Walking paths and badger trails…..

England is crisscrossed with ancient public walkways over fields and farms, through forests, public and private land. The walkways are sacrosanct and are kept up and maintained by the landowners. We have one going through our place. The other day we set off in the late afternoon and after walking through the woods came out at the end of Maple Tree Lane, decided on a path which went by a friends house, carried on past his place sure that we would link up soon with one of the paths that go through our place. Ha ha ha! Strangers in a strange land…..what would we know?…..We hooked onto what looked like the path, but was in fact a badger trail. Now badgers, which are nocturnal animals, about the size of a middle sized dog, follow the same path each night on their excursions, see photos…..one is a badger trail and one is a walking path (a special prize for picking the right one!!) Anyway, we followed a badger trail that led us into a hedge!!! It was starting to get dusk and we began to get a bit panicky……there we were in the middle of rural England, trying to find our way home…..we finally got to another lane which runs along the back of our estate…..there was a telephone box, in the middle of nowhere (just in case we had 20p and knew someone who cared!). We found our way home, just as the mist rolled in……exquisitely beautiful.
Ana and the boys arrived a few days later and in our excitement, having picked them up from Heathrow, lost our way home and spent the next few hours trying to find the A12 to take us back into Essex – now that doesn’t sound like much, but in Friday traffic, the smallest distances in London take hours……we incurred congestion charges, cause we accidently ended up in the centre of London…….and that’s another whole story. It’s unbelievably fantastic having Ana and the boys here……..more later……lots of love xxxxx

Cambridge…….

…….it was a beautiful day and so we decided to visit Cambridge. It’s glorious, it reminded us a little of Auckland, a lot of Edinburgh, but it’s Cambridge - what else could it be but a beautiful university town steeped in tradition. Without getting too metaphysical about it, you feel you are walking in the presence of greatness. The buildings themselves give a sense of what has gone before and the throng of students provide hope for the future……answers to global warming etc, which is very much in evidence here….. It has been declared officially Spring (about 6 weeks early)….and it is lovely, but rather confusing, some birds didn’t even bother to migrate! The bulbs are bursting out of the ground, the wildlife is getting very frisky! We are thinking about turning off the central heating and are quietly thinking “call that winter!!! ”
We visited King’s College and went to Evensong as the Choristers were singing. We have observed that England is quite conservative and reserved in a lot of ways, particularly around religion and as we sat in the chapel we were aware that this service had been taking place in the same way for centuries, (since Henry VIII) who would want to change it?
We didn’t have an epiphany, but it was very nice………lots of love xxxxx

There really are a lot of people in this part of the world……..

…..as mentioned previously 80,000,000, give or take a few. Because of this things take longer than we are used to. The distances are the same as in NZ and the roading system is brilliant, but it always takes longer than you expect to get to places…..and to get things done.
Anyway…we had to ‘tax’ the car – we call it Registration, but nobody here knows what we are talking about! Anyway, should be simple, did it six month ago. Off we went down to the PO…”no, love…you haven’t got the log book(????), you’ll have to get that from the DVLA” …..You what????? Anyway we finally had to go to the place where we could get this sorted..shouldn’t take long we thought.. wrong! We were number 365 and they were only up to 330, we took heart from the fact that the place was closing at 3pm (on a Friday?) and hopefully they’d see everyone before they closed! We got our ‘tax’ finally and we are driving a legal car again…for another 6 months.
We came back to our local for a pint and the pub dog was wandering around hoovering up the crumbs off the floor from lunch, we shared a plate of fish and chips…..pub culture is quite different to café culture but equally satisfying!
We went to London on Thursday, it was a rainy day so didn’t take the camera – damn! You always should. Anyway we spent a wonderful day doofering around the National Art Gallery and then the National Museum….we only did the Impressionists at the Art Gallery and the Egyptians at the National Museum….. plenty more to do on the next rainy day in London…………..wish you were here xxxxxxxxxx

It’s unseasonably warm……..

We went to Southend on Sea today ( the last place for us to explore in Essex)..we’d been avoiding it because apparently it’s ‘tacky’, we decided to go because it’s the middle of winter and we thought it would be the best time to visit. Well as you can see from the photo, the streets were quite crowded… imagine what it would be like in the middle of the season? The South American buskers were busking and to keep warm were wearing feathers!....the buildings also sprout feathers! We’ve decided we’ve ‘done’ Essex now and so have to venture further in our weekly explorations, mind you London has a million faces yet to explore and beckons constantly. Meanwhile “life as a servant” continues and the other week we visited (sans camera unfortunately) Faulkbourne Hall – pronounced “Thornburn Hall”(??????) with our employers, who had been invited to lunch. It was rather impressive…Faulkbourne Hall has been declared the finest 15th century mansion now existing in the county, we didn’t get to stay for lunch, but were invited to wander around. We had a pub lunch down the road – not half bad – and not a bad way to spend a winter work day! January is the month the Brits hate most….. all the excitement of Christmas is over, the New Year’s resolutions are starting to crumble and it’s still a long way until summer and the next holiday break….Apparently Monday 21st January is the blackest day of the year for most Brits for the aforementioned reasons….Nine months down the track for us, we are still a bit in the honeymoon phase, BUT we are starting to feel the effects of driving, shopping and mixing constantly with 80 million other people. Except when we are at Mill Green Park, we constantly have to avoid banging into people as we walk (or drive!)……..miss you heaps and wish you were here xxxxxxxx
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Swimming in the Arctic Circle…….

