Despatch at the start of a journey

I’m sitting at my desk on a warm and humid day, the sky heavily overcast and thunder rumbling in the distance. Upstairs DH is snatching a nap after a very disturbed night. In the hall is a stack of luggage, waiting to be transferred to the car in a couple of hours, when hopefully the rain will have stopped. We will then head across to stay overnight with my mother-in-law, before DH drives me into Oxford to catch the coach for Heathrow.

Yes, after a static but very busy  summer, full of building works and house sale and interrupted by another debilitating virus, I’m finally on the move again. This time it’s not to France or Scotland, but to Prague, for a much anticipated and very welcome return visit to my friend Ricky Yates, the Anglican chaplain there, before he retires next year. I’m looking forward enormously to exploring Prague again and catching up with the friends I made on my previous two visits.

During my visit I will be taking a Sunday service in Ricky’s absence and on the other Sunday I will go with him to Dresden, where he leads a monthly service of Evening Prayer in English at the Frauenkirche, the world-famous symbol of Dresden reborn.  This time he has invited me to be the guest preacher, a hugely exciting, if rather daunting, prospect. Wish me luck.

I’ve spent a rather large number of hours in the past few weeks working on the sermons I will preach and now they are nestling in my new super-light suitcase, along with two complete sets of clerical robes, as well as an ample stock of more usual holiday wear. The freezer is full, so DH won’t starve in my absence, the hairdresser has again successfully tamed my unruly mop and I’m ready for one more adventure. 

First impressions

After months and even years of planning and anticipation, my trip with my sister to the battlefields of the Western Front proved to be a hugely interesting and deeply moving experience. After three packed days of visits, two of them in glorious sunshine and the third in the snow, we travelled back to the UK last Friday, tired but very content.

Next morning DH collected me and drove me home, with my head whirling with a kaleidoscope of impressions, my camera laden with almost 450 images, my suitcase full of laundry and my poor lungs feeling very sorry for themselves, thanks to a nasty chest infection which ambushed me and several other members of our party partway through the trip.

It’s taking me a while to recover, but I’ve finally dealt with the laundry, downloaded the photos and am just about thinking clearly enough to start to organise all my impressions and memories. Though it feels like I have enough material for a book rather than a few blog posts, at this stage I’m not even going to use words. In their place is a selection of images, which hopefully capture something of the essence of our trip - of cemeteries and memorials, of landscapes and the remnants of war that still scar them. The words will come later, when I can find the ones I need.

Gallivanting again…

...or another Big Birthday trip.

Almost five years ago, when my blog was still new and shiny, I wrote a post about a holiday I’d just had with DD.  2011 was the year I turned 65 and she turned 40 and to mark these momentous occurrences  we decided to go to Assisi together on a Pax Travel pilgrimage. I had been several times before and loved it, but for DD it was her first visit. On our return I shared some impressions of our experience in a post called The Big Birthday trip.

This wasn’t the first time in recent years that I’d headed off on holiday with a member of the family other than DH. The previous year, my next-to-youngest sister, PolkaDot, and I had visited Madeira only weeks after the catastrophic floods of February 2010 and, once I had a blog, of course I had to write about it. We both enjoyed our shared holiday so much that afterwards we talked several times about the possibility of repeating the experience.

In November 2011, to mark Armistice Day, I had written a post about my Great-Uncle Walter who died in the Ypres Salient in World War 1.  That sowed the seed in my mind of one day doing what PolkaDot had already done and visiting Ypres in Belgium to see his name on the Menin Gate memorial. Time went on and a couple of years later she suggested that we might like to go on holiday together in 2016 to mark two more Big Birthdays - her 65^th and my 70^th - and also the centenary of Great-Uncle Walter’s death on February 16^th.

Now February isn’t normally the time of year one would choose to holiday in Western Europe, but some things are more important that the weather. When we discovered that a holiday company had scheduled a battlefields tour that would take us to the very area where Great-Uncle Walter had been killed, on the exact anniversary of his death a century ago, the die was cast.

We booked and now I’m busy with my final preparations before DH drops me at my sister’s house on Sunday, ready for a very early start next morning on our journey to Belgium. Fortunately the local weather forecast for next week is very much better than what we’ve been enduring this week - cold and sunny, rather than wet and windy - and we’re both starting to feel very excited about Big Birthday Trip Mark 2. My camera and notebook are already packed. Less important things like clothes will come later...

