Selling the car

Over the last few days we’ve had a bit of concern about being able to sell our car. We’ve put ads in the windows of the car and sat it outside the local supermarket. This was quite effective, as when I turned up to collect it (after having left it there for just under two hours) a couple was looking at it, and I was able to give them one of the signs to take with them. When Celia went back to do some shopping later she also found someone interested. However, nothing came of either of those.

I also advertised it online in the Eastern Daily Press (EDP), the big Norfolk-wide daily newspaper.

Out of this I got two calls, and as well as this my brother-in-law had an inquiry from one of the people he works with. So we were feeling as though we might get it sorted.

And we did. The second person to call, a woman from Norwich, wanted to check it out today, so we went to her home on our way back from Cromer, where we’d been staying overnight with one of Celia’s brothers and his wife. We found the house via our faithful friend, Malvina, and within half an hour the car was sold, and a deposit made on it. It’s going to be picked up on Thursday morning from Attleborough.

Hallelujah! This will also give us a bit of spare cash, as we were getting very low on funds.

Gadding about

I don’t think I’ve travelled so much in a car since I was with the Opera Quartet in New Zealand back in the 60s. Because everything you want to go to is somewhere else, as it were, and by somewhere else I mean not within walkable distance or hop in the car distance, we seem to spend a lot of time driving. Trips that in NZ would have been considered major are here just part of the day. Driving to Norwich regularly is a good twenty-five-minute trip, or driving to Birmingham yesterday was like driving from Dunedin to Timaru, except that we had to drive on three lane highways regularly at speeds of up to 120 kph. You kind of get used to it, but it isn’t my idea of fun. Fortunately we’ve bought lots of audio books at various op shops and have been listening to them to pass the time on the long hauls. I’ve even driven to Norwich and back twice by myself. Now for someone who wasn’t keen on driving in England at all when we came, that’s pretty good going.
I spent much of yesterday (Saturday) at the PodCamp in Birmingham. I’ll be writing about it in due course on another blog or two, but suffice to say for the moment it was a stimulating and unusual experience. Celia went wandering in Birmingham itself, wore herself out, joined me at the PodCamp and listened in on a conversation between a dozen or more highly articulate podcasters, and then we drove home via Coventry Cathedral. (Which was terrific, but very focused on the sombre.) Then we had to sort out stuff for coming to Luxembourg, and this morning I was up just after six, because we had to leave fairly early to get to Stansted Airport for our flight. My brother-in-law drove us to the airport, we had to wait around for something like two and a half hours, often in queues, get onto a cramped plane, fly for an hour, meet up with Stephen C, whom I haven’t seen for around 35 years, and be driven by him from Frankfurt Hahn airport to his home in Luxembourg. And then of course it was catch-up time for Stephen and his wife, and Celia and me. Celia has retired exhausted to bed at an hour almost unheard of for her (8.30 English time, 9.30 Luxembourg time) and I’m sitting in a half-darkened room trying to get down some notes about what’s been happening.

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.

A lack of verandahs

Things are still a bit quiet on the Crowl front, but we’ve now booked a flight to Hamburg for early in October, as the beginning of our European train tripping around. And we’ve booked our first piece of accommodation. Scary.
Meanwhile, today we went into Norwich intending to go to see the Roman Catholic Cathedral (which we tried to see a few days ago and couldn’t find where to park conveniently), but Celia got stuck in a department store while I went to take some books back to the Norwich library (yes, of course I have an English library card) and that was the last I saw of her for an hour and a half or more. When I say ‘stuck’ I mean she decided she could do some shopping while I wasn’t standing alongside her being annoying, so she just got on and did. The poor old Cathedral missed out on our patronage again as she was too exhausted after all the trying on of clothes to walk along Chapelfield from the main shopping area.
Never mind, we’ll get there eventually.
It was raining in a misty sort of fashion when we got into Norwich, and continued to do so while we were there. What the English cities and towns could do with are the verandahs we have in NZ, which protect shoppers from the rain - pretty much. Dripping your way around a shopping area with no cover isn’t fun.
It was raining last night too, when we went to see The Bourne Ultimatum. The Riverside complex, where the multiplex is, doesn’t have any shelter either!

