Category Archives: UK

family, UK

Somerset & Bath

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It was great to pick Mum up from Heathrow much too early on a Saturday morning a week and a half ago. Even if that did mean driving through London well too early on a weekend – not that days of the week have too much meaning to me at the moment. We continued west towards Somerset, ducking off when the M4 was closed & wandering around a pleasant little Wiltshire village, lunching & then trying our luck again on the roads. The direct route west through Bath was too snarled up, so it was north back to the motorways. Eventually we were at Mum’s cousins’ (Gary & Joan) place, where I promptly left her to get over the jetlag (which apparently never eventuated) to go down & visit John & Anna (who I met years ago biking in Rotorua) & their young twin daughters. Esther & Lydia sure have grown since I was in Canada. My shoulder dictated that this was my first visit to Taunton without a bike; even so I enjoyed just hanging out as we watched the girls, shared travels stories and looked over my photos from North America.

Back up at Burnham-on-Sea Mum & I spent a relaxing few days trying to avoid getting painted when we walked through the hallway, moseying around various quaint villages (I didn’t get any cheese in Cheddar – “Not much call for it? It’s the single most popular cheese in the world!“, visiting various family & friends, frequenting charming centuries old pubs. I even managed an interview in Bristol on the Tuesday for a job I wasn’t particularly keen on – it was a mercifully short interview. I was delighted to have the new Jack Reacher novel arrive on my Kindle mid-week – a good look as to how Reacher came to be drifting around the States “solving” various problems with usually staggering amounts of violence.

Highlight of the week was getting to Bath finally – a place that I’ve skirted around on the motorway numerous times & never quite had the time to pop in & visit. Unfortunately it ended up being a rather rushed visit, but I got to see the main things I wanted to. That Wednesday was the start of a purple patch of weather – five sunny calm days in a row with the mercury getting up in the high-20s each day. A very pleasant surprise as the days get shorter heading in to October. Consequently, there were plenty of people out & about in Bath (I imagine there usually are – except on the bleakest of days) & we briefly wandered through town towards the Abbey & the Roman Baths.

The Celts first had a temple here around the geothermally heated spring & the Romans built up a temple & the baths here in the first century AD. Those first baths were eventually lost after the Romans left Britain, but much of their complex has been revealed & is part of the facility today. Most of the current buildings & statues date from the 1800s. The audio-tour is very informative & it’s always nice wandering around old architecture & engineering. The various artefact displays & reconstruction of some of the Roman temple were very well done too.

The main drain – nice algae too

There was just enough time to enjoy the late afternoon sun & walk up to see some of Bath’s famous Georgian architecture. The Royal Crescent is particularly impressive – as you would expect a Grade I listed building to be.  With a huge green lawn in front of the crescent, it’s a wonderful setting for the arc of facade that was finished in the 1770s.  I found it interesting that the architect (John Wood the Younger) designed & built the facade only.  This meant that people bought their own section of the front & then had their own architect design the house behind.  At the front this shows up with many different styles of windows & doors, while at the back there is a real hodge-podge of building styles & sizes.

The week rounded out with Mum & I driving down to Dorset to see another cousin (Pamela – Gary’s sister – who I’d last seen when I was four, apparently I’ve grown a bit). All the driving on A-roads was just tedious – so busy & small. After a week of driving through various parts of England on tiny roads in an under-powered rental, I was really missing driving my Outback around the big empty wide roads of North America. There was a much longer & better job interview on Friday near Southampton before we got back to London. The weekend of great weather was mostly spent with Mum organising herself for university, more meals with family & eventually taking Mum up to Colchester & moving all her belongings in to her flat on campus. It’s a little odd taking your mother to university.

around home, shoulder, UK

Now, where’s my pistol?

