Julie's Boggle

We had our now-familiar time-hiccup yesterday. While we were sleeping we had an hour nicked from us, with an I.O.U. for October. And just like that we moved into British Summer Time (BST).

Coming from a country where daylight-savings isn’t the norm, the whole idea seemed quite foreign when we arrived in the UK. Our first experience of it was the flip back to GMT in October, which is always depressing. Suddenly you go from it getting dark before 17h00, to it getting dark before 16h00 (!); which seems SO much worse. (Never mind that by the time you get to December, you’re well into twilight by 15h00!)

So on the whole the summer-time arrangement seems to have a lot more to offer.

The clocks always change on a Sunday, so we had our usual amusement at church of seeing “who’s been caught out”. There’s always one. In particular we had one lady yesterday who’d clearly planned to arrive half-an-hour early. Her face was a picture when she walked through the outer doors and spotted the service already well underway – I was on sound-desk at the back so had the best view of this utterly startled expression. We didn’t have too many of those though, so kudos to our organised congregation.

And the first day back at work in “summer-time” is such a pleasure. Early-spring temperatures out but such a good feeling at the day’s end to be heading home in broad daylight! An hour later it’s still slightly light at 19h00 and – best of all – from here it just gets better all the way till the June solstice!

Tom’s been out helping a friend choose a new computer today. They weren’t necessarily going to buy though – because we’d had a look at PCWorld’s website the other evening and their online prices were very competitive. So today was more for looking so they could make some decisions after seeing the real thing.

Their plan was to drive out to the big PCWorld shop at Brentford which would offer a nice wide range to look at and a site easily accessible by car. I had a few calls from Tom while they were out there to check prices for them against the web page. After they’d found a good computer on special, the next call was about the monitor – which turned out to be significantly cheaper online. Happily for Tom and Michael, with a little convincing, the salesman let them buy it for the online price.

Things were less happy when they got all the kit back home and discovered the monitor (a Samsung) was faulty. Back in the box and back to PCWorld.

Even more unhappiness followed when they got the second monitor back home, and discovered that in the box was a second-hand Philips monitor! Huh?!? Back to PCWorld again, where apparently the staff were equally surprised to find that monitor in the box; and at last they got one home that worked.

We got an early-morning call on Wednesday, all the way from Australia. This was to let us know of the much-anticipated arrival of Angus – the first of the next generation on Tom’s side!

We’re dead keen to see some photos of the wee lad! Hopefully some will be forthcoming once the household settles down, because we’ve got a long wait till July when we’ll get to see him in SA.

As is fairly typical for a Sunday afternoon, we started off with very little on the agenda.

First off we had to finish watching Shadowlands – the excellently-told and very moving story about C.S. Lewis and his wife Joy.

After that Tom started making noises about wanting a curry…

The tragedy of this, is that our favourite curry restaurant Le Cinnamon stopped serving lunch (probably because it was not a profitable venture) some months ago! In the absence of a good alternative and with the lunch hour moving onwards, we headed out to find the Anglesea Arms, a gastro-pub that we’d been told was good but not visited so far.

It took about 20 minutes of gentle strolling to bring us to the famed Anglesea, only to find that we didn’t want to eat there! It was packed with punters and a heavy cloud of cigarette smoke hung over the proceedings. Veto! We moved on, wandering through the pretty streets of terraces that the real estate agents have named “Brackenbury Village”. The walking was all very well, but we were getting hungry! And the few pubs we came across were clearly not doing food any more. At last we got back to Hammersmith Grove and another gastro-pub we’ve visited a few times: The Grove.

We were in luck because they were still very much in the serving-food mode and their lovely light and airy room was a joy to behold. Tom went for the chargrilled rib-eye steak, for a slightly eye-watering £15 (he only noticed afterwards), and I had an option from their brunch menu:- smoked salmon and scrambled eggs which was delicious. Afterwards, to cushion ourselves against the potential disappointment of the cinema not having our favourite ice cream flavour again, we went for desserts too.

