around home, family, London, UK

Crossing things off the list

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It’s been another busy couple of weeks as the weather has continued to be fantastic & warming as the days progress. With less than a month left in London, I’ve been trying to complete a few things on my London list. With the Monday before last being such a stunner I wasn’t so keen to spend the day in a museum, so I dug out the ‘Walking London’ book to see which ones I hadn’t yet done. There aren’t many in the central city left, but as there were likely to be fewer tourists around with a lack planes coming to London I hit the Westminster walk – of course most of the places I’d been to before at some time or another & there wasn’t too much new. After lunch it was out further east to Tower Hill & the Wapping to Limestone Walk – most of this one was along the river, but since the book was written many of the old warehouses that were central to trading of commodities such as spices & tea have been redeveloped in to appartments. The most interesting part of this walk was the start of Regent’s Canal – the start of the extensive canal system stretching to the north that was developed before being overtaken by railways. To round the day off, it was back towards Picadilly to try & find the Royal Institution – the organisation made famous by the work, discoveries & lectures of such famous scientists as Davy & Faraday. In the basement there is an excellent little museum detailing the work & importance of what these & other notable scientific figures did at this very place.

I’ve also been back to the RAF museum, which I had a bit more time to peruse at my own rate. The milestones of flight display was fascinating & there were some pretty good planes in the hall too. The Sopwith Camel that was missing from the WWI hall really only reminded me of playing Flight Simulator in black & white on a 386.

There were also a couple of the best WWII fighters on display – a P51& a Me109 – as well as the always appealing V/STOL Harrier.

On the way back in to town on the Northern Line I jumped off at Belsize Park to wander around Kentish Town along the same streets that my great-great-grandparents used to wander around. Of course, their houses are long gone but it was pretty neat to get a very slight idea of the area they lived in. As it was such a beautiful day, I took a short diversion onto Hampstead Heath & up Parliament Hill – where my great-grandmother used to toboggan down in the snow. There was a great view towards the City of London

& after six days of silent skies, international travel was returning to normal operation leaving plenty of vapour trails streaking across the brilliant blue.

That afternoon I met up with a family/school friend from our Papamoa days – I can’t have seen Matt for at least fifteen year, maybe almost twenty since we left Papamoa for Te Puke. Matt has just arrived in London from NZ & he was in the middle of a whirlwind of interviews, while his girlfriend has already started work. It was great to catch up on a lot of what we & our families have been doing for the last decade or so over a couple of pints. Coincidentally, Matt’s brother lives about six hours drive from where I will be in Canada – sounds like a good reason for a road-trip with a bike in the back of the car. Later that night I met (cousin) Chris at Liverpool St station – he is finally back in London with a new two-year visa – & we went for a short architectural waling tour around the St Bart’s/London Wall area of the city before wandering off to Charing Cross. En route to the station, we stopped off for a pint at the Cheshire Cat – a very old pub that was filled with lots of tiny rooms, all with their own bar in them. Dr Samuel Johnson was a regular here & there is a still a very old & large copy of the seventh edition of his dictionary on display (no works by Gertrude Perkins though) – it really was some feat that first dictionary, the pages were large & the print small & still all the definitions of ‘lay’ ran to over a page.

Chris had pointed out the London Museum at London Wall, so on Friday it was back out there after a brief but fruitless visit to the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons. Unfortunately, the second half of the museum was undergoing an extensive revamp so I was only able to get up to the Great Fire in 1666. But what I did see was very interesting – taking one through London from pre-history (when the Thames ran a very different route), the Roman occupation & development, the middle ages – very well presented with all sorts of artefacts. As I strolled around the London Wall I stumbled across a small thoroughfare across a church yard. It was a pleasant spot to have lunch & on one of the walls was many plaques detailing the efforts of certain London around about a century ago who gave their lives trying to rescue fellow Londoners. Most of the people died trying to rescue people from drowning, only to drown themselves; others died rescuing people from burning buildings, out of the paths of horses & carriages – it was quite touching. I continued my day by walking through the City & then further east to Bethnal Green, where I couldn’t quite pin down the places where another of my great-great-grandfathers lived. From Stepney Green I took the tube further east still to Newbury Park – here’s an ironic photo just for Dad.

From here I was quite easily able to find the two houses Mum lived in before she & her family emigrated to Sydney in the mid-’60s. The houses looked pretty much as I imagine they did all those years ago. It was funny to remember back to all the times Mum remarked when driving through new subdivisions in NZ how much all the houses looked the same – it was the same, streets & streets of semi-detached & terraced houses. Still, it was cool to go back & see where the Hinds left almost fifty years ago.

On the way in to catch the train home, I finally managed to get on my eleventh & last tube line – the nothing Waterloo-City line that only has two stops.

