Grandfather's back

 

But no I don’t mean me, Instead I’m referring to the family longcase clock. About 6 months ago, ‘his’ rope broke. This is a circular loop of rope used to wind he mechanism. To make  the required loop , one end has to be spliced with the other. This is a skilled and lengthy process but always produces a join which inevitably acts as  a critical point of failure however well done. For this reason more modern long case clocks have chains rather than ropes. When it finally went, I had to dismantle the clock and take his innards to a very traditional clock doctor in Salisbury whose family have been looking after him since the 1950s. I remember the first time that I assumed responsibility for arranging his care when they came to my mother’s house in the mid 1970s. ‘Ooo’ they said ‘this an oldie….look an external striking mechanism.’ Soon after I did some research on the maker – a John Price of Chichester who was active for a brief period in the 1780s, when the clock probably came into the family, then living at West Dean five miles north of Chichester. Anyhow, he’s now back tick-tocking away remarkably accurately despite his 250 years. Not worth much, as such clock aren’t in fashion but very nice for someone like me to have around still. I really missed him.

It’s the family associations as much as anything of course. My father, an engineer, did much too reconstitute his workings and polish him up apparently, so family lore says after a couple of decades of black-faced silence, propped up against an angled floor in a Portsmouth house condemned as it was sliding into a bog ! And that sort of association goes for much else in the house that many others might well regard as clutter.

I was thinking about his on my latest foreign trip, a brief hop-over o Rotterdam where the conference organisers have put me up – and I do mean ‘up’ – on the top 23^rd  floor of an uncompromisingly modern hotel by the harbour. It’s one of those pretentious places I most dislike. It could be anywhere, its avowedly minimalist, with no handles to the drawers, the cupboard doors or the coffee mug. In its desire to be different even the wood in the three cornered pencil is black. There’s no place to put anything, or even to work despite the generous size of the room. The coffee set is crammed onto a tiny space too small to operate it in. You have to take stuff out and put it on the floor. For all its determined stylishness, the whole place is ridiculous  - and I daresay not cheap. Give me my clutter anyday !

This break in the UK has been almost free of academic endeavour and very refreshing too, though equally busy. Lots of family events (including family trips to Bodiam castle and Bowood House and adventure playground)  which I won’t recount as many of my audience have participated in them but a joy for me having been away from them all so long. All sorts of other little things too, like being reminded that it’s not just Singapore that has fantastic trees – this 

‘weeping plane’ was amazing.

 

Some family history of course, especially in the form of side-trips when going to, and returning from, Burgess Hill which provides options for explorations of different  bits of ‘Till Country’. On one of them I even managed a walk in the New Forest and seeing signs of in-coming spring all around.

More recently, when returning from shopping in Devizes, I saw that I still had 12 ‘free’ electric miles on the clock and on an impulse decided to visit Adam’s grave on the hills behind the house. Partly to see whether I could make it, when feeling slightly under the weather. Pleased to say I could. Threading my way through thousands of cow-slips  I got to the top. Magnificent views all around and apart from the wind I had it all to myself. A first encounter with larks ascending. Downland is my favourite country I think, perhaps not surprising since the family seems to have lived in it for a thousand years !

It was all very quiet and peaceful – in strong contrast to the roar of battle here back in 715 when the Mercians first attacked and defeated the forces of Wessex. Looking north it was easy to see the way they would have come following the little modern road snaking its way through a valley in the downs. From there it was only a gentle though long rise to the earthen fortifications around the Adam’s grave burial mound where the Wessex force had probably established themselves. Behind the Wessex forces a steep drop down into Pewsey vale, awful country for a retreat after defeat. Wessex got its revenge however a century later in 825 at nearby Wroughton.

Then there were two exhibitions at the British Museum one on the Samurai (with a dramatic battle rendition clearly echoing the first one in the Tom Cruise film) and another on Hawaii (with a cloak made of the feathers of what must have been thousands of little birds) .

Add to that an ‘Old Boys’ session at a village pub south of Salisbury, a Friends of Wiltshire Churches meeting, checking on one’s various life support systems, linking up with long-term colleague etc, together with  restoring the garden, getting the tractor mended, arranging for a new gardener and having some tree surgeons in, I haven’t been idle. Less constructively but equally necessary, a huge variety of dangerously overdue business affairs, not least of which has been trying to access a long closed bank account in the US. The byzantine convolutions one has to go through in order to lay one’s hands on one’s own money is quite staggering. Much more pleasant to potter about in the garden building up collapsed brick vegetable patch surrounds, get things mowed, feeding the birds, putting in more beans,  and so on. 

