It took a bit of organising to make sure we still had somewhere to stay in Seoul, Korea, on the way home – the travel agents in NZ must have started to tear their hair out a little when we changed the dates not once, but twice. However, everything is all organised now – we just have to figure out how to get from the airport to our hotel and we’ll be fine.

We’re also trying to sell the car, that great little Peugeot that’s served us so well. We’ll be sorry to say goodbye to it, really, because it’s very economical; far more so than our Mitsubishi at home. But trying to take the Peugeot home isn’t within the possible budgets, so it’ll be staying here, hopefully with a new owner very soon.

The only thing I don’t like about it are the bucket seats (typical of most small cars, of course). I get back ache very easily in them, and that, combined with the neck ache I got from the stress of driving on English roads I wasn’t familiar with made life a bit unpleasant for a while. I think I’ve learned how to deal with both, as I’m certainly not getting the problems now. I suspect we’ll find driving on NZ roads a breeze after the English ones.

The joys of owning a car in England

You’ll no doubt remember that we bought a car for the time we’ve been in England. It’s been great, a Peugeot 306 XR, and we’ve done a lot of mileage in it. It’s also been very economical in terms of petrol, probably a lot more economical than our Mitsubishi Chariot at home.

However, we had to pay for its annual registration last month - £63.00 – which works out to about the same as we’d pay in NZ. But we also had to get an MOT – the equivalent of the NZ Warrant of Fitness – and this has been a bit of a shock.

I’m not sure what the current cost of getting a WOF in NZ is. (This is a post full of acronyms, isn’t it?). I don’t think it can be more than $40 or so. That would be the equivalent of around £14.85 in British money. Here, however, the cost for the MOT is £50.35 (goodness knows what the 35p is there for – it’s like the sign in the Italian subways, where they would charge you 50 euros and 5 cents if you didn’t have a ticket). That’s about $135NZ. Good grief.

Worse, because there were a couple of things wrong with the car (two of them utterly minor, and one to do with the brake pads) we had to have some work done on it. This cost another £80 – or $215NZ.

And then, because the people who’d tested the car had to do a ‘partial re-test’ they charged us again: another £25.13, making the total for the MOT about $200NZ. How on earth that can be justified is anyone’s guess. (I happened to look up this garage when I was trying to find their phone number the other day, and obviously I’m not the only customer who hasn’t been satisfied with them. Have a look at the comments section.)

So in the last couple of months our great wee car has cost us over £200, which has seriously reduced our bank account. We’re now heading towards almost nothing in it – gulp! – and we’ve still got another week here, as well as staying two days in Korea. It reminds me of a time when I was young man and went to Australia to see if I could work there as a repetiteur (I’d already worked professionally at the job in NZ). I didn’t get any work, and after a month of swanning around, came home, only to realise when I flew into Christchurch, that I didn’t actually have any money to get the train home to Dunedin. Fortunately the lady I was staying overnight with in Christchurch coughed up the readies, and I was able to repay her later (no doubt out of my mother’s money, since I didn’t have a job to come back to either!)

A few notes

One of the great advantages of having relatives in England who care about you is that we’ve been looked after very well, even by those who’d hadn’t seen us for more than thirty years. Without our extended family over here, this trip wouldn’t have been possible in any sense.

I’ve just been checking back over some of the words that HitTail has turned up and find that the windmill in Cley, which we visited (well, we walked around it as it was closed at the time) was restored by the parents of a singer/songwriter called James Blunt. His real name is James Blount and he’s the composer of the album, Back to Bedlam. There now, did you know that?

I mentioned too that we’d had to get Vodafone to unlock the content control on the mobile connect, and that it had been a bit of an issue doing so. Seemingly, Vodafone is the only company that actually does this for free (why do they lock them in the first place?). Some companies in Australia, apparently, charge anything from $27.95AUD to $199! What a racket.

I’d talked about Gaudi’s architectural approach to the Holy Family Cathedral in Barcelona, and said it looked like the stone was melting. This isn’t unusual in Gaudi’s work, apparently: in a recent article in the NY Times, the writer talks about the way Gaudi used this melting effect on houses and roofs and other architectural features.

Our frequent mention of McDonald’s brought us into a search result as well. I don’t know if I wrote that we didn’t go to McDonald’s in Spain because they didn’t serve milkshakes. Whether it’s something to do with the way they bottle milk or what, I don’t know, but we couldn’t get a milkshake in Spain (not from McDonald’s anyway).