The plan for the weekend was to spend the day with the Patricks on Saturday & then ride out to watch the London Marathon. This all changed in a hurry on Saturday morning & I ended up visiting the Patricks for the afternoon & evening, getting beaten again in a game of Knights & Cities. I stayed the night out before driving a few hours west on Sunday morning with bike in the back of the car itching for a good mountain-bike ride on the Quantox with John. With my time in Britain for now running out & John & Anna’s busy life with very young twins this was my only opportunity to get to Taunton & see them & get a good ride in with John. Thankfully, it was a lot warmer than the last time I rode with John (which was pretty much freezing) & the heavy showers that I drove through to get west had pretty much passed through. After a much-too-large barbecue lunch (which I thought was my first of the year, until I remembered the snow barbecue in Canmore in January) we were organised & out riding for two & a half hours on John’s local ride – the Quantocks seems to be a wide expanse of public land, hills just off the coast – one can see across to Cardiff, Swansea & the mouth of the Severn if it’s not really cloudy. We parked at a carpark near the top so the riding consisting of some nice downhills before riding back up to the top & repeating this a few times. I was surprised & pleased (less cleaning) at how dry it was; I was a little tentative to start with some of the more technical downhill parts, but I gradually remembered how to ride a bike & the trails got more flowy & more enjoyable. It was pretty difficult to disguise that I am significantly less fit than John (& he’s one of those singlespeed nutters), but I managed to grovel up the hills eventually. A great ride & always good to see the Lamberts & their growing family (the girls were in much better health than when I last saw them) – I really lucked out meeting John in the Redwoods a few years ago. Monday was a slow cruise back to London – stopped off at Stonehenge on the way, nice day for it & quite interesting & incredible really.

Made a slight detour to Avebury, similar to Stonehenge in that there are really big rocks sticking out of the ground in a circle – but these rocks weren’t quite as big, but the circle was much larger – it seemed to go all the way around the village.

Have been spending quite a few more afternoons in the hospital visiting Nora while she waits for a place in a residential care home. Dementia is pretty depressing (I suppose I was fortunate not to have to cope with my grandmother’s slide – I’m starting to see why it was/is so upsetting for Mum) & it’s hard having to explain every time we visit that we aren’t there to take Nora home & that she will not be going home as she knows it. It’s pretty bleak in the ward as there is little stimulation & most of the patients aren’t up to any rational conversation & you know that a lot of the patients will only leave the ward in the box that one occasionally sees being wheeled in. On a lighter note, I churned through & quite enjoyed the rest of the 44 Scotland St series, even if a couple of the main characters (Bruce & Pat) left noticeable holes in some of the books (3 & 5 respectively). Trish & I are finally heading to Hastings tomorrow (another thing will be gone from the list), & this (long) weekend holds more mountain-biking & my first trip to Wales – can’t wait.

around home, family, friends, history, London, UK

Planes, bikes & houses

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The sky is strangely quiet over London at the moment – as I expect it over much of the rest of the British Isles & parts of Western Europe. I can’t say that I mind too much; but I’m glad I have no plans to go anywhere near an airport in immediate future – for those that were planning on traveling by air, the disruption due to the volcanic ash floating on down from Iceland must be horrific. Two days of closure – unprecedented & surely a right nightmare for travelers & the airlines. On a brighter note with regards to air travel (pending the clearing of the ash in the next four weeks) – the paper work for my application for a one-year working holiday visa to Canada came through a few days ago & I have since booked my flight to Calgary (May 15). It would be fair to say I’m more excited than a “Frenchman who has just invented a pair of self-removing trousers”.

The weather has continued to improve & that has made the days out in the last ten days nicer & in some cases possible. Trish & I have also managed to watch quite a bit of Hornblower, I’ve got hooked on Alexander McCall Smith’s second series of books (the 44 Scotland St series) – set in Edinburgh & full of very interesting interconnected (as I suppose most are in novels) characters in which one often sees parts of one’s self reflected, been sorting a few things out for Canada & we have played quite a few visits to Trish’s mother, Nora, in hospital. Such hospital visits are still consisting of countless games of gin-rummy, which is good for Nora as she remembers how to play & is known to beat us on occasion; sadly, it looks as though she will not be going home after being discharged, rather she will only be discharged when she has a place to go to in a residential care home.