Time to go home…

…for a while at least. Time has been up to its usual tricks since we travelled up to the north coast almost a fortnight ago. On the one hand it seems no time at all since we arrived and unpacked. On the other we seem to have been here for ages, so settled do we feel. We’ve certainly been busy, DH with his database work and frequent visits to the office of the local community transport organisation he does some work for, me with housework and church, friends and Knit & Natter.

But now the time has come to pack up and head south again, since I have an unbreakable and longstanding commitment to get ready for, of which more anon. In the meantime I’ll leave you with a selection of the few photographs I’ve managed to take over these cold, wet and stormy two weeks, most of which were taken as the tyre of a friend’s car was changed after a puncture on the way home from Knit & Natter yesterday. If one has to have a puncture, there can be few more lovely places to have one.

White caps on the Kyle, whipped up by the gales of Storm Gertrude

Ben Loyal from the village of Tongue - waiting for my lift

The houses of Talmine nestle in the lee of the hill, sheltered from the westerlies

Looking out over Talmine Bay while waiting for the wheel to be changed

The Rabbit Islands 

Going for a sail in Talmine Bay

Finally, for those like me for whom the words “Time to go home” find a strong echo from their own or their children’s childhoods, here is today’s theme tune…

Heading north

As you may remember, our usual autumn visit to the glorious North-West Highlands had to be cancelled last year, so we have been starting to look forward to heading north again when spring arrived. In the meantime, having recovered from the round of family visits over the festive season, I was settling in nicely to a quiet winter at home when DH casually dropped a very small bombshell at bedtime last night.

On our way to bed we stopped to look out of the landing window at the frost already forming on roofs and road and it occurred to him that the little house on the north coast hadn’t been winterised as usual. Except for the odd night or two of frost it’s been an unusually mild winter so far, but of course there’s no guarantee that this will continue and the last thing we would want would be to arrive in spring to find that we’d had a burst pipe weeks or months ago.

Our frosty Welsh garden

It didn’t take us long this morning to decide that a trip north sounded like a good idea and since then I’ve spent the day turning the contents of the vegetable basket into soup for the freezer and generally getting ready for a spur-of-the-moment winter break for a couple of weeks.

My camera is packed, along with my new pride and joy, a Samsung tablet (my early 70^th birthday present to myself). So I will be blogging from the north for a little while and hoping for some clear weather to capture again the beauty and wildness of that extraordinary landscape.  See you there…

Ben Loyal in the snow

On the road again

It’s Saturday morning and I am typing this in an empty house, the only sounds the clicking of the keys and the wind lashing the rain against the window next to my desk. Yesterday afternoon I waved DH off on another of his regular visits to his very elderly mother and after clearing a few chores headed out into the garden.

Earlier in the week a good friend had presented us with a delayed house-warming gift, a bare-rooted rose bush which needs to be planted without delay. Unfortunately the perfect position was already occupied by a battered, unsightly and very spiny berberis, which it was my unwelcome task to remove. The struggle was fierce, but ultimately I prevailed and managed to complete digging the hole for my rose as twilight fell.

The berberis had its revenge, however, and I spent much of the rest of the evening with a sharp needle, extracting the numerous thorns which had made it through my strongest gardening gloves. This morning my poor hands look as though I have a very localised attack of measles, but at least I’m ready to sally forth into the garden as soon as the rain stops and the ground dries up a little, and bed the rose comfortably into its new home.

After that my busyness will take a different direction, as I get down to the preparations for our spring trip to the north coast of Scotland. DH will be home on Monday evening and by then I need to have everything ready for us to pack the car on Tuesday morning and begin our journey with our customary overnight visit to his brother in Southport.

I’m already looking forward eagerly to the long journey up through the Highlands. The road is familiar to us now and we drive it with huge pleasure, revelling in the grandeur of the scenery, whatever the weather, and keenly anticipating our arrival in our little home from home between the mountains and the sea. Easter in the Highlands has become part of our lives over the past few years and I can hardly wait.

Time to go home

Gosh, it’s all go! From Advent quiet to ever-decreasing circles has taken just one day.

Yesterday DH drove me on the 170 mile round trip to the hospital for my check-up, from which I emerged minus the cast, but sporting a wrist splint, which I have to wear day and night for the next 4 weeks at least. My lovely surgeon was very pleased with my progress, but gave me strict instructions on what I can and can’t do until I’m seen again by a surgeon in Wales in the New Year. Absolutely no lifting or carrying with that hand and no pressure on the hand or wrist, so no Christmas baking and no clarinet practice. Sigh.... 