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More of the same – arm in sling, no riding, reasonable fall weather & trying to find a job. Tuesday was the day for my appointment at the Fracture clinic – I managed to show the registrar that I have reasonable movement in my arm. He then demonstrated that he could make it click & almost come out again quite easily. So I’ve got an MRI in a couple of weeks, followed by another appointment with the registrar. I suppose that, & the explanation he gave me of recurrent shoulder dislocations, means surgery may be a possibility. An idea I wasn’t particularly keen on, but if that would make my shoulder more stable I could be persuaded – especially as it hasn’t recovered so well this time. Today I was back at the hospital picking up another sling. This one is over the top compared to all I’ve had before (so it should be, retailing at £120) – with a strap around my belly it uses a metal plate to rotate my arm out. There’s a grip in the front of the sling to hold on to – with my arm straight out in front of me & my fingers wrapped around the grip I feel that I’m shooting from the hip, alas a six-shooter doesn’t come with the sling. It looks kind of goofy, but the shoulder joint is supposed to heal better rotated externally – or so some research says (of course, it’s easy enough to discover contradictory findings). It also proves difficult to take a webcam photo of oneself while wearing it.

Thankfully, I don’t have to wear it all the time as there’s a bit going on this week. Mum arrives early tomorrow morning – it’ll be great to see her – & we are heading west to stay with some cousins of hers (ours, I suppose) for a few days south of Bristol. I’m also looking forward to going down to see John, Anna & their young twins while Mum recovers from the flights – pity that there’ll be no big (or small) ride with John. It’s worked out well has I have two (possibly three) interviews in that part of the world next week. It was neat to catch up yesterday with Roger, a riding buddy from NZ is over this side of the world for a couple of months having ridden in the World Singlespeed Champs in Ireland a few weeks ago. I met him & Michelle at St Pancras a couple of hours before they were due to get the train to Paris – I was mildly jealous, it’s two year to the week since I made the same trip & loved every minute of it. After they left I enjoyed wandering in the sun down to Charing Cross checking out the British Library, the British Museum & stopping in nice sunny parks to read for a while.

Unexpected delight of the week was chewing through both series of Rizzoli & Isles (I have too much free time) – a TV show based on a series of books I read when I was back in NZ. While a gritty cop show, it’s pretty funny too & I was surprised to see how much one of the leads reminds me of a good friend back home. The subtle east-coast accent, intelligent professional, fashion enthusiast, loves to cook elaborate meals & a home stylishly decorated with everything just-so. Mind you, pathology & academia are quite different careers.

around home, engineering, history, London, UK

Crossness Pumping Station

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One of the few places in London that I really wanted to go to the last time I was here & didn’t get the opportunity to was the Crossness Beam Engines. As this great example of Victorian engineering is still undergoing extensive restoration work, there are very few days this year that one can go & visit & see an engine in operation. But today, as part of Open London (an annual weekend when a lot of London’s great architecture that is usually off limits to the public is opened up) the complex was open & welcoming visitors. What a lot of visitors there were – we queued patiently for about an hour just to get in. Who would have thought so many people would turn up to the site on the side of a huge sewage works in south-east London?

A brief history lesson – in the early half of the nineteenth century, rapidly expanding & industrialising London did not have a central sewage system & almost all waste from over 200000 cesspits was discharged into the Thames (“dump her in the Thames?”) system. Unfortunately, the Thames at high tide (it really is surprising just how far the tide flows up the river – well out west) had a habit of returning that sewage to where it came from. Even worse, the Thames was still the main supply of water to the city! Outbreaks of cholera & typhoid were, in hindsight, hardly surprising. Eventually, mid-century, a plan was devised & put in to action to deal with the problem. Basically, a two sewerage systems independent of each other were built on either side of the river. These used gravity to move all of the sewerage to the east of the city, where it was then discharged to the Thames. In the last four years of the 1850s, over eighty miles of brick intercepting sewers were built (using 318 million bricks!) & this is also the reason we have the Victoria & Albert Embankments today.

But the problem of preventing the sewage coming back into the city on the tide still had to be overcome. This is where the pumping stations came in – one at Crossness (south) & the other at Abbey Mills (north) were used to pump the sewage up to large reservoirs. From the reservoirs, the sewage was released on the outgoing tide. There was no treatment initially, later settling ponds were introduced & the solids were shipped out to sea & dumped there. The pumping station at Crossness had twelve boilers powering four large rotative beam engines. Each engine had two pumps attached to the beam & at peak they could move over 500 tonnes of sewage a minute. That was after a retrofit, changing the engines from single-cylinder to triple-expansion (high, intermediate & low pressure cylinders). The engines were superseded by diesel & eventually left to decay & vandalism for thirty years from the mid 1950s. I’m sure the restorers are also stoked that someone had the foresight to fill the engine area up with sand to prevent methane accumulating – they’ve had to remove a hundred tonnes just to restore the first engine.