Eltham Palace is but a few miles from home & I had been meaning to visit for some time. Trish & I took the opportunity last Tuesday as the sunny day was good for viewing the extensive gardens. It’s a slightly strange palace, as while it was originally built for Edward IV in the late fifteenth century & Henry VIII spent a lot of his childhood there, it fell in to disrepair in the 1800s (the Great Hall being used as a barn) before Stephen & Virginia Courtauld extensively renovated it in the 1930s. The Great Hall was restored in medieval, the buildings were extended & the exterior kept in the right period, but the inside is a bold mixture of Art Deco, ocean-liner & Swedish styling. It makes for a rather curious contrast – but it’s fantastic. The house has been restored well by English Heritage & they have a lot of the original furniture & paintings. As well as the great design work (the huge glass dome in the entrance foyer is spectacular), the house had a lot of up-to-the-minute technology – underfloor heating, multi-room audio system, central vacuum & an early PABX. As expected, the gardens were beautiful & very pleasant to walk around – there were even some tunnels surviving from four or five hundred years ago.

Battle was to be the next place visited, but as Andrew was taking his two young daughters (Shelley is now back at work two days a week) to see all the planes at the RAF museum in North London, I thought I would tag along & tick that off my list. In the end I only got to half tick it off, as there are so many planes & so much history to read that I still have the Battle of Britain hall & the History of Flight hall to go back & see. The collection of WWI era aircraft was quite fascinating, as it is not so often one sees surviving examples of these plane. A couple of them had no fuselage – just a cockpit, then a big gap & then the tail.

I quite liked the Bomber Hall too; it’s always quite difficult to get photos of planes in museums as it is difficult get far enough away from the planes (particularly bombers) – but here is a Lancaster (WWII) & a Vulcan (built to drop nuclear bombs in the ’50s & ’60s).

There was a good doco film about the Dambuster raids – an event, that if not entirely successful, never fails to catch the imagination. That Barnes-Wallis sure was a smart guy – also was able to appreciate the size of a Grand Slam that he designed (a massive bomb that only specially modified Lancasters could carry that would penetrate deep in to the ground before exploding with earthquake effect – used against infrastructure [bridges & so on]). I was impressed that the girls were so well behaved – hardly heard a peep out of Amelie & Vittoria was able to be amused most of the time, even if she did seem to think she had spent the day looking at dinosaurs. Andrew was pretty good too.

Saturday was perhaps the warmest day of the year so far, & I took the opportunity to go for another ride through the northwest Kentish countryside. I managed a loop down to Shoreham & up the other side of the valley (good views out towards the Thames Estuary), through Eynsford again (brief stop at the ruins of Lullingstone Castle). It was a great day to be out & plenty of other people thought so – a lot of ramblers, people sitting roadside at pubs & it would seem every one in a twenty mile radius with convertible drove past with the top down. I managed about forty kilometres & some reasonable hills in there too – but not particularly long. Along the spine of the hills back down to Eynsford I was intrigued by the sound of a motor behind a large hedgerow – it didn’t sound like farm machinery, more like a circular saw. As I reached a gap in the hedge I spied a group of people gathered in a field for an afternoon of model helicopter flying. At first, the helicopter looked barely in control as the pilot (I suppose you could call him that) took it flew a whole lot of turns, dives, spins, loop-the-loops; but as I watched it fly around in a cloud of smoke the manoeuvrability as it seemed to bounce around on thin air was quite incredible. That’s more than enough of that.

Another outing I had been meaning to go on for a while was to ride to Down House near Biggin Hill. Down House was of course the home of Charles & Emma Darwin for about forty years in the nineteenth century. I went for the just-about-countryside-all-the-way route to get out to Downe & some how managed to get another forty-odd kilometres of road riding in. The house itself is recreated as it was in Darwin’s day downstairs with a lot of original furniture, paintings & decor; while, upstairs is an very good exhibition on the family history, the Beagle voyage & his subsequent work. The garden was also quite interesting (unfortunately a bit of it was closed, so good photos of the house were difficult to take), as quite a few of Darwin’s experiments were done here over many years. It seems Darwin was not the typical Victorian father, so there quite a few amusing family-life anecdotes.

around home, family, friends, London, UK

Limbo

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If I thought I was coming back to England to reduce my food intake, I was badly mistaken on my first day back from Spain. Andrew had organised a surprise birthday party for Shelley the day after I got back (that timing was planned, I would have stayed longer in Spain otherwise). Heading out to West Harrow I was quickly reminded why I rarely travel in to the city on a weekend – Transport for London find it necessary to take down half the tube lines on a regular basis for engineering work. Just as well I had given myself plenty of time – a train from Marylebone to Harrow-on-the-Hill (with a lot of waiting) & I was, somehow, at the venue first (I never could pull off fashionably late – it’s pretty difficult when you are never fashionable & usually are punctual). Anyway, Shelley was suitable surprised & it was great to finally meet some of their London friends that crop up in conversation when I am visiting. Plus there was a huge meal laid on by various people.