After rolling home, we had a choice of several movies that we’d flagged as “need to see” and we picked V for Vendetta.

Wow!

Described by our favourite reviewer as

“a visually sumptuous concoction that combines political allegory, bloody action, and a few stunning cinematic moments into a solid piece of entertainment”

it thoroughly lived up to the review. All I’d add to that is “well worth seeing”.

Tom’s recently confirmed another trip to New York for work. Apparently they want him to go there about four times a year.

In theory, it’s a good thing, because he’s earning more AA airmiles with every trip, and hopefully soon that will turn into a free ticket and another trip for me. But in the meanwhile, I’m going to lose him for a whole week in April – and leaving on my birthday too!

Fortunately we have the Easter long weekend together, because the next week he’s off again for work, this time to a developer conference in Oxford for several days. At least we’ll be sharing the same time zone for that trip! (Amusingly, Tom – who’s not usually one for writing long letters home while he’s away – is going to have to write up a daily blog for work on the conference goings-on.)

Last weekend we headed for the south coast, just past Chichester. To the small seaside village of Bracklesham Bay and the holiday resort of “South Downs”.

As I mentioned in a previous post, we were going down for an Alpha weekend, hosted by Holy Trinity Brompton. As HTB is where Alpha got started, I guess that made our weekend about as authentic an Alpha weekend as you can get!

There were quite a few other churches along, taking attendance to several hundred, and even with the large numbers, the organisation was impeccable.

The resort itself was quite novel to us, having missed out on the whole UK holiday resort culture. This one had moved with the times but we fall well outside of their target market judging by their website:
– “Over 50′s chalet Hotel Breaks…”

It was a big place but HTB had the entire site booked — a good thing because there were lots of little kids running around and usually the resort is “adults only”!

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My weekend was certainly very relaxing. During the morning sessions on Saturday, I wandered off on a nice long walk. The pebbled beach of Bracklesham Bay was only a few minutes away. And from there I rambled off in a westerly direction.

People may say that you have to have sand to make it a proper beach, but I do like a good solid shore of pebbles. The rattling, crashing rumble of a billion pebbles as the breakers rush back away from the shore is awesome.The pebbles become sand further down, and then eventually the shoreline dissolves into a great marsh – a lovely wild area. And speculated as the location where the Romans first landed in Britain!

I rejoined the group for lunch (they did feed us well!), and then we had the afternoon free so we took a carload to nearby Chichester.

More a town than a city, Chichester’s main points of interest are its large cathedral and the well-preserved Roman walls which enclose the central area and make for a pleasant walk.

To wrap up the day, we had some excellent entertainment in the evening back at the resort. Performances were by various people, and the whole show was compèred by one of the HTB clergy – who, I’m sure, could easily bring in some extra cash on the comedy circuit if his day job doesn’t pay well enough! He had us in stitches.

Not sure if it was all the walking, but I completely got over all the little botherations of the night before (tiny bed which had Tom and I on top of each other most of the night, plus loud rushing water noises from the radiator every 10 minutes) and slept like a log.

I spent most of the Sunday morning program with the others. And next thing it was lunch, and then we were packing up and heading back for London.

All in all a fine time out from our busy schedules and a great opportunity to recharge the mental batteries.

This had to be a very quick note because there’s been sooo much to do this week, and this evening (my only free one while Tom’s off at the Alpha course) has been mostly taken up with the mindless domesticity of ironing. (Ok, and some extra time with my latest free novel from the Gutenberg Project, My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin. An absorbing read about life in colonial Australia.)

On Monday evening we wrote and passed our Sports Diver theory test – hurrah! The pass mark is 80% – so I skimmed quite close with 86% while Tom scored 93%. Now that we’re through that, it’s just the (cold) practical sessions left to get over!

Looking ahead, this weekend is the St Simon’s Alpha course weekend-away which is being held in Chichester as a combined weekend away with lots of other churches’ Alpha groups. I’m going along for a relaxing weekend away while Tom does his Alpha leader thing. Should be good.