But I have to say that this little trip to Rotterdam illustrates the point that the academics haven’t entirely gone away. Stuff is still coming in on the internet and always in the background Ukraine and Trump’s ‘Epic Fury’ against Iran (or Epic something else – a 6 lettered hyphenated word with the same first two letters, as its known in the Washington think-tank community.)  It won’t be long before I’m fully immersed in such stuff again as I return to Singapore, if only for quite a brief while.  

ANOTHER NEW YEAR AND HOMEWARD BOUND

 

My time in Singapore this time has simply flashed by in part because I have been much busier than usual. I’ve finished with my last long teaching session, enjoying the student contact as much as ever. In fact they have been both the largest and arguably the best group I have ever had. Not just in their written work (where AI means one has to be wary of high standards these days) but in the presentations and class participation part of it as well. A nice bunch to end with. I was actually very touched when a Philippine student, who’s fine but not outstanding in the class, sidled up to me as I left and presented me with a bag of Philippine cakes and biscuits, for me ‘to have with your coffee.’ So that side of things, has been great,  though I am less enamoured with all the bureaucratic nausea that goes with teaching these days.  

Of course the big event of the last three weeks was Chinese New Year, when again I was invited to attend a family – and really its should be dynastic – celebration. A good 50 people all told with a lot of chattering (about half of which was in Hokkien or Mandarin) the rest in English or Singlish. This was, I have to say full on. I was there about 8 hours. Much eating - and drinking though I have noticed that the locals are much more abstemious  with alcoholl than most of us decadent westerners. One highlight is the ‘Prosperity Toss.’  All the ingredients of this are gathered ceremoniously into a representation of the year – in this case the Year of the Fire Horse. Hence the horse head picture of the plate.

All of the ingredients are ‘auspicious’ of something or other – health, wealth, good fortune, lots of children etc. Once assembled everyone pitches in with chop sticks and chants theoretically tossing the contents into the air to lock in the beneficial effects. Large numbers need to do it in relays ! Aficionados try to hit the ceiling but we didn’t have any of them. Its fun, but I’m not sure the video of my role in this will work.(it didn't)

The other major activity was Blackjack. The real thing – and it has to be with money, usually based on the Hong Bao money one gives out to kids – in ceremonial red packets. I had come prepared for this of course. Two and a half hours. I was pleased only to be down by 3 dollars  at the end. The real card sharps were the kids who can’t be seen in this pic. The other grandfather in the pic (and there were several present at various stages) seemed very stern, did everything in Hokkien, but lost ‘heavily’. Interestingly they didn’t allow increasing bets after the cards were dealt but had a lot of special cases to be remembered. It certainly passed the time !

That and related activity practically gutted one week and the one before saw us squeezing in a very compressed trip to Kuala Lumpur. Lots of academic interactions, including their defence University. But two of us (I must admit at my suggestion as a perpetual grockle) went off to look at what is now called the Seri Negara a rather grand summerhouse that used to be one of the major colonial headquarters. General Templar stayed there during the Malayan Emergency of the 1950s. It now houses a technically very upmarket museum of Malaya’s path to independence. It was fascinating to compare this with the special exhibition My colleagues and I had been shown round at Singapore’s National Library the week before.

This was based on the so-called  ‘Albatross file’ – something that had been kept secret since 1965. This up-ended the long assumption that Singapore, after years of difficult negotiations, had effectively been kicked out of the British inspired Malayan Federation (of Malaya, Brunei and Singapore) by the Malaysians – effectively Tunku Rahman. This led to Lee Kuan Yew famously crying on TV when he announced it to his people, believing that the city wouldn’t prosper on its own. The file showed in fact that there were a group of Singaporean senior politicians who thought that Malaysia would be an ‘albatross’ tied around Singapore’ neck and who actively strove for independence.

But the Malaysian exhibition literally didn’t even mention Singapore; nor did it have more than a passing reference to the ‘Confrontation’  of the 1960s with Indonesia, when British forces protected Singapore, Brunei, Sarawak and Sabah against Indonesian military attacks. There was also plenty of references to colonial exploitation generally not seen in Singapore. I found all this really interesting and illustrates the tensions below the surface in all the local relationships, of which the little local war between Cambodia and Thailand is another example. But as you can see, it was a delightful building and made for a very fulfilling visit.

          Of course, Singapore has indeed prospered on its own, doing much better than both Indonesia and Malaysia so far. But as this shot of KL at night time from the open air top floor bar and pool of my hotel shows, the city isn’t by any means a sleepy little town either. Though it has a much more extensive, scruffier, old ethnic Chinatown than Singapore. On one day we were invited to another full-on Chinese New Year lunch with prosperity tosses and all the rest of it in the  heart of that area which was really, really noisy and great fun. The only problem a programme mix-up meant this was our second big lunch of the day, having already had one at NDU. But our host had gone to so much trouble we all did our best. Fortunately the next stop was the airport.