I think the calorific intake of the previous week inspired me to replace the rear brake pads on my bike – the current ones having been all but destroyed on that wet Farnborough ride. Even though I had bled the brakes quite recently, there was no way that the new pads were going in – no matter how much I tried to persuade them. Somewhere in the act of persuasion the centre of one of the pistons snapped off, rendering the brakes inoperable. Damn, no riding for a little while. I wasn’t overly keen on forking out eighty to a hundred quid for a new set, so was pleased when I eventually got a secondhand set of similar vintage off eBay for about half the price. These are now on the bike (an easy switch) some two or three weeks after returning from Spain – but more of the resulting (road – boring, I know) rides later.

A few days later, Louis (a friend I grew up with in Te Puke & then flatted with during some of my time at university – now living in Ipswich with his wife, Emma) was in the city for a training day for work. We arranged to meet late in the afternoon at one of the NZ stores after he had bought Emma some NZ goodies of the confectionery kind. The days were finally starting to get a little longer & more pleasant in this part of the world, so I made the most of it by heading in & trying to get some value out of my English Heritage card (bought all those months ago at Osborn House, Isle of Wight). First stop was Apsley House on Hyde Park Corner – the home of the Dukes of Wellington since the early 1800s.

This was quite fitting as I had seen signs on the coach drive back to Madrid to places where notable battles of the Peninsular War had taken place – specifically Talavera & Salamanca. The house was gifted to the nation in 1947, but the family still has use of some of the building as their London home. I quite enjoyed my visit to the house as there is a good collection of art, & plenty of gifts from various nations & interesting artefacts from & commemorating many famous battles (such as swords that both Wellington & Napoleon carried at Waterloo). It was interesting to learn that Wellington & Nelson only met once – & that was while waiting to report to senior officer & at first Nelson had no idea who Wellesley was. Opposite the house is Wellington Arch, which gives good views of the royal parks in the area & over to Westminster.

Inside the arch – as well as a display detailing the history of the arch & one explaining London’s blue plaque system – there is a small display devoted to the nearby NZ Memorial, which is always nice to pass by & remind one of home (the Australian memorial on the opposite side of the arch is pretty neat too, but of course does not have as much significance for me).

I still had a bit of time to kill before meeting Louis, so a pleasant stroll down the side of St James’s park took me to Westminster & a couple of small English Heritage attractions in the abbey complex.

Walking back through Trafalgar Square I was pleasantly surprised to see a new Jack Reacher novel in the window of Waterstone’s – buying that straight away & going & sitting in St James’s Park & reading for an hour was a bit of a no brainer. Met Louis eventually & had a good catch up while walking around trying to find a GBK (Gourmet Burger Kitchen) for dinner.

I’ve been racking my brains to remember what else has filled the last few weeks & then I remembered that for a while I was actively looking for gainful employment. So that was a few hours every day trolling through various websites, ringing recruiters, preparing CVs & cover letters and so on. As one would expect, the job market over here is a little on the tight side (which is akin to saying I like mountain-biking a little bit) & I didn’t really find any jobs that appealed a great deal. Not having much of a clue as to what I really want to do either doesn’t exactly aid in narrowing things down. Somewhat out of the blue, I landed an interview up in Tamworth (about twenty minutes north-east of Birmingham) for the role of process engineer for at a small (compared with the steel mill anyway) factory that makes PCBs (printed circuit boards). At about that time I was really starting to wonder if I wanted to head back to a real job, settle in one place, get a car & all that. I started tossing around the idea of going back to Spain & teaching English – while an attractive option for a variety of different reasons, in the end I really didn’t want to have to study for a TEFL qualification & while I really enjoyed the one-on-one tutoring style of Vaughan Town, I hate teaching classes. Working on a farm up in Scotland or north England even crossed my mind, & then I got a reply to an email I had forgotten that I had even sent. It turns out that, even though the website isn’t very clear on the issue, applications for NZers wanting a one-year working holiday in Canada were still open for 2010. After the fantastic (dislocated shoulder excluded) five weeks recently spent in Canada, I always thought I would return one day, I just didn’t expect that it may be so soon. I’ve really missed being able to get out of the house & go for a mountain-bike ride in London & a summer spent riding in Alberta & BC just seems fantastic – not to mention the next ski season. You can only apply for this visa before you turn thirty, so I figured it was better to do something about it now while I am not settled in a real job – I can always come back to Britain & Europe any time I wish thanks to my British citizenship. So in the space of about two days I had gone from not really thinking about Canada, downloaded & completed the forms, got my ugly mug on a couple of passport photos & posted it all off to Mum & Dad for them to organise a bank cheque for me. So with a bit of luck, this will go through easily & I’ll hear back in five or so weeks.