Today we went to visit a friend and it was on our return that I discovered that the Met Office had issued a snow warning for Scotland for Sunday, the day we were planning to make the long journey home to Wales. After some discussion we decided to bring our departure forward to Saturday, so while DH is out at a meeting this evening, I’m piling together  clothes and other items I can move one-handed, ready for him to pack tomorrow while I’m out in my turn at the monthly Eucharist.

So until we’re back in Wales, I’ll leave you with this seasonal offering, the perfect antidote to Christmas hype, from the wonderfully evergreen Tom Lehrer.

En route

…or we soon will be. The saga of our poor neglected campervan meant that we had to wait until all was well again before we could safely book our ferry crossing, so it was only at the end of May that we finally knew our departure date. Now, if all goes well, in a week’s time we will be once more ensconced for the summer in our small cottage in Normandy.

Well, I say summer…  As longer-term readers of this blog will know, the weather in southern Normandy is not very different from that in southern Britain. Maybe a degree or two warmer in summer and sometimes a degree or two colder in winter, but it is still recognisably a maritime climate and that means changeable.

Not for us the settled expectation of hot sunshine in summer and freezing temperatures with snow in winter. As the old quip goes, we don’t have climate, we have weather and sometimes it seems as if we experience all four seasons in a single day. This makes packing for a summer stay an interesting conundrum.

Yes, we can reasonably safely pack the swimsuits and leave the snow-boots at home. After that it’s anyone’s guess what the weather will throw at us. We’ve sweltered in September and had the wood-burner glowing and the hot-water bottles toasting our feet in July before now. We’ve had weeks of drought, with every drop of washing water saved for my rapidly shrivelling plants, and weeks of rain, with the grass growing to hayfield level before I get a dry day to cut it.

So with my hand now healed enough for me to get on with the packing, I’d better start sorting the T-shirts and the sweaters, the sandals and the wellingtons, so that whatever the weather, we will at least be appropriately attired. Then we can start looking forward to the journey and to seeing our friends again, to eating different food, speaking a different language, and, in my case at least, worshipping with a different church community.

Who knows? We may even have kittens in the woodshed again….

Hitting the road again

I’m typing this at the kitchen table in a little house that’s just been turned upside-down so that new carpeting can be fitted in the living-room and hall. We bought the carpet a couple of weeks ago (a nice remnant at a very good price) and the fitter should have been here with it this morning, raring to go. So far, at nearing mid-day, we have an upside-down house, no new carpet and no fitter…

In other circumstances this wouldn’t be a problem worth mentioning, but unfortunately these aren’t other circumstances. Late on Saturday evening we had an email from the son of our farmer neighbour in Wales, telling us that his elderly and chronically-ill father had died peacefully in his sleep and that the funeral would be this Thursday.  

We have been friends and neighbours for over 40 years, ever since DH and I moved into our shabby old farmhouse as a couple in our twenties with two small children. Our neighbour was then in his late forties, a busy, hard-working dairy farmer, but never too busy to lend a helping hand when we needed one. He and his son sank a new well for us when the old one proved insufficient for our needs, all for just the cost of the materials.

Until the regulations changed and milk had to be stored in sealed tanks until collected, we bought all our milk from their farm. I have such vivid memories of watching him or his wife ladle totally fresh and un-homogenised milk into our one-gallon carrying churn, knowing that the cream would rise to the top and be able to be scooped-off to be poured over puddings. Those were the days.

Since the news arrived we’ve had three days of chaos – packing the van, saying our goodbyes, moving furniture ready for the carpet-laying, even cancelling my birthday present order from Amazon, since I won’t be here to receive it. If the fitter doesn’t turn up we’ll have to leave the furniture where it is and get the carpet fitted on our next visit.

For some things are far more important than a bit of chaos or a delayed new carpet or the loss of the last few weeks of our visit. Saying goodbye to someone we've known, liked and respected since we met him nearly 41 years ago is essential – so this evening, come what may, we’ll be heading south. 

Update at tea-time: The carpet is being swiftly and expertly laid and an early evening departure is now a certainty.

A touch of Tudor splendour

Given the slippery nature of time I shouldn’t be surprised to realise that it’s already more than two weeks since we arrived up here in the North-West Highlands after a most enjoyable 90^th birthday celebration weekend for DH’s mother, which I haven’t even mentioned yet.

We assembled on the Friday afternoon at the home of DH’s youngest brother in Southport for an evening of family chatter before the big day itself. At 90 one doesn’t want to spend the day too strenuously before one’s birthday dinner in a local hotel, so it was decided we would go out in the afternoon for a gentle stroll around a local historic property, Rufford Old Hall, near Ormskirk.