It was interesting the way the McDonald’s vary. When we came back to London we had more trouble communicating with the staff in the two McDonald’s we visited than we did in any of the countries in Europe. There the assistants were pleased to interpret our English into McDonaldsese. In England, even though the assistants were all English-speaking, they got our orders muddled, didn’t seem to hear what we were saying and in generally were surprisingly obtuse. Ordering in McDonald’s shouldn’t be that difficult: they have a kind of universal language, and you find the order boards are the same wherever you go around the EU.

I said in my last post that we’d been to Cambridge. Apparently Sir Humphrey Cripps, the man who built up the Pianoforte Supplies company in Roade was an honorary Fellow there. He was ‘the greatest single benefactor the College has had since its foundation over 500 years ago.’

And finally, Buckley’s Canadiol Mixture gets yet another mention in HitTail. I haven’t had to use it yet for the cold I’ve got at the moment, but just the mention of it brings to my senses that wonderful aromatic and throat-burning mixture.

Back to London again

We travelled to London today, partly to box up the extra stuff we’re sending home separately, and partly to catch up with one or two people (and London itself) who we won’t see again for a while. And thirdly, to check out with Korean Air as to whether we could alter the dates for our return. We’ve decided we want to come back a bit sooner. Korean Air was very helpful, and will do the alteration for free! So we’re going to leave England on the 26th November, rather than the 2nd of December.
Korean Air is situated in Piccadilly, so after we’d been there we wandered back along the street looking at the shops, including one extraordinary place (called Andy and Tuly) that supposedly sells waistcoats primarily, but had nothing but cufflinks in its windows, hundreds of pairs of them. And all of them priced over the £100.
Crown Relocation, who are sending our extra stuff home, couldn’t have been more helpful. They provided everything, were very pleasant with it, and best of all: we managed to get everything we’d taken with us into the two boxes.
We’re staying in a rather unusual accommodation: it’s over a Café in North West London - South Ruislip, to be exact. The café obviously caters for drivers and other blue collar workers and its food is good old-down-to earth English; the room we have isn’t the best we’ve had (!) but for three days it’ll be okay. The leg of one of the beds ’broke’ when a certain wife sat on the bed after we arrived, but the leg has obviously been broken for a while. I told the owner, and he feigned surprise - I say, ’feigned’ but it may have been genuine. The room has a tv, fridge, microwave and a kettle - the latter item is something that’s always been missing from European hotel rooms.
I drove all the way into Ruislip today - a first. I haven’t driven in London at all before. It certainly wasn’t as bad as the previous two times we came when we got stuck in long traffic jams and the brakes heated up and failed.
The Indian community is apparently celebrating Diwali - or else there are a lot of people using up unused fireworks out there. One enthusiastic lot let a whole pile off while we were standing at the South Ruislip station this afternoon - it was a bit pointless since none of the lights could be seen. However, there was a much more timely display later on, when it was dark, while we were sitting in a café in Shepherds Bush having milkshakes (with NZ icecream in them).
We had a meal in the West End, at a some sort of noodle house in the Haymarket. The food was great: I had a chicken satay and Celia a large noodle soup with chicken. This was after we’d spent some time exploring the five storeys of Waterhouse’s - good grief. Too many books, but I finished up buying one on Alfred Hitchcock and his movies anyway, by Patrick McGilligan.
Then we got the bus back to Shepherd’s Bush, pointing out well-known places as we passed them, checking out the Christmas lights in some of the major shops (Fortnum and Mason’s is celebrating its tricentenary and have done the Twelve Days of Christmas as their window display. Hugely detailed and wonderful conceived.
We also stumbled on the Orlando Chamber Choir rehearsing for their performance tonight of Handel’s Jephtha. It was a bit bitzy, as you’d expect, but worth sitting in on all the same.

Home to Attleborough

Long day yesterday, all focused on travel. We could have quite happily have got on a plane back to New Zealand, but we still have a month to go in England before we go home. That’s okay, we have all these friendly relatives here who look after us, so we can’t complain!

The plane didn’t go till 16.20 so we had quite a lot of time to fill in. The trouble with travel days is that you tend to do little else except wait around: so we had a coffee and coke in a café around the corner from our apartment, moved up the road and read for a while under a willow, moved further up the road and caught the tram, transferred to the Metro which conveniently took us all the way to the airport, sat around in the airport reading, had more coffee (our own from the famous flask this time), read more, eventually stood in the queue to get on the plane (I stood in the queue – Celia sat and read), sat and read some more, had more coffee, stood in the melee to get on the plane, got on the plane, read on the plane, snoozed on the plane, got off the plane, got on the bus and finally got home. Exciting.