So that took any impetus that there was out of the job hunt – but I still had an interview to go & do. I went mainly just for the experience & to see if the job was a blinder. Consequently, the suit (yes I only have one & I hardly need that) came out of its bag for the first time since August, I drove a few hours north (all motorway driving – enough of that boredom to make me want to go to Canada even more), checked out the small town of Tamworth (not too bad, but I struggled to kill the two hours before my interview) & rocked up for the interview. It was a strange experience – having a interview for a job you really don’t care if you get or not, actually one you would prefer that they don’t offer you – I was super relaxed & had to stop myself lounging on the arm rests of the chair & wasn’t at all concerned with how it went. It seemed to go pretty well, but that was mostly due to my indifference. The factory was so clean compared to the Iron Plant & the process so much more precise. The making of PCBs was quite interesting with a lot of baths & electrolysis for coating the boards with various things – copper, gold, platinum, tin; it was a nice change to be thinking of such geeky things. Was quite happy to get back on the road & visit Carol (first cousin once removed), Barry & their daughter Catherine near Stansted for a great dinner & a very talkative evening. Home exhausted from the six or so hours of driving.

I’ve become disturbingly well acquainted with the local hospital, Queen Mary’s over the last few weeks. (Incidentally, it started off as a medical camp during WWI & a Kiwi, Harold Gillies, performed a lot of pioneering plastic surgery work with facial reconstruction of servicemen badly burnt in the war.) Firstly, Trish has to go there every so often with the recovery from her broken leg – last time it was to have a screw removed. Secondly, I’ve finally started physio there – trying to strengthen my shoulder up so it is less likely to dislocate; I’m a little ashamed to say I’ve had to buy a Swiss (gym) ball as part of the rehab, I hate gym equipment – I would much rather be outside riding or even walking. But most of the visits have been to do with Trish’s mother, Nora (my great-aunt) & my role as taxi-driver & errand-boy (as Trish can’t drive at the moment). There was one eye appointment, & then Nora had a fall walking home from Tesco & ended up in A&E with nasty bruising above & below her right eye & low blood pressure. I think Trish & I were there until midnight that night. Almost two weeks later, Nora is still there – but that is more to do with social work & OT assessments. So there have been quite a few visits & countless games of gin-rummy.

Much of one week was spent doing the most physical labour (although not particularly onerous) I have done in a long time – Ray (Trish’s brother & another first-cousin-once-removed) & his wife, Jill own & run a cattery. I’m not too sure who builds roofs out of plywood, but one of the catteries had a rotten roof so I spent all of one Sunday removing the rotten roof & cladding & installing a new roof with Ray & his son Tim. My thighs hurt for days after that – from all the crouching & going up & down ladders. I was out at Ray’s for the few days after tidying up the mess we had made & cleaning out the cattery & doing other odd jobs. If the weather improves – that is, if we manage to have a day that isn’t rainy or windy – I’ll be back out there this week doing a spot of painting. It was great to be working outside for the week. Trish & I also had dinner at Clare (Ray & Jill’s daughter) & Mark’s recently – great to catch up, as although they only live half an hour’s bike ride away, I hadn’t seen them since late September.

It was cool to spend a bit of time at Andrew & Shelley’s over a couple of days at the beginning of last week. The first was a Sunday afternoon/evening & strangely, the weather was pretty nice. I think we had a good time keeping the girls amused at a nearby park – even if Vittoria did have ten or fifteen minutes of the “terrible twos”, something I never mind too much as I’m very much an avuncular figure & don’t have to live with screaming kids & can quite easily ignore them (reminded my a lot of my time in Pennsylvania!). Shelley soundly beat Andrew & me in a game of Knights & Cities – a step up in complication from normal Settlers of Catan & one I haven’t quite mastered yet – which I will tell you is because I have not played it very much, a good story & I’m sticking to it. The Tuesday after I was back at the Patricks’ house, after a day in London, for a spot of babysitting. The day in London is probably of more interest to you (& me) – it started off at the Tate Modern. The level of my appreciation of modern art is easily illustrated by the fact that I found the most interesting part of the whole gallery is that it used to be a power station – what was left of the turbine hall had me imagining boilers, turbines, steam lines, pulverisation & so forth. I popped up to Euston to complete my look around the British Library galleries – quite a few months since I had last been there; saw two of the remaining four copies of the Magna Carta, some pretty cool Shakespeare & Beatles texts. With a bit of time to fill before heading out west on the Metropolitan Line, I spent an hour brushing up on my British royal history, courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery’s first eight rooms & the placards that go with the great pieces. The Patrick girls were as well behaved as usual – Andrew & Shelley seemed to return with most of a normal sized store after their shopping trip, just as well it was a large store that they went to.