On top of all this there were quite a few invites out and special events, so apart from staggering around the Botanic Gardens a few times, I found I had much less time for grockling than I had anticipated. But there’s always May, when all being well I shall be back for several weeks. After all this Allington will seem very quiet.   

Things old and new

 

It’s shortly the year of the Fire Horse and it would be hard for Singaporeans not to be aware of that. This one stands, or rather rears,  in the middle of New Bridge Street which is a busy road that runs alongside Chinatown.

Upper Hokkien street feeds into it. I mention that since that’s where I get my Lapsang Souchong tea from (though it costs a lot more here than it does in Devizes, make of that what you will). The horse appeared almost overnight – a nice illustration of the blending of old and new. Old ideas, new format. That goes for Chinatown too and in fact everywhere in Singapore despite the surface modernity of much of it. Look closely, or around the corner, and you’ll find bits of the original still hanging in there. It’s why I like it, I suppose. 

Behind the horse for example you can see the Majestic theatre. It looks like an Art Deco cinema, but actually it was a Cantonese Opera House built in 1927 so it’s not very likely that either my father or Cherry’s went there when stationed here or passing through before the war. Cantonese opera is an acquired taste. They would certainly have recognised Chinatown, though, and the Tiger and Tsingtao beer is probably much the same. 

            Perhaps that train of thought was set off by my re-visiting the refurbishing Singapore national museum last weekend. It’s in a splendidly recycled colonial era building – probably the biggest in Southeast Asia – founded in the mid 19^th Century. To cover up the on-going refurbishment they put on two big displays of Singapore’s history, mercifully free of the anti-Imperial cant so common these days. One was a kind of sound and light show that you walked through by descending a circular ramp, starting with today and going down to the remote past. It was very effective and photogenic.

I liked this portrayal of the old kampong days, and the awfulness of the war was particularly well done. Equally so, its depiction of the sinking of the Prince of Wales and Repulse in December 1941. But the fore and after really comes across from old photos, like this one of the river just before the First World War.

 Now the river is almost completely empty apart from a few tourist boats chugging around – all the shipping has shifted now partly to Keppel Harbour and now to a brand-new ultra-modern, automated port at Tuas at the western end of the island. Building that was a gigantic project of extraordinary complexity that puts our shambling H2S to shame. There’s nothing like a bit of ‘guided democracy’ to get things done ! It’s the same at my university campus which was largely green when we first came here 20 odd years ago but now has no less than three underground stations being built on it with twisting overhead tracks all over the place. It’s still full of trees though. Likewise the shop-houses on the quayside behind the boats in the river are still there, though mainly restaurants and bars these days.

I go to college twice a week by public transport the underground -or MRT Mass Rapid Transport and bus (and once by minivan) and am always struck by how deeply underground my Downtown line is. The lift, if uninterrupted, takes a full minute travelling quite fast to get down to my platform. Some of the escalators are hugely long. And yet before the war when the military wanted to dig trenches on the Padang ( Singapore’s equivalent of a village green even with the cricket club nearby) for protection against Japanese planes, they were dissuaded by the locals who said the water table was so high they would flood. Or so we are told !

Anyhow enough of that.  I have been extremely busy teaching and participating in conferences and the like, not the leisured life I had been thinking of, but can still find time for the odd local excursion to favoured places. Unimaginative it might be, but the Botanical Garden just next door a great and easy lure. There’s nearly always something to see.

It might be a shot of a white-fronted waterhen picking his way across the lily-pads or a tiny Kingfisher, or this chap, a monitor lizard dozing at the water’s edge right by the path, so well camouflaged that most people walked past without seeing him, even though he was a good 5 feet long. 

I did spot him , and took the photo.  while I was so engaged, a small group of young French gentlemen came over to see. ‘Oooo la,la,’ one said, impressed. I didn’t know they really said that !

A sleeping dragon beginning to wake up. So, to summarise, out here one quietly continues to take delight in little things, be they old or new.    

Welcome home !

 

 

Well, that’s what they said to me when I got back to Singapore after the Christmas break. That was because under my current contract I am resident of Singapore not a visitor, but it felt strange all the same as I had already had a very good welcome home beforehand ! Nice though, all the same. I had a hassle free flight to the UK arriving in the early hours of December 9^th, got home finding everything in order, unpacked and then went out straightaway to Devizes to get the necessary Christmas tree – or two if there was a suitable small one for the dining room. I was shocked to find the usual place of purchase almost completely denuded but managed just one and that was shorter than usual. The rest of the day everything went up and two months of postage was processed.