Couple of quiet days

We haven’t done a great deal that’s unusual over the last couple of days. I’ve spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out how to make my bloggers more productive, income-wise, than they are at present; Celia went to Norwich with her 11-year-old great-niece, and hada ball buying clothes for our granddaughters back home; we had a family meal - a Chinese, that cost us a lot in weight-watchers points; I played cricket very badly with my great-nephew, who plays cricket very well; our Garvin Sat Nav continues to take us from A-B and in general we don’t go down the wrong road too often. Although one of the turns we’re supposed to make when coming back from Attleborough to Wicklewood is a few hundred yards beyond the one we have gone down - twice. And the wrong turning (where Malvina cries out in mock alarm: Recalculating!) takes us miles out of the way.
Attleborough (two of them) and Attlebridge and Attleton Green are the only places in the UK starting with the odd word, Attle. According to one online dictionary, the word means: Rubbish or refuse consisting of broken rock containing little or no ore. It’s a mining term. (There now, wasn’t that interesting?)
I’ve been playing the piano again, because there’s a rather-out-of-tune piano here and I can practise as I please. It’s not a piano made in the fair village of Roade by the Pianoforte Company run by Mr Cripps; nope, it’s an Eavestaff made in London, a make I must say I’ve never heard of. Last night we had a bit of a sing around the piano, working our way through some old jazz classics and some modern love songs. The others enjoyed it, even if the piano-playing and the singing were both a bit shambolic.
Just a postscript: I wonder why Buckley’s Canadiol Mixture is such a popular search term? It’s always been one of those names I’ve delighted in; compare it to the modern names for cough mixtures: Robitussin, for example. What the heck does that mean? Does it grab your emotions the way Buckley’s does?
And the ad that goes with Robitussin is awful. Mummy, if we say Bless you when someone sneezes, what do we say when someone coughs? Robitussin.
Robitussin? Good grief.
I've just discovered that Buckley's Canadiol has a rather delightful site - with an ongoing competition where you can send in a photo of your 'bad taste' face, or a story about taking sour medicine.

Checking out prices online

Just having some fun playing with the HotelReservations.com site. I began by looking at Hotel Reservations on their own. You can put in a place name and the site will skip off and find you a choice of hotels (and other facilities) within seconds. Even though USA was on the page, I put Auckland in, and it was quite happy to find Auckland, NZ. Some of the room prices were a bit out of my reach, but that’s okay - at this point I don’t actually want to stay in Auckland, even though my daughter has moved there recently, and taken her man and their two children (our grandchildren) with her.
But we have considered going on the Continent for two or three weeks, say in October, so I put Florence in as a search. I hadn’t realised there were five places called Florence in the USA, one in Alabama, one in Arizona, one in Kentucky, one in Oregon, and one in SC. It’ll come to me in a minute which state that is! Ah, South Carolina?
In spite of the wealth of US Florences, the first Florence to come up was Italy‘s, which is where I was intending to look. So that was a plus. Clever site.
The site does vacation rentals as well as hotels (and flights, cars, package deals), so I checked out NZ for that, too. Up came Auckland, Queenstown, Wellington, Christchurch. Pretty good, though again things are on the pricey side. Maybe this site doesn’t look at more economic possibilities?
Thought I might as well have a look at the flights option, as this is something we’ve been checking out quite a bit online. And it’s usually not easy. However, apart from checking which of the several London airports I wanted to fly from, it found a possible flight very quickly. Though at US$10,683.40, it might be a bit beyond our budget! I went back to check that I hadn’t put business class in the options, but the only option was economy/coach. Obviously there might be a cheaper flight available: £5,339.80 or NZ$14,621.95 for one return flight to a place that’s not that far away from here, seems just a bit over the top.
However, one interesting thing that did turn up in the flight options, was this: people 62 years old and over can obviously go for a better price. Finally my age gives me some benefits! (Actually, if I want to travel by bus from Norwich to a large number of destinations, I can go free, because of my age.)