Thursday last was forecast to be snowy or sleety, but I awoke (eventually) to a clear blue sky – enough for me to get on the aforementioned fixed bike & go for a ride. Of course, by the time I got organised it had clouded over – but I managed to avoid any rain lingering around SE London & NW Kent. It was great to be out pushing the pedals around again – even if it was only a twenty-two mile (close to 35 km for those of you in more sensible countries – really, who thought it was a good idea to use a mixture of imperial & metric units? What a royally stupid idea.). I headed east past Swanley, over the M25 & to the small village of Eynsford. Pretty flat generally, but with a few long gentle hills on which to push the legs a bit harder. By the time I got to Eynsford, it was well past lunch time & with no cash & a £10 minimum on the debit-card (eftpos for the Kiwis) machine I had to force down a large mexican pizza & a bowl of fries (I say force, but it was pretty nice & I was rather hungry – not too much of a hardship really) while enjoying banter at the bar with all sorts of accents you wouldn’t expect in the Kentish countryside. Before returning home, I checked out the ruins of the Lullingstone Roman Villa – which was started in about 100 AD & expanded over the next three or four hundred years as the owners grew more & more wealthy. What remained of the mosaic on the floor of the dining room was quite impressive, as were many of the other artefacts that had been excavated over the last sixty years.

Saturday just gone was the famous Oxford v Cambridge Boat Race up the Thames. Happily I didn’t have a lot planned for the Easter weekend so was able to go & take a look at this British institution. With way too much time on my hands, wanting to spend some time on the bike & as a chance to see a different part of London (even if I was mostly constrained to the Southern Circular route – the A205) I decided I would ride out there. This didn’t look like a good idea earlier in the week with thunderstorms forecast, but thankfully British meteorologists seem to be even worse at their jobs than their Kiwi counterparts & the weather was quite reasonable. As pointed out by Andrew earlier in the week, on my bike I would be able to move down the course as the race progressed. It took me ninety minutes to ride across south London & arrive at Putney & find a good spot on the south bank of the Thames to sit & wait for the boats to come past – I could just see the start. Unfortunately, I overestimated how long it would take for me to get there, so I had an hour to while away (without my iPod, dammit – I have three Hamish & Andy episodes to catch up on) – it did get a bit colder, so I was glad I had put the leggings on under my Dobies (I was quite the picture of NZ MTB clothes – Krank top; Ground Effect leggings & socks; NZO shorts & gloves & Buff – with an Icebreaker layer to top things off). There were plenty of people about & every one was pretty well behaved – just over the river was Bishops Park (which featured on one of my earlier walks) & Craven Cottage – home of Fulham FC. The tide was well in & the race started at 4.30 – Oxford in the dark blue on the near side (Surrey side of the course) & Cambridge in the light blue on the far (Middlesex) side.

Oxford had the better of the early part of the race & I was on my bike shortly after they passed & riding across to Barnes Bridge to see them come past again. There seemed to be many more people at Barnes Bridge – probably as it was closer to the end of the just-over-four-mile-long-course. By this stage, Cambridge was ahead by about two-thirds of a length – a lead that they would not relinquish as the race ended, just short of Chiswick Bridge, to win the race against the bookies’ odds & prevent what would have been a three year losing streak.

The ride home took slightly longer, but thankfully summer time has started here in the the UK & there was still plenty of light when I made it back at 7.00. A good afternoon out & I was pleased at how well I had stood up to over sixty kilometres of road-riding – not that there was any real pace involved.

Easter seems to be a bigger deal over here than at home – I’ve had so many toasted hot cross buns & so much chocolate; Easter Sunday saw Trish & I drive out to Jan’s (Trish’s sister) place just north of Dover. Last time we were out this way it was Christmas & the M20 was similarly quiet. While the Sunday dinner was being prepared, I skived off to visit Dover Castle. Being Easter Sunday & the start or middle of the school holidays (depending on the school) there were plenty of people around – just as well it’s a pretty big complex.

The castle, perched atop the white cliffs, commands great views of the Channel & over to France.

There have been fortifications here since shortly after William the Conqueror successfully invaded Britain in 1066 & the main castle dates from the reign of Henry II in the 1160s. Garrisoned until 1958, it was a military installation for nine centuries continuously until 1958. At the centre of the castle is the Great Tower that Henry had built – a symbol of his power, greatness & wealth. The Great Tower has recently been recreated as to how it would have been to receive important visitors in 1184 (Dover Castle was on the pilgrimage path to Canterbury from the continent); the six large rooms recreated include the King’s Hall with the throne & numerous wall hangings & banners – all quite splendid.

Being a bank holiday weekend there was a bit more than usual going on around the castle – including a small group dressed up as Grenadier Guards of the Napoleonic War period. After having watched too many episodes of Sharpe (a bit like Hornblower, but in Wellington’s army not the Royal Navy) I was interested to see them loading & firing their muskets at three rounds a minute.