Team Powell arrived just after a big Sainsbury’s delivery which also had to be stashed away. The Walthamstow gang arrived the following day. The first Christmas dinner was at te King’s Arms – an enormous affair and very welcome. Fun and jollity followed. It was great  first part of an extended Christmas-New Year break. Packed with activity and two weeks completely free of academics, apart from emails, which just can’t be escaped.

A couple of days on my own, in which I sorted things out and started packing for my return flight and chased up an errant US bank account and arranged the fiendishly expensive travel insurance I now have to pay for an extended stay abroad. The to Cross-in-hand. On the way I treated my self to a trip to Bosham, a place connected with the House of Godwinson and the beginnings , I like to think, of the family history project I am aiming to do. Fascinating and lovely place well worth a visit. I parked at the water’s edge and enjoyed a sandwich before doing the local Church. It’s thought also to be the place where Cnut bade the tide stop rising. His 8 year old daughter is buried in the Church after having drowned in the harbour. It doesn't lookit from this angle but is one of the oldest Saxon/Early Norman Churches

It's also the place from which Harold Godwinson, the future victim of the Battle of Hastings, and the Tills' probable landlord set out on his ill-fated visit to William Duke of Normandy. This is how the Church is portrayed in the Bayeux tapestry. The church looks a bit different now but the great Saxon chancel arch is still there.

On Christmas eve,  a carol service in which we made our way around selected suitable sites, a pub appropriately called the star, and into a very upmarket stable (with a swimming pool in a local farmstead) with a real baby Jesus who only had a melt-down when being out back into his car having performed his role perfectly up to then. The Church itself of course and some moments around a blazing and most welcome bonfire. All very nice, and made up for the fact that at the last minute I couldn't get into Salisbury cathedral for its spectacular version because it was completely full. Christmas day itself was a jolly one and busy one, especially when all the Patricks came. Time also for a walk to a nearby wood and on Boxing day all the clan turned up for present exchanges more eating and drinking and of course the expected photo on the stairs.

Back to Wiltshire for a couple of days via another House of Godwin Church (Compton two miles north of West Marden the first documented Till residence in 1386). I largely finished packing for the flight back to Singapore, changed library books, got my next stash of pills, brought some firewood in from the garage and battened the garden down for what seemed likely to be a cold snap after I left. R,S + V arrived on the 30^th. The second Christmas supper out at the Peppermill in Devizes followed. New Year’s eve to the Savernake forest to track down – and measure ! – some of its collection of grand old  oaks, the  Big Belly Oak is especially famous, one of the 50 finest old national trees, right be the road unfortunately. The Seymour Oak 10 meters in circumference also had a hollow interior which Violet enjoyed and the equally impressive Cathedral oak. Here two members of the team peer out from the latter.

It was a beautiful day and the slightly misty woodland looked fantastic even without the big oaks.

The cows in Allington got a second visit, though Violet wasn’t as keen on being licked as Barney’s Ambrin was ! Then it was take-down and departure time. All hands to the plough. RS+V left at 1200, my Heathrow taxi an hour later. Timings were tight !

 

And that was that. Or so I thought. Because for only the second time in my life I was given an upgrade to First Class which turned out to be a very nice way to start the New Year !

Homewards bound ?

 

I hope that the title is not tempting Providence, but I’m checked in largely packed and nearly ready to go. The last few weeks have been busy with all the usual teaching routines. I am very pleased with the enthusiasm of my students, and in awe of their ability to engage in a language which for quite a few of them is not their own. It’s nice teaching note to go out on.

          And, talking of ‘going out’, an Australian colleague sent me an article  in a prestigious English language marine science journal in Indonesia which was largely about me and which ended with a glowing obituary, because I had sadly died back in 2017, aged 76. I was also born in Manchester I gather. Interesting.

          So when I was taken out last night to

a Chinese restaurant by a couple of my long-time ex-students, I was pleased to encounter this which is basically a promise of a long life and lots of money. As you can see the décor was largely given over to gambling. Talking of money  my insurance company finally paid up my medical expenses last may which was a considerable relief.

I’m not as fat as I look in the picture it was just the way I was slouching in my chair. A lot of Ipoh noodles and fish balls to process. One of the reasons why the weight is under control before the fast approaching Christmas splurge is that I’ve been a regular hiker through the Botanic gardens. There are always things to see. Their collection of trees is fantastic and this time in a remote part of it that I had never got to before, I found some delightful parkland with a couple of bizarrely but attractive colonial buildings. One called ‘Iverturret’ which looked like it sounds and housed an interesting botanical museum with to my astonishment housed a collection of really enviable 15-17the botanical books. Surely they must have been replicas, but the notices didn’t say so.

    Another fun day was one out with the navy it was an occasion for naval families but I was shown round by a couple of my ex-students. We visited  a landing ship, dressed overall as they say, and I got in some more sea time by chugging round the harbour in a little landing craft around