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.

Potter Heigham

Yesterday we went to Potter Heigham, which is famous for two things. Firstly, it’s on the Norfolk Broads, so that makes it special to Celia, and secondly, there’s a bridge over the River Thurne at Potter Heigham beside which Celia fell in the water when she was a schoolgirl. (We have a photo of this bridge, but on the laptop, and I can’t upload from there at the moment. However, the link I've just given has a very good picture of the bridge on it.)

Why did she fall in the water? She was on a week’s boating experience with her school, and when you get to the bridge at PH (there are now two of them, in fact) you have to lower the mast on your boat because the bridge isn’t very high above the water. In lowering her mast she knocked herself into the water. Historic.

Potter Heigham isn’t pronounced Potter Heigham, by the way. Try something along the lines of Potterhyam? I put the question mark there because Celia always gives it a kind of upward lift at the end of the word.

It was packed with people having a day out yesterday, (although not so much as Wroxham, which is further along the road). We went for a walk along the bank of the particular arm of the Broads that comes into the village, and walked, and walked – and walked. Our intention was eventually to cross a bridge and walk back on the other side, but the bridge proved to be over yet another arm of the Broads, and there was a considerable body of water between us and the other bank, so we didn’t try to cross it. In the distance we could see the boats sailing through what appeared to be fields, with cows munching away. It’s an odd visual thing because it’s only as you get up close to some of the waterways that you can see they’re there. If it wasn’t for the boats on them you wouldn’t realize they existed.

Our long walk took us past a now disused (and dis-sailed) windmill, one of about half a dozen in the vicinity, past the backs of dozens of little holiday houses (virtually cribs or baches as we’d call them at home) parked right on the bank of the water, past marshes and smelling ditches where the water had become green and stagnant, past odours whose origins we didn’t want to think about, past brambles and stinging nettles and reeds and, best of all, wild blackberries. Which were ready to pick and exceptionally delicious. One of my great regrets in New Zealand is that the blackberry is considered noxious; here it grows where it pleases and passersby can pick as they please.

Most of the holiday homes were for rent, I presume, or were owned by people who came year after year. One of them was up for sale: £120,000 was the asking price. £120,000! The building was in a pleasant spot, but it was also run-down, and would need repairs to the walls, the roof, and probably things we couldn't see. The notice on the window did admit it needed a bit of a sorting out. That didn't apparently stop them asking what seems to me to be a phenomenal amount of money for what would be a crib back home.