Considering there was only five muskets, the noise was tremendous (I wonder if they had extra loud blanks – in case they wanted to “deafen them to death”); I can’t begin to imagine what it would have been like in the ranks – the smoke was something else too.

A part of the complex that I wasn’t expecting to encounter was the secret war time tunnels. Tunnels had been made in the cliffs from 1797 to provide extra accommodation for two thousand odd troops. Come the second world war, these tunnels were recommissioned & used for the command of the defence of the south-east coast. It was from here that Vice Admiral Bertrand Ramsay organised & commanded over the space of ten days the evacuation of over 300,000 British, French & Belgian troops from Dunkirk in 1940. There are three layers of tunnels & access was open to the top two – a field hospital & the command centre. I managed to make it back in time for dinner & then Jan’s eldest son Luke & his wife, Katy, dropped round to say hello & show us photos of their recent wedding in Antigua. After all that & way too much food, it was a struggle staying awake on the couch – just as well the drive home was uneventful.

So now I’m in a state of limbo waiting to hear about my visa, not looking for jobs in the UK, not wanting to waste my (potentially) last six or eight weeks in the UK for a year & not really wanting to spend too many pounds as I will need them to get in to & set myself up in Canada. But I seem to find enough to do around London; who knows, maybe another week in Spain at Vaughan Town or elsewhere could be a good option. That is an exceedingly long post (pity I haven’t taken heaps of photos – damn clouds), I really didn’t think I had been up to all that much – just as well I didn’t detail all the books I’ve read, TV & movies I’ve watched (although I am back on to The Young Ones – “I better get back to the lentil casserole before I get disorientated”) & so on.

Finally – go Lyon!

city, Europe, national park, travel

An awful lot of talking (for me, probably not for some)

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Another airport, another chance to sit down & update these musings. This time it is Madrid Baribas Airport & I am at the end of ten days in Spain. Due to a slight adjustment in my sleeping hours towards what seems to be the Spanish norm & a very intense week I am having a little trouble remembering exactly all that I have done & seen in my brief time here. I do remember that for my first three days (spent in Madrid) the weather was pretty average (by London standards, bad by Madrid standards) – cloud, light rain & cold. First impressions were of the Metro from the airport in to the city – & those impressions have lasted; the Madrid metro has all the good things about it that the metro in Paris has (quick, on time, regular trains, clear & easy to understand maps & signage), but it is also much cleaner & newer & with far fewer beggars. In the central city my hostel was easy to find and about average. I think Thursday afternoon & evening were spent walking around the central city & getting orientated – which is very easy to do & I found plenty of parks, small side streets & hills to keep me interested.

Like most old European cities, the streets are mostly small & twisty – but with some quite wide arterial routes that help one from getting at all lost. I made the mistake of bringing a very good book with me (thanks a lot Neil) – the second in the Millennium trilogy by Steig Larsson, where one of the main characters is the most unlikely hero (if you like a good thriller/crime novel with a decent plot, I would do well to recommend these books – that’s for you Dad), so when I got sick of walking around in the gloom it didn’t take much to persuade me to go back to the hostel & read. Madrid of course likes to party, so my few nights at the hostel did not exactly provide me with sound sleep to prepare me for the exhausting week at Vaughan Town.

Back to Madrid, Friday was spent at various galleries & museums. The most famous of which are the Museo Nacional de Prado, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum & the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia. The Prado was a great collection of art & is a much more manageable size than the Louvre – a lot of Goya, Raphael, Bosch, Titian & pieces from other Spanish & European artists. My favourite of the three was the Thyssen – the landscapes (my favourite – I get a little sick of endless religious art – Rest on the road to Eygpt, & so on – & portraits of people that I know nothing about) there were fantastic & it wasn’t as crowded as the Prado. I’m still a complete ignoramus when it comes to modern art, so there was little to interest me in the Sofia. My antipathy towards modern art was well reflected by one of the first rooms I went in to in the Sofia – a long room painted in white that had a few slabs of steel of various lengths standing on their long edges. How a room that looks like the guys in the caster have got a little keen with the slab cutter & then done a little extra scarfing can be construed as art is completely beyond me. Steel can be used to great effect in architecture, but slabs are hardly interesting enough to look at as art.

Even Picasso’s Guernica was disappointing – needless to say was the highlight of the Sofia for me was the viewing point of the city from the third or fourth floor. Also that day was a rail museum which were interesting enough considering there was very little translation in to English & my Spanish can generously be described as poor.

A bit of lie in on Saturday, conceding that my book was much better than the weather, before heading to the Palacio Real de Madrid (the royal palace of Madrid). Thanks to my Madrid Card (which is not nearly the great value that the London, New York & Paris Passes have proved to be) I was able to skip the ever-growing queue to get in. Another typical impressive palace, but thankfully not nearly as extravagant or large as Versailles – but pretty fancy all the same.

