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
/>

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

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