Tom is a member of the parish council at St Simons, and yesterday was their annual away-day. This meant I had the day to myself and I decided to get in an excursion.

I took myself off to the National Portrait Gallery near Leicester Square which I’ve never visited before despite two holiday visits to London, almost 5 years of living here, and the fact that it’s free.

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Tom has never been enthusiastic about looking at portraits so I wasn’t overly hopeful, but it turned out to be a fascinating place to visit.

While I do appreciate art and enjoy wandering around galleries, I don’t make any claims to be an art buff. So for me this gallery was the most interesting one I’ve ever visited because these were pictures literally bringing history to life. All the memorable names now suddenly had faces: from Thomas More and Samuel Pepys to the great scientists and engineers like Fleming, Boyle and Stephenson.

I went round in completely the wrong order to see things chronologically – I didn’t notice until I was halfway through that the visitors’ guide suggested starting on the second floor and working down!

The ground floor was where I realised that there was a lot more to portraits than I’d initially thought. The theme was Britain since 1990, and they had various paintings, sculptures and photos of lots of famous names which it was quite cool to recognise – including a very cleverly done 3D painting of J.K. Rowling.

The first floor dwelt briefly on the 20th Century before moving on to the densely populated Victorian galleries. I had picked up an audio tour-guide for £2 which offered bonus info on some paintings and was occasionally amusing. One such occasion was the commentary on a painting of a very youthful looking Charles Dickens. The commentary ended with an extract from one of Dickens’ peers who was bemoaning the fact that his 10-year-old daughter (yes, that’s right a 10-year-old!) would far rather read Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby (which she apparently loved to bits -my paraphrase- and read all the time) than any of her father’s writings!

As the Victorian era moved on, we started getting a photos introduced. Some of these were of Captain Scott and his ill-fated North Pole team, paired with sad entries from his diary in his final days.

Upstairs, I found the second floor was packed with British royalty. The paintings in the 16th and 17th Century sections were glorious creations with every type of exquisite detail captured in oil paint, and occasionally gold leaf. This was where the real walk through British history started with snippets of info on every king and queen next to their painting.

My initial plan to move on after an hour or two and do some shopping or see a movie had been cast aside with no regrets, but time got the better of me as the afternoon progressed. Consequently the 19th century went by in rather a blur so that I could make it home by 16h00; but it’s not too serious – it just leaves me with some more to look at on my next visit. (When there will also be some time allocated for the afternoon tea at the top-floor restaurant! )

It’s a gorgeous blue sky day – with a slight cross-wind apparently – and Tom’s zipped off for the afternoon to renew his South African pilot’s licence.

Fortunately there are so many of us “Saffers” here in the UK that he doesn’t need to trek all the way back to SA to do this — he just needed to find a South African instructor over here who was willing to do him a South African practical test.

The closest one in this case is a guy who flies out of Popham, another tiny airfield, about an hour and a half’s drive away.

Along with this, Tom had to find a doctor to do a medical that would meet the South African CAA’s standards. There aren’t many of these guys around in the City but fortunately one of the ones who practises at Heathrow also has a surgery across the road from Liverpool Street station which is just a few stops down from Tom’s work on the Tube. So Tom took care of that this week as well.

As an added bonus, Goldman Sachs apparently have some interest in keeping their VP’s healthy, so they contribute £50 towards a medical every two years. This basically covered a third of the overall cost so you could say that Tom’s becoming a VP this year was excellent timing.

For those of you who are wondering, Tom did briefly consider converting to a UK pilot’s licence, but the costs were staggering. It was over £500 plus an exam or two, whereas our SA instructor charges £275 for everything bar the medical. So it looks like Tom will be staying a South African pilot for a bit longer!

Tom’s been speaking to the guy upstairs who comes out onto the front doorstep to smoke. Apparently their baby is due in the next two weeks. That sounds all very well, but they only have one bedroom and it’s just one wooden floor away from ours!