Rochester and a party

Back into Norwich yesterday for a short visit with the aim of trying to find a travel agent who could tell us more about rail travel on the Continent. Neither of the places we went to were much on to it; seems they don’t handle rail travel a lot. So in the end we went back to the online info in the evening, and are trying to work from there.
Today we drove down to Rochester in Kent, via the M25 at one point, and the bridge at Dartford. Four lanes of traffic on our side all slowing up to pay a pound toll (see picture). The bridge is massive, a great creation slung from towering pillars. And it rises way up in the air before hitting it’s peak and coming down again. Quite impressive.
We drove to Rochester because we were attending a ‘welcome ceremony’ for a recently-adopted child. She’s near to two, and has the energy of a fireball. Her father is Cockney Indian, so there were a lot of his Indian relatives there making us welcome. Her mother had friends from the library where she used to work. And there were various other ring-ins like us (we‘re not related to the family, but my daughter in NZ is). One of the librarians used to be in the Poetry Library which is situated in the Festival Hall building on the fifth floor; she‘s now in the British Film Institute Library - just as intriguing!. The poetry library has nothing but 20th and 21st century poetry in its stock: two copies of nearly everything, one for borrowing, one for the collection. Another friend at the party was a poet, Patience Agbabi, a lovely London-born woman from a Nigerian background. We’ll have to try and track down some of her poetry; though from what I read on the Net it sounds fairly radical!

Old Norwich

Back to Norwich later this afternoon, where we finally got the Vodafone people to unlock the content control from my mobile connect. The control has meant I haven’t been able to get onto my Scrabble site - not exactly a site to worry anyone, you’d think!
The other aspect of our trip there today was that I rediscovered the Norwich I remembered - as far as I remember it at all. My impression had been of a place with narrow streets and old buildings. That’s the bit we came across today. It had been hiding further along the road than we’d explored so far. And there are some op shops there - and the SPCK bookshop. So we’ll have to go back when we have a bit more time, and find out what else it has hiding away.

Mobile Connect

Oh, the joy of technology! Not.
After continually having to find The Cloud places, and then pay seven pounds for every three hours we use (three hours gets used very quickly), and then pay for drinks every time we want to use the pub or café’s wireless, the money’s starting to mount up. Plus the sheer nuisance of trailing around finding The Cloud places.
In the end we decided to go for it and buy a mobile connect, something we’d talked about in NZ before we left, but had decided wasn’t worth the cost. With the UK Vodafone system we can get one free - that’s the upside. The downside is you’re committed to a year’s payments of twenty-five pounds a month (can’t find the symbol for the pound), and have to pay one hundred pounds up front (which is refunded after six months). Because we’re leaving in December we have to decide how we can use up the months we won’t be here for. No doubt there’ll be a relative who could make us of it!
Anyway, that was all okay. We brought the mc home and bunged it in the computer. It installed itself and everything seemed hunky-dorey, until I discovered that the internet speed was about the level of dial-up. Turns out that this particular area isn’t one of the high level spots for Vodafone’s mcs. I thought that the cellphone network supplied the mcs but it doesn’t; it’s a different system, which seems rather daft.
That wasn’t the worst: today, when we tried to use the mc, nothing would happen. Vodafone might as well have not existed as far as our little machine was concerned. Great distress amongst the Crowls, particularly since we’d had to drive into Norwich to get the mc yesterday, and it looked as though we might be up for another trip today. It’s about half an hour to Norwich - but then another number of long minutes before you can get through all the traffic.
In the end after trying the mc all over the place, and not getting any results, we went back to Norwich. While Celia parked the car, I went into the Vodafone shop and discussed the issue with a young guy called Adam (I think!) He was very helpful, and in the end was going to swap our mc for another - until he discovered they’d sold out of them. So we finished up having to go to the other Vodafone shop (this isn’t an ad for them by the way) in Castlemall. They were even more helpful, and spent a good half hour sorting out the problem. It appears it may have been a faulty mc, though I don’t think anyone was quite clear at the end. Anyway, we have a new one, and it’s working. PTL!

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.