I also spent a bit of time wandering around some of the many parks & green areas in Madrid, which were very nice considering the drizzle.

That night was a small tapas evening at a bar for the English-speaking volunteers to meet each other before the week of a lot of talking, something I was unsure I was up to but willing to give it a go. It was a little strange to speaking only English in Madrid, but nice to meet people with accents from all over the world. The night continued for a few of us in various other bars & I was back in the hostel late for me, but early by Spanish standards & the curse of “I know I have to get up early to meet some form of transport & so now I can’t sleep” struck & I had very little sleep before dragging myself out of bed & off to meet the coach & most of the rest of the other Anglos I would be spending the week with – one bonus of being kept awake was the conclusion of my book, I’m looking forward to starting the third one & the movie of the first installment that is just being released in English. A pleasant drive through the Spanish countryside for three hours south-west(ish) & we were almost in Portugal before we stopped at the hotel in the National Park that would be our home for the week.

Most of the Spaniards at this particular course work in the hospitality industry & quite a few of them work for the same chain of government owned hotels & know each other; even so I imagine there were quite a few nerves on their part as the program kicked off with introductions from all participants & a basic outline of how the week would work. The whole idea of the program is to improve the English conversation of the Spaniards & get them used to hearing different accents (of which we had quite a few – different parts of England, Glaswegian, Aberdeen, Irish, American, French & my Kiwi one – thankfully, a lot of the more difficult accents for the Spaniards to understand [including mine] had been softened somewhat by travel). We must have had about twenty one-to-one sessions during the week, each of the three meals of the day were at tables of two Anglos & two Spaniards, a few group activities of the team building type & the socialising were all of course in English – it was quite intense for the native English speakers, & was clearly exhausting for the Spaniards who had to think almost every time they said or heard anything. I was surprised that I managed to talk so much, even if I often found myself repeating similar stories to numerous people. Of course, working & growing up in NZ were common subjects (which started to make me a little homesick after the third or fourth time) as well as my trips to Kenya & Canada and also what I was planning on doing in Britain. For me, it was a great way to meet some local people (rather than just being a tourist the whole time), understand the country & culture, & get to know some great people.

Perhaps the most surreal part of the week was during the evening meeting (a chance to perform a song, skit, tell a story or so on) on Monday night when two different groups of people got up & performed Argument Clinic and the Four Yorkshiremen skits made famous by Monty Python. I was slightly annoyed I missed the opportunity to participate in those – the saddest thing would have been that I could have probably done so without a script. These sketches led in to a long discussion at dinner with one of the Spaniards about Python & how well it translates in to Spanish, our favourite movies & lines – that was one conversation I would never had thought I would have! After a couple of grey days, the sun came out for the rest of the week on Tuesday & many of my one-to-ones were spent walking in to the small village close by, or the opposite direction down the road, to escape the confines of the hotel & ward off cabin fever.

We were lucky to be able to do so – apparently the other group were in a much smaller hotel & had a lot of snow & were stuck indoors for most of the week – it may have driven me mad. Bird watching, gypsy jump, castle… bridge. It turned out that just down the road from the hotel was one of the best places in Europe & the world to see various species of birds – vultures, eagles, storks & many others. During another one-to-one, Ricardo drove me down to the Gypsy Jump (the name – from a local legend – given to the two large rocks standing tall either side of a narrow gap in the Rio Tajo – the longest river in the Iberian Peninsula) to spot the vultures – with the aid of some binoculars & Enriques’ powerful monocular we could easily see many vultures flying around & nesting on the rocks; we were also lucky to spot a couple of the less-frequently seen black storks. Another outing was to the small castle (a keep really) on the top of the rocks above the Gypsy Jump that was built by Arabian goodness knows when – the panorama from here was spectacular & it wasn’t all that cold.

On Friday it time for goodbyes & the bus back to Madrid. After a week of way too much food & too little sleep it was nice to get back to Madrid. But of course there was that common drawback of travelling & meeting so many wonderful & interesting people – every silver lining having a cloud & all that – you go your separate ways with no guarantees of crossing paths again, but what happens there remains to be seen. Six of us English speakers found a much quieter hostel than the one I had been in the week before & after a movie for some of us, I was in bed at the comparatively early hour of one o’clock to have the best sleep I had had for some time. Up to see brilliant sunshine, pack up & on the Metro to have brunch with a distant cousin I had never met – our great-grandmothers were sisters, that makes us third cousins (I think). A very pleasant two hours meeting Christine & her roommate & once again eating well too much (not to mention three cups of tea – Christine is British after all) before heading to the airport…

Biking to go places, going places to bike.