Being built by the Victorians, the building & fittings are fantastic. But the real star is the fully restored Prince Consort engine operating under steam. The flywheel is almost nine metres in diameter & has a mass of over fifty tonnes. The beam is almost fourteen metres long & forty-seven tonnes heavy. It was surprisingly quiet as all the valves opened & closed in time to drive that massive beam up & down. It was well worth the wait to get in as one could wander around at leisure poking around not only the restored Prince Consort, but Victoria (which they are starting to restore now) & the still derelict Albert Edward & Alexandra engines. All the volunteers were friendly, knowledge & some were in period dress which added to the old time feel of the place. It was a great few hours out & I particularly enjoyed marvelling at the feat of engineering from 150 years ago & seeing the Prince Consort engine all painted up & effortlessly gliding through its cycle.

Engine house at rear, boiler house in foreground

The brickwork was exceptional all the way around

The Prince Consort’s flywheel – note the trimming on the guard rail

Looking up to the Prince Consort’s beam – flywheel connecting rod in front of pump connecting rods

Counter beam on left, top of the low & intermediate cylinders

End of the main beam looking down on top of drive cylinders

More superb Victorian detailing

Unrestored beams

Just in case there’s anyone left wondering how this thing worked

Just in case there’s anyone left wondering how this thing worked

The rest of my photos from the visit are here. I left wishing I didn’t have a gammy shoulder & was staying around here a bit longer so that I might volunteer a bit – a fantastic historical project all round.

around home, family, London, UK

Shooters Hill & Dulwich Picture Gallery

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Eager to get out of the house while it was sunny, albeit still windy, on Sunday Trish & I went & picked up Nora (my great-aunt & Trish’s mother) for a small outing. We didn’t really intend to, but somehow we ended up at Shooters Hill. One of the highest points in London (not really saying much) there are good views south across the field. We spent a bit of time wandering through the 8000 year old wood dodging the acorns being blown from the trees above us. Nora did surprisingly well with the (very modest) amount of walking & I was glad to go somewhere I hadn’t been yet.

Having an arm in a sling is as tedious as usual, but with Trish repaying all I did when she was recovering from her broken ankle I shall be able to keep my arm immobilised longer than usual this time. With Saturday’s trauma I’ve been pretty tired & have spent well too much time watching my favourite Canadian cop drama – Rookie Blue. That title is only bestowed on it due to the small sample-size; Corner Gas being the only other Canadian show I ever watched regularly. But now I’m all caught up to the end of the second series & struggling to fill the time – maybe I just wanted to hear the accent again, even though Canadian seems normal & unaccented to me, for now. Well, I’m still looking for work but that just consists of more time on the internet & looking at vacancies that I’m not quite qualified for or that just sound boring. I should go & see the Vocation Guidance Counsellor – but I don’t even have the right hat for that. We’re slowly starting the redecoration of the middle room, but chipping paint off an old fireplace is slow at best using my left hand.

Yesterday was Trish’s birthday so we took a little outing to the Dulwich Picture Gallery – another place I didn’t get to last time I was here. Famous for being one of Sir John Soane’s designs & the first purpose-built art gallery open to the public in England, the collection is small compared to some of the larger galleries around but very impressive in its content. There are numerous Gainsboroughs, Rembrants, Rubens, van Dycks, Reynolds & a couple each from Canaletto & Hogarth – and many more besides. I think my favourites were those by Gainsborough. With the skylights there is plenty of light streaming in – I recommend visiting on an overcast day. The glare on the higher positioned paintings was too much & had me wandering around in random directions just to try & get a decent view of many pieces.

We had a short stroll around Dulwich Park, which has recently been returned to its original Victorian layout. It is very nice with big open spaces bordered by big old trees – we didn’t even get attacked by any geese or swans. Avoiding the random toll-gate in the middle of suburbia, we tiki-toured home; I suppose if your school is almost four-hundred years old you’re quite welcome to put a toll on these new-fangled automobiles. Over a very pleasant & large dinner out I was regaled with very interesting stories of Trish’s seven years travelling & working in Australia.