……some Mothers do ‘ave em. We went to Sommeroy which is on the coast. It was gorgeous, we starting off in the gloom and after a few hours we came back in the dark. That’s how it is at this time of the year in Northern Norway. James kept muttering about having a swim, but who would….it was 3 degrees below zero. Anyway on the way back we stopped and James got out, stripped off, plunged in, got his gear back on and away we went again!!!!! Why??????
On the way home we saw a herd of reindeer, but there wasn’t enough light to photograph them. Home to more glorious food and Geir’s brulee……..Norway for us was about the dramatic landscapes and the hospitality…..can’t wait to return when the sun shines all day (and night!), we are hoping to get even further North to an island called Svalbard,(Spitzbergen), where the polar bears roam, (I hope to have a telephoto lens by then), otherwise it will be a postcard! As I write this, the sun will be just peeping over the horizon for a few minutes, increasing a little each day. Takes special kind of people to live in such a place and we are thrilled that we have this as part of our extended whanau. Life as a servant continues, but more about that later……..lots of love xxxxxxx

Celebrating….Tromso style…..

…. New Year’s Eve arrived and we were invited to take part in our neighbourhood’s traditional children’s parade. Families met at a special place at 4pm and each child held aloft a flaming (literally!) torch and off we paraded around the streets of our neighbourhood, as did families in other parts of the city. Another tradition to deal to the environment?? This was apparent all the time we were there, the windows of the houses were lit with ornamental lights creating an atmosphere of cheeriness and warmth in opposition to the bitter cold and dark. We peeled off from the parade at our place and Hannah and Sunnova then proceeded to smash the little gingerbread house that had been made before Christmas. This symbolizes new beginnings, very cool…. AND you get to eat a ginger bread house!!! Later on we went to our extending family’s home for more incredible hospitality, the food in Norway is amazing! At about 10 oclock we went outside and the Northern Lights were just starting. We had been hoping we would be lucky enough to see them, but unless the weather conditions are just so, in conjunction with a Solar Storm it doesn’t happen. But there they were, nobody else at the party was much bothered but us three Kiwis howled and yelled and got right into it until we were so cold we just had to go inside to warm up. (howling and yelling makes them stronger….it worked!!).
Now leading up to New Year’s Eve there were fireworks going off all around the place sporadically, a little like NZ experiences around Nov 5. We were told that New Years Eve was when everyone let off fireworks and that there was a public fireworks display that went off one of the surrounding mountains at midnight, but we didn’t even get to notice that. From 11.30pm until midnight the whole city went “OFF”, everyone in their own yard sending up the most amazing star shells and the like, emergency flares, you name it, anything that could be fired into the air was, we were gob struck…a whole city, around a fiord in complete harmony. We were told that the year of the tsunami, instead of buying fireworks the people of Tromso sent the money to Indonesia….what can you say????? Note to self……don’t go out in a boat and get into trouble on New Years Eve in Tromso….your flare would go completely unnoticed!!!!

It’s a “Hard Day’s Night” in Tromso………

…..and a long one, in fact the sun doesn’t rise, at all for several months. But it’s fantastic, you can tell it’s day time by a gradual, brief, lightening of the sky, except on cloudy days when it’s a bit hard to tell the difference between night and day. It’s quite good actually, because the hospitality is so fantastic that it’s about 3am before you know it and you just sleep until your eyes open…usually about 10am. Heading off for a ramble after breakfast (a sustaining affair of luxurious proportions)…you have to allow a good 20min to ‘rug up’. Although we only experienced a little bit of snow, the temperatures were definitely in the minus and so we had to put on heaps of extra layers (we aren’t really that fat!) and keep moving fast if you want to be home again before dark around 2pm….
We loved walking in the snow, it’s really hard to describe how beautiful the environment is even when it’s bleak…….one of the things we learned is that you never walk with your hands in your pockets, ice can surprise you at any moment and you can end up sitting on your proverbial……the grandchildren however just skate through it instinctively.
It was unusual being in a wooden city with no ‘high rises’. Tromso has a very frontier..ish feeling to it, which is not surprising being in the Arctic Circle. However, some of the architecture, the bridge building and tunnel systems are state of the art. Imagine a city on a mainland and an island, divided by a fiord, and connected through an amazing series of linked tunnels with roundabouts inside them. And over the fiord, beautiful flying bridges that are works of art…..we would show better photographs, but we’ll wait until there is more light or we upgrade our camera. The trolls of Tromso really know how to build tunnels, bridges and celebrate…….to be continued……..Happy New Year and we hope to see you this year xxxxxxxxxx