Rufford Old Hall was owned by the Hesketh family for some 500 years until it was handed over to the tender care of the National Trust in 1936. The original building, which dates from around 1530, was a late mediaeval hall-house, though now only the Great Hall survives. Its elaborate and highly decorative half-timbering is both beautiful and impressive, though I couldn't help thinking how many oak trees it must have taken to build it.

Wonderfully carved screen 

Spartan dining

 Hammerbeam roof with angels - highly unusual outside a church

In 1661/2 a new wing was built at right angles to the original hall which, being brick-built in Jacobean style, contrasts very clearly with the hall’s black and white timbering. The house was further extended in the 1820s to give the building we see today. 

A touch of extra glamour is given to the house by the possibility that the young William Shakespeare himself may have acted in the Great Hall in the early 1580s when he was working as an assistant teacher in the household of a local landowner.

Detail of the screen

And this is meant to be movable?

The house is surrounded on three sides by formal gardens and on the fourth by a branch of the Leeds to Liverpool canal, giving it an air of great tranquillity and timelessness and a feeling of being very far from the hustle and bustle of modern life. 

We thoroughly enjoyed our tour through four centuries of English domestic architecture and came home very ready to relax with tea and birthday cake before sprucing ourselves up for our evening out.

The doors would have given access to the lost wing

The photographer photographed - DH and his beloved camera

The birthday girl herself

Sadly, the sunshine we enjoyed that afternoon didn’t last and our journey up through Scotland on Mothering Sunday was notable for the mist and murk which conspired to hide even the grandest of the mountains we drove through. That’s Scottish weather for you!

Notable by her absence

That phrase sums up rather well the relationship between me and blogging for the past couple of weeks or more, ever since I was finally able to get back to full activity. Everyday life has taken over and it’s been good for me to get away from the computer for a while. The last three months have been very sedentary and I can feel the impact this has had on my general fitness, so it’s great to be busy and active again.

That doesn’t mean I haven’t missed you all, but I’ve been making up for lost time, particularly with music practice, plus a multitude of jobs around the house. The advent of some real spring weather has been another distraction, though that seems to be on hold again, with frost and wintry showers being the order of the day over the past few days. 

Dawn on a frosty Sunday morning

A sign of spring pushing through the debris of a long wet winter

Now DH and I are busy getting ready to be on the move again. The very small campervan has just returned from the garage with a new speedometer cable and a spruced-up gearbox and is raring to go. DH has even given its exterior a reluctant wash and brush-up, a great concession from one who firmly believes that road dirt has a protective function where vehicle bodywork is concerned.

On Friday we will travel to Southport, where we will be celebrating my dear mother-in-law’s 90^th birthday this weekend. From there we will head north on our spring migration to the north coast of Scotland and the glories of the North-West Highlands. Having only managed a two-week visit there in the whole of last year, we can’t wait to arrive and settle in for a good long stay. We have no TV there and I’m looking forward to catching up with you all in the quiet evenings which are one of our great pleasures when we’re away. See you then….

The best-laid schemes

Rabbie Burns was right! We mere mortals can plan things to our heart’s content and then along comes the randomness of human existence and all our careful arrangements are overturned. Having comfortably settled in for what was meant to be a six weeks’ stay up here in the Highlands, DH and I now find we have to go south again by the end of the week.

So it’s back to the packing and the farewells, almost before the last echo of “Hello, how are you?” has died away. In addition, we have to find some way of piling all the furniture in the middle of each room, so that in our absence the local decorator can at last do the long-delayed repainting of our very shabby walls and woodwork. Wish us luck!

This song is only vaguely linked with the above, but it takes me right back to my university days, when I was young and supple and bits of me didn't creak when I bend and lift. 

 

The compass swings to the north

Fallen leaves carpet the ground, the freezer is full of soup, the weather is forecast to turn much colder, and most sensible creatures are snuggling down where it’s warm and sheltered. So what is the Transit household doing in this situation? The answer is simple: busily packing for our autumn migration to the glorious far north-west of Scotland. As the winds from the arctic begin to blow, we are getting ready to head off at the weekend in the direction they are coming from, and what’s more, we’re looking forward to it.

As regular readers will know, we enjoy our twice-yearly visits to the north-west Highlands enormously and are keenly anticipating our arrival and the pleasant process of settling-in and seeing our friends again. Whilst there I will knit more socks at the weekly Knit’n Natter meetings, walk along the road to the little church with one of the best views in the world and appreciate yet again the wondrous variety of landscape our little offshore islands have to offer.

Naturally my trusty laptop will accompany us and I’ll catch up with you all when we arrive. Until then it’s back to the sorting and packing. I love it really…. J