Roade

We arrived in Roade today, after a much lengthier trip than we expected due to spending almost half an hour moving at a snail's pace in an enormous queue of traffic. The cause of the delay was an accident on one of the turn-offs - the one we wanted to go on, naturally. And while we were crawling along yet another one of the current series of thunderstorms struck, pelting hailstones down on the cars, and sending lightning streaking across the sky overhead. We didn't much enjoy driving on the A roads (they're a step down from the M roads). Even though the traffic isn't going full bore, there are usually three lanes of it, with dozens of immense trucks roaring along beside you.
I'm not sure why anyone would call a place Roade; it's a bit like calling a village Streete, or Footpath. Be that as it may, Roade is pleasant little town (it's rather more than a village, as it has at least two pubs), and I went for a walking survey of it this afternoon. After my comments about bricks everywhere in Norfolk yesterday, it was interesting to see that here in Roade they use bricks still, but much softer in colour; they're rather more sandy than red, though often red ones are mixed in with the lighter colours to produce a mottled effect. And they use flat stones (I'm not sure if it's slate) in the same way the people in Sheringham use beach stones. The town is a real mix of modern housing and old ones restored. But interestingly enough, while in Attleborough (where we've been for the last week) there's a real uniformity of design (to my eye, anyway) with lots of fairly square two-storey homes, often joined to at least one other, here in Roade, the more modern houses have a variety to them. There's the same basic brick structure, but there are interesting things done within the mold.
The Anglican church is well cared for, and has a modern hall built onto the back end. Obviously people still go to church in Roade. (Norfolk is packed with churches, with a mixture of square Norman towers and round Saxon towers. Many of them are in a bad way - having survived nearly a thousand years.) There's a street called Tithe Lane that leads down to the church - a nice reminder of one's duties! - and the usual bunch of Roads that have identical names with Closes. We're in Hyde Close, and originally went to Hyde Road (next door) where we knocked on the door of the house we thought belonged to our rellies, only to get some poor woman out of bed.
As I was walking around, I kept hearing what I thought were trains. I was right, as I discovered in due course. Running through the middle of Roade is a four-track railway system, and electric trains go speeding past with great frequency. I stood on an old stone bridge and watched them zipping their way beneath me.
I don't know how easy it's going to be for me to keep up my blogs for the next week or two: I'm having to use the laptop without any access to wireless or broadband. Still, one of the pubs is supposed to have wireless available, so I may have to sit there and type away, and drink the local ale!

Wireless, market, church, library.

Celia and I went into Norwich today, intending to have a look round the place, but also to try out our wireless laptop, which we haven’t managed to do so far. We paid for three hours of use on wireless with The Cloud before we left, but I’m not entirely sure we need it. Time will tell. Anyway, today we sat just near the market in Norwich and opened up the computer and voila! we were online. It wasn’t quite as easy as that, but it was pretty straightforward.
By the time we’d got all that sorted out, and rung one of the kids (Celia was going to Skype him, which was the idea behind the excursion with the laptop, but then realized he isn’t on Skype!) and walked from the car park and back to it within an hour, we didn’t get much else done. However, we reparked the car in an area where there were no restrictions, caught a bus back to town and walked about without the weight of the laptop or the backpack – both of which we’d brought with us on our first trip in. Sounds complicated? Yup, we seldom do anything without complication.
Anyway, the market has all been upgraded, and all the stallholders now have permanent wooden stalls, closed in above, and closeable at night with shutters and such. This means that many of them look much more professional than in the past. The secondhand bookstall, for instance, was so tidy I didn’t want to disturb the displays. Didn’t buy anything from there but did buy a copy of Dombey and Son (which I think I’ve already got at home) from an op-shop later on.
I did get a watch from one of the stalls – again, it was much more like a little shop than a market stall. The watch is very similar to the one I’ve had since Celia went to England the time before last (around twenty years ago). My old watch has suddenly come apart, which is distressing, as I’m not a person to change watches at the drop of a fashion. I’ve only ever possessed two: one I got for my 21st and the other one I just mentioned. Now that I’ve said that, it’s possible I did have another earlier one: I seem to remember a rather ugly thing I was glad to replace with my 21st birthday present.
The weather continues to be mild and often hot, and we both came home exhausted from traipsing around and not really seeming to achieve anything much. I did have a look around the library, and even joined up on the off-chance that I might borrow something from there during our stay. The library is only seven years old, with a great deal of glass, a huge covered forecourt (there was a careers display going on while we were there) and three stories high. When you look out through the glass from the inside you can see the wonderful old church of St Peter Mancroft just in front. (It’s next to the market.) The church has all these plates in the floor where either people have been buried or that are just memorial stones; I’m not sure which. It also has three marvelous series of stained-glass windows; stone heads sticking out from below the upper-level windows, and a blazing gold altar of carved statuary. Quite a place.
There isn’t a saint called Peter Mancroft, by the way. The church was originally St Peter and St Paul, but St Paul got dropped at some point and the Mancroft bit was added. It’s thought that it relates to the name of a person who owned the piece of land where the market is now situated.
The other remarkable thing about Norwich is that much of the original city wall is still standing: it wouldn’t actually keep anyone out, but it’s been there for an awful long time.