The biggest bonus of the day was that we already had our ticket booked for the National Express and there was no problem getting back with them, and they got us here a quarter of an hour earlier.

The other unusual thing was getting to Stansted and finding that all the passengers, having disembarked from the plane, then got on the airport tram and were shot off to the arrival lounge, which must have been a kilometre or more away. Stansted is huge.

A bit of a rethink

We’d thought that Celia’s foot had reverted to her old problem from a couple of years ago, but we’re now wondering if it’s not a reaction to when she was walking across the Cathedral Square (which is just a couple of blocks from our apartment) and missed seeing a step down at one point. She jarred herself badly and it may be that her foot is reacting to the mishap. In a way that would be better than if the heel thing had started up again. In a way.
Anyway, it’s caused up to rethink our options, and so it may be a good thing that we couldn’t book Madrid to Paris yesterday. We’ve decided to go back to England the day after Valencia week rather than heading up into France. Our concern was that with her foot being so sore to walk on, another series of walks with the full rucksack wouldn’t help things to heal. So we got on the Net this morning and rearranged our flight. It cost us a bit more, but it’s better that she gets ‘home’ to Attleborough as soon as practical, where at least she may be able to talk to a doctor who understands English.
Unfortunately it means we might not be making the fullest use of our Eurail Pass, but again, her health comes before that as a consideration. Our ‘landlord’ here in Valencia has kindly said we can go to another one of his apartments for the extra day at the same price as we’re paying here. It’s only five minutes away, so it shouldn’t be too much of a shift!

Getting Lost in Barcelona

Our intention today was to go and see the Picasso Museum. Unfortunately a couple of days ago we lost the index booklet that went with our map, and so it proved to be a bit of an issue trying to find the street. Finally I saw on the map that Montcada was served by a Metro station and a bus. But when we got to the Metro station itself there was no sign of Montcada. So we deduced that the bus 96 must take us to it. Twenty minutes later we arrived at a outskirts suburb called Montcada. Celia didn´t want to get off there as it looked as though we might be in the middle of nowhere. And there was no sign of any museum - she said it was unlikely that it would be way out there anyway.
So in the end we gave up on Picasso.
We came back into La Rambla via the Metro planning on walking quietly along the seafront. However, I needed a loo (what´s new?) and there was a boat sitting there waiting to go for a tour round the harbour and beach.....
So on we got, into the loo I went, and we spent an hour and a half on the sea. It was very pleasant actually, although the water was quite rough outside the harbour basin (one woman was sick on the way back). Anyway, we saw Barcelona from the water....
When we got back to shore, we decided to have a cuppa from our faithful flask (the one we bought in Hamburg after our English one broke only a couple of weeks after we bought it. And because we weren´t sure where the train station is in Barcelona, we decided to have a recce and find it, so as to save ourselves hassle tomorrow, when we leave for Valencia.
It was just as well we did. The station at Arc de Triomphe (sorry, can´t remember how the Spaniards spell it) someone had told us served the trains doesn´t. There´s only a very large bus station there. We got back on the Metro and headed for the station called Espana, where the real train station is.
After getting on a suburban train instead of the Metro, and going three or so long stops before we realised something was drastically wrong (none of the stations were named on our Metro map), we got off and went back to where we started - almost. We were able to save one train stop by getting out a stop early. Eventually we found the Metro to Espana only to arrive there and be told that the train is kaput (as one non-English-speaking official told us). It turns out that the line is ´broken´ as another official charmingly put it, and we could either get a bus from Espana to Sants Estacio or get the Metro to it.
I´d read something to this effect in the Metro newspaper, one of the freebie papers that turn up on the underground, but hadn´t quite been able to figure out from the Spanish when the train was going to be kaput. I´m still not sure how long, but hopefully, when we go to Sants Estacio tomorrow, we´ll be able to get the mainline train to Valencia without difficulty. If not, we´re in trouble!

On language

12th Oct, 2007 again..

