God is Good!

Yesterday we travelled down from Cambridgeshire to London. We made a long stop on the way at a National Trust house, which I’ll write about in another post.
Our trip into London was both what we expected and more than we expected. We haven’t really driven in the capital much, apart from our trip to Rochester, and this time we were actually having to go through areas that were very built-up and traffic-heavy. So it was stop-start, brake-accelerate, in and out of first and second gear (we could well do with an automatic) and in general rather stressful (though to give me a modicum of credit, I kept my cool - and I wasn’t even driving!)
The trip took far longer than our poor little Sat Nav had estimated at the beginning, because there were so many blockages and hold-ups (a normal London day, it seems). In the end, we were about five to ten minutes from our destination when Celia suddenly yelled that the brake had given up the ghost (well, she communicated that without words almost), grabbed the handbrake and we swerved to the side of the road. Fortunately we weren’t going fast, so it wasn’t a completely awful moment. We held fire for about ten minutes, while I suggested that perhaps with all the braking we’d been doing the brakes had overheated and given up temporarily. Celia gave things another go, tentatively, when we thought it might be safe, but they were still kaput.
Frazzlement.
We looked up the number of the AA on the Net: our little mobile connect friend was working wonderfully at full speed, as has done so everywhere in London. There was a number to ring for mobile phones, so we tried that. After some discussion as to who we were and why we should be ringing them, we were informed that there was no reciprocal agreement between the UK and NZ, as we’d been informed, and that just to get someone to come out would cost us £99! To join, according to the friendly lady, would cost even more. Meanwhile Celia was looking at the AA page on the Net where there was no indication that the price was anything like that. In the end we said we’d think about it.
By this time I was needing to go to the loo rather desperately (it’s one of the hazards of travelling) and because I’d seen a boy talking to the a man in the house we were parked outside, and because the bloke had seemed friendly enough, I thought I’d try and see if he’d let me use his toilet.
He was extremely friendly, and when I’d done my bit, he asked what the problem was with our car. I explained. He said, just give me a minute to get the kids in bed, and I’ll come and see if I can do anything. While we waited he must talked to his wife because she appeared and suggested we come in and have a cup of tea and that she was just ringing her Bank who covered her family for roadside mishaps to see if they would help us.
Amazingly that was fine: as long as she was with us when the RAC driver arrived, we’d be covered. Isn’t that extraordinary? We sat in the couple’s front room and talked about who they were and who we were (he’s a publisher of little children’s books - Little Tiger Press) and apart from the fact that we were still feeling rather frazzled by the incident, it couldn’t have been a more pleasant experience. (We’d called to the place we were going to, to tell them we might be running late - and they rang back suggesting a similar approach to the problem!)
But the two virtual strangers were like a couple of angels sent from heaven. Bless ‘em, as they say a lot over here.
Anyway the RAC man arrived, and of course the brakes were fine. No oil on the road, no obvious problems except that the brake fluid was hot. He recommended we get the car to a garage in the morning and have the fluid flushed and changed. And then followed us all the way to where we were staying for the night to make sure we got there safely. And we got there at the time we were supposed to!
This morning we went to the garage our overnight hosts recommended and they did the job within an hour! We thought we might be looking at a matter of days. Since then, we’ve driven twice through London traffic with the same stop-start issues, and the brakes have held.
Good old God.

Rochester and Braintree

Our trip back from Rochester took all day, but that was okay as we were just wanting to meander. We’d stayed at a Youth Hostel at Gillingham overnight - it was fine, a bit expensive, I thought, and very noisy (not helped by a baby who woke up several times during the night screaming, Mummy!)
We began our meandering by going back into Rochester again. Just a few hundred yards away from where we’d had the party the day before (at the Quaker Hall) we went into Rochester Cathedral. It’s a smaller Cathedral than Norwich, for example, but it has a more welcoming feel as a result. Not only that there was a choir there practicing for Matins, which was at 9.45. So we sat listening to the wonderful music in excellent acoustics, and then joined in Matins by sitting in the choir stalls themselves, just a few feet along from the singers. Apparently they were an ad hoc group. Celia had met one of them the night before at the Hostel, and she told us that they used to sing together in Southampton years ago, but because they’d all gone their various ways they only got together like this once a year or so, and this year they were spending a week singing in Rochester. Fortunately for us!
The cathedral also had an exhibition by Robert Koening in situ. It consists of a large group of figures all carved from lime trees - the trees had all grown in the area near where his family had come from, in Poland. The twenty or thirty figures, men and women, stand all facing one way with pain and hope on their faces. Their clothing is painting in simple colours, though the bumps and bruises caused by the sculpture’s travelling around Europe and England have knocked some of the colour away. There were four other smaller figures, done in greater detail.
We then went on to have a brief look at the Castle, which is literally just across the road. We didn’t go inside the building itself, as it cost more than we felt was justified at the moment, but the castle is still fairly intact given its age.
Set our Sat Nav to go and find the couple who had held the party the day before, to see them once more before we go. They have a house that by NZ standards is very narrow - one room across, and three deep, with presumably a similar arrangement upstairs - and it’s set in a street of similar houses. Still, its value has more than doubled since they bought it, so that’s a plus.
Onto Braintree, where Celia’s niece and her family live. She was surprised we found the place so easily, but Malvina had taken us there fairly straightforwardly. She was in the middle of finishing of an assignment for some higher degree she’s doing, so we didn’t stay too long. We may go back there when we head off to Luxembourg next month. (We’d had a bit of a panic about our possible European travels, wondering whether we needed visas or not, but after some calls today found that any places we’re likely to go to we don’t need them.

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!