White Christmas………

………well sort of! It’s frosty most of the day and when that disappears the fog rolls in. We went to London to soak up a last bit of Christmas Culture in the big city and it was great. We hung out in Hyde Park and watched the skaters, we ate German Sausage at the German Christmas Fair and Rod talked to Santa (we think this was the real one). It was fun, we spent the day riding around on double decker buses to get to our destinations, We’ve decided it’s the only way to get to know the layout of London. The tube is easier and quicker but doesn’t give you any idea of where you are. We also decided to go to Harrod’s, we wanted to buy each other a £10 secret Santa gift to open on Christmas morning. We had always understood Harrods to be the iconic store of all things stylish and wonderful……….. WRONG….tacky, tacky, expensively tacky, think gold chains, big watches and lots of ‘bling’. We are sure there is some good stuff there, but we couldn’t find it. We did find the ‘shrine’ to Dodi and Diana however, ….cringe! On the way home we found Santa busking in the tube station (we don’t think this was the real one), but he did play a very groovy riff.
We decided to have a Christmas Party for all the staff here, (seeing as how we’ve got no friends)!!!! It was a lot of fun, we bought NZ beer and lots of Tim Tams from the NZ shop, sang carols and played charades.
Spending Christmas Day with Amy and Chris, then off to Tromso in Norway, as of now there is still no snow there, but it is forecast for Tuesday, the day we get there….can’t wait. As we write this you are waking up to Christmas morning, we wish you all the happiest of Christmases and a wonderful New Year. Lots of love xxxxxx

“On the first day of Christmas…….

……my truelove gave to me”…..yes well, ours weren’t in the pear tree, they were hanging in the game cupboard for several days. ‘tis the season of “shoots” and we have had quite a few of the family (and dogs) staying attending several shoots around the area.
Now please understand we know nothing about the finer points, but from what we have picked up talking to various people and keeping our ears open it goes something like this…..you get invited to…. or you buy your place…. or you buy…. “The Shoot”. This gives you the opportunity to get into your ‘shooting clobber’ (quite a fashion statement as you can see)…load up enough ordinance to start a small international incident, have a really GOOD BREAKFAST…..(cooked by the servant….”moi”)..pile into the Range Rovers and off you go into the freezing wilds. Now the rules of engagement seem to be very strict.
First of all there are the “guns” and the “beaters” and the “picker uppers” - the beaters scare the birds out of the undergrowth (the drive) and the guns line up in their proper places and blast hell out of the birds….pheasant, partridge and the odd magpie type thing…and the picker-uppers send in the dogs and do just that. After a few drives someone opens a bottle of ‘sloe gin’ and all the guns get a drink After doing this a few times it’s off to lunch, usually catered. Everyone has a jolly good time and on a good day shoot several hundred birds!!!! The person paying for the shoot puts up several thousand quid and then for each bird shot there is a fee of about 35 quid per bird ……so a good shoot cost about 10,000quid! I don’t get it, but it’s sport for some I suppose.
On the subject of birds, we have Mr & Mrs Goose living on the pond, they sleep on a raft in the middle of the pond to protect them from the fox. It’s very cold now and while there is no snow, there is a lot of ice around. We were worried that the pond would freeze over and the fox could get the geese…..BUT, get this, each goose takes a turn throughout the cold and frosty night, to swim around and around which prevents the ice completely forming on the pond
The days are crisp and clear and the sun is very low in the sky and rises like an orange ball about 8.30am ……travels around the sky like a silver dollar and then sets about 3.30pm with the most spectacular sunsets. It’s colder here than Tromso at the moment and talking with them up there today, there is still no snow in Tromso…this is the Arctic Circle!!!! It better get happening by next week!!! Have heaps to ‘blog’ so will do so again within the next few days…..thanks for the keeping in touch, it’s great for us xxxxx

Frosty……..

Well, we’ve had a few frosts and it’s been a bit cool, but we woke up this morning to a doozy……The environment we live it is pretty comfortable, we have double glazing, a living flame fire, an Aga, plus radiators in every room, even the cloak room loo, so it’s easy to loose touch with what’s going on outside. This morning we pulled back the curtains and Wooh!...... one MOTHER of a frost. As it was our day off we went for a lovely walk. It always takes us about 10 minutes to gear up with our gloves, scarves, boots and hats and anything else we can put on to keep warm. It was gorgeous, The cows had frost beards from eating frozen grass…sod that. The geese were sitting on their raft in the middle of a frozen lake hoping the ice wasn’t thick enough for the fox to walk on. There were masses of holly all around, but over the last week the birds have stripped the berries off the bushes. We have our employer’s family coming to stay over the next week and so have had to put the holly in the raspberry cages to keep it safe from the birds, so they can take it back to London to decorate their houses. We got carried away about 2 weeks ago and decorated our house ‘cause it’s so easy to feel Christmassy in this part of the world. It is the season for “shoots” (declaring war on the local wild life) and because our Estate doesn’t have that many shoots these days, the pheasants come and hang out with us, however last Saturday we did have a “shoot” Rod was a beater and managed to scare out the fox – not quite what the guns were looking for – it got away (Rod was silently cheering), however this morning he’s been hanging around sizing up the bathams - again……if he’s not careful he’s gonna get it!! Anyway it’s getting damn cold, the frost didn’t melt today it’s 1 degree here, 5degrees in Tromso so we’re looking forward to going there – warmer temps AND we get snow AND hopefully the Northern Lights……more about that later. Miss you heaps and hope you’re all getting into the Christmas mode….lots of love xxx

Just another Saturday in London…….

………having spent all our money last week at Hamleys (the LARGEST toy store in the world), we decided to go to London yesterday just to hang out and check out some ‘free’ culture. We went to Oxford and Regent Street for a while, checked out Trafalgar Square and then wandered along the Thames. The buskers were wonderful, everything from a string quartet to a couple of guys playing amazing rhythms on a wooden box and a few inverted plastic buckets. The chaps on the banks of the Thames were going hard out to beat the tide with their sand sculpting. We eventually got a bit cold so dropped into the Tate Modern and were confronted by the most astonishing ‘piece’ – “Shibboleth” by Doris Salcedo….a long snaking crack across the vast length of the gallery, fracturing the concrete floor. For the artist, the crack reveals a ‘colonial and imperial history that has been disregarded, marginalized or simply obliterated’ she reminds us by gouging open the very ground that we walk on, that these wounds cannot be simply consigned to the past, that we must confront uncomfortable truths about our world and about ourselves without self-deception….phew!!!....it was amazing to be in a place that would allow such an installation to take place. It was challenging on many levels, not least being the expense involved in creating something so ‘permanent’ yet with a transitory existence like rangoli.
Emerging several hours later it was dark and so we wandered on and ended up in a lovely pub on the banks of the Thames for a pint. It was cosy under the radiators so we ordered fish and chips (okay Ian & Janet we are up to 2009!!!). We scoffed these, convinced we were having supper, glanced at our watch and it was only 10 past 4!!!! Puleeze!….too late for lunch…way too early for supper…afternoon tea???? Not only has our direction in this part of the world gone to pieces, but also our body clocks have become completely dysfunctional……make it dark and we’re ready to snuggle down for the duration…. don’t know how we are going to get on in Tromso, more about that later…………miss you and love hearing from you xxxx