The language situation in Luxembourg was intriguing, you might remember. It‘s equally so in Switzerland, where German, French and Romany all exist - as well as Swiss German. The latter is their ‘native‘ language, but is so different in pronunciation from German itself that I found it impossible to recognise words when people were speaking. And yet they read and write ‘High’ German as their language, because it‘s the common denominator. Very confusing. Swiss German is even more gutteral than ordinary German, which sounds relatively soft by comparison. Celia reckons if she goes along making gggghhhh noises with her throat, she’s doing a pretty good version of the language.
She’s also discovered that the word, Migros, means supermarket in Swiss - it’s obviously a brand name but it helps to know what sort of shop it is. In some Migros stores there is a great range, but in the one we went to the other night on the way home from Thun, we went round and round struggling to find any sauces to use with the chicken we were going to buy. In the end we bought yet another couple of packets of Pelican filets - I don’t know they were filets of, apart from being fish (and they certainly weren’t Pelican; that’s the brand name) - which we’d already tried before and found quite tasty, if a bit salty and buttery. But to buy fruit and veges in this particular store you had to sort out the price ticket yourself, which meant getting the number from above the item you were buying, taking the goods to a weighing machine, pressing the number on the screen and waiting for a ticket. We’d already got to the check-out before we discovered this and had four items needing prices, which flustered the woman at the counter not a little. Rather too much in the way of self-service, to my way of thinking. Though in England, in some of the big stores like Asda and Sainsbury’s, you can check out all your items yourself. It takes a bit of getting used to, but it’s quite fun in the end.

Travel writing in abeyance

Sadly, I can't get online to upload my notes about the trip at the moment. As I've explained in an email to some people, the mobile connect has gone AWOL - we've tried all sorts of things, like uninstalling it and so forth, but it's just not wanting to work. This means I'm having to rely on Internet cafes\shops, and though they're not expensive, it's not so easy to get things uploaded.
We went to the Vodafone shop in Corso Buenos Aires yesterday, but the young man in there refused point blank to help us. He belongs to Vodafone Europe - we belong to Vodafone UK. And trying to ring Vodafone UK from here doesn't work at all. We get a lovely Italian lady telling us something at great length, and then the usual English woman saying we appear to have dialled a number that doesn't exist.
Anyway, I've written up lots of notes and have them on my computer. If we have time I'll come in and put them on here. If not, know that we are still doing things! (In Florence, at present.)
PS Everything on Google is in Italian. Makes a change from German.

Never mind the quality....

The room we had in Köln was lovely: light and airy, with those European windows that open by leaning into the room to let in some air, or which can be opened fully as NZ windows are with a switch of the handle. Plus there was a desk, a chair, two bedside tables, bedside lamps, curtains, a rubbish bin, and a wardrobe. It had a toilet and shower en suite. Note these things.
Even better, breakfast was a buffet, with a wide range of Continental and English options. Note this too.
For this hotel we paid 130 euros for two nights. That’s on the cheaper to middle range for b&bs.
Today we arrived in Heidelberg and found our hotel. Except it wasn’t our hotel. We’re being billeted in another building five minutes walk away. We’re on the second floor, and we’re paying exactly the same amount of money as we paid in Heidelberg. The only difference is that this is classed as a hostel, not a hotel.
The only difference in terms of nomenclature, that is. The difference in quality is astonishing. Our bedroom has no curtains, no desk, no chair, no rubbish bin, no lamps, no bedside tables, no wardrobe. It does have a hat stand. And nine power points. And a slightly sloping floor. For breakfast we will receive one hot drink and a croissant. Whoopee. The toilet is shared with three other rooms on this floor, as is the bathroom - which admittedly has a bath as well as a shower, and is very large. There is also a towel in there, the only one provided on the whole floor.
Celia isn’t feeling well, having got a cold overnight, so she isn’t terribly excited about this place. Certainly it’s in the middle of the Altstadt - the Old Town - the area Heidelberg is probably most famous for, but that doesn’t quite compensate for the minimalist approach to hotel rooms.
On top of that we had a bit of fun with the train this morning. We’d booked from Köln to Heidelberg, which should have taken about three hours. The train was a bit late - an unusual occurrence in Germany, I gather - and it somehow got later as it went along. In the end, as we were heading toward Mannheim, (known only to me because of Mozart’s links with it) an announcement was made in German telling us that the train wouldn’t be stopping at Heidelberg, because it was running late!
Fortunately, the German lady in our compartment picked this up on our behalf and went in search of the guard. He told her we needed to get off at Mannheim and take the train back to Heidelberg. Seems that Heidelberg would be sidestepped completely. So we got off the train at Mannheim, found platform neun and hopped on the Heidelberg train, which was a local one with not much room and a short fat girl going round asking anyone who was eating anything if they would give it to her. Still, our faithful Eurail Pass was perfectly acceptable to the guard and we arrived at Heidelberg a bit late, but none the worse for wear.
From there we had to get a number 33 bus to the Platz just down from where the hotel was (or was supposed to be). The driver must have forgotten to take his happy pills this morning, as he seemed to be all over the show, and since both of us had our backpacks on we were struggling to keep upright.
But here we are, Celia’s asleep, I’ve walked across one bridge over the Rhein and back across another, the day is lovely, the mobile connect is working perfectly and things could be far worse!


In the photo you can see one of the bridges I walked across - and in the background is Heidelberg's castle.

A few notes

When we were flying into Germany we could see several wind farms. From the air they looked like crosses in a military cemetery.
I forgot to mention yesterday that Johannes Brahms, the composer, has great links with Hamburg. He’s one of Hamburg’s beloved sons. And alongside the dedication to him in St Michael’s Church is one to Teleman and another to Carl Philip Emmanuel Bach, both of whom were Music Directors there.
Tagging - the art of painting on walls alongside railway lines, must be an international thing: there was mile after mile of tagging between Hamburg and Köln, today.
And tv advertising in Germany is just as silly as it is in England - or NZ.

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.

Sleeping Policemen

Keep meaning to mention Sleeping Policemen. We just call them something subtle like judder bars at home, but in England this phrase is a reference to those annoying humps in suburban roads which are meant to stop people hooning down the street.

York, Day Two

We spent a second night at the camp site near Acaster Malbis last night and a nasty cold night it was too. With rain.
(Before I forget I came across two more peculiar village names today, both within spitting distance of York and of each other: Askham Bryan, and Askham Richard. I kid you not!)
Fortunately the pub is only a few yards down the road, so we stayed there both last night and the night before until about 9.30. It was warmer than inside the tent.
Both of us had a dose of homesickness last night, and debated whether we should change our air tickets and fly home on the next available plane. Hang the expense, we said.
Came to our senses, but it took a bit of time.
This morning we were going to head south again, still trying to get to the elusive other village of Crowle (and Mamble) but two or three cellphone calls to places south didn’t encourage us much (one was actually closed, in spite of being listed as open all year around), and Celia’s tooth was playing up again, and she finally got an appointment for 4.30 this afternoon, so that kind of put the kibosh on going anywhere today.
Plus our nephew rang and said he was coming to York tomorrow, and would we like him to take anything excess back home with him? Would we! It’ll be nice to meet a familiar face: think that’s part of our homesickness. I keep saying to Celia that I want to meet somebody, anybody that I know from home. But we haven’t so far, which I’ve found disappointing. It’s not as though such a thing is an impossibility: last time I was in England, on the second day, I met someone I knew, in London. And when Celia was over here, twenty-plus years ago, with our daughter, there was a similar occurrence, one that was even more amazing. My daughter went out with some of her English relatives, to Milton Keynes, and they met my cousin from New Zealand…

Place Names

Anyone who likes a bit of nonsense can check out a short piece I wrote on place names in England called Ten Places in Great Britain You Might Not Want to Move To.
It appears on the Quazen site in something called Trifter.com. (Quazen has developed a policy of putting the articles people write on a variety of sites, instead of all on one main one. Not sure whether it’s ideal, particularly when I have no idea what Trifter means, but it seems to collect all the articles on travel together.)

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.

Going back in time 2

Yesterday we spent a good deal of the afternoon at a wedding reception with a difference. Firstly, the actual wedding had taken place back in July - we’d babysat the house for the couple while they went on their honeymoon. Secondly, there were six wedding cakes. The bride had asked certain people to make a cake specially for the reception, and so each cake was quite different, and at least two of them were more like children’s birthday cakes. One of these had a little car and trailer on it, and the other was a large teddy-bear shaped cake with scrumptious soft icing.
And then the reception took place at a pub in what I would call the middle of nowhere. It turned out to be about a mile away from the main village of Whepstead, and had no other buildings anywhere near. It’s a lovely old building, in good condition, large enough for a few guests, but really what we would call in NZ: out in the wop wops.
Still, the day was hot (the English can no longer complain that they’re not getting a summer - today is too hot to go outside); the bride left some water pistols for the children to play with after lunch, and it was two adults (my wife and a lady vicar) who started the ball rolling. At different times in the day some people got completely soaked. In fact, the vicar poured a glass of water down her brother’s back late in the afternoon, something he took with surprising equanimity. I suppose he thought retaliating on a woman wasn’t the done thing, let alone a female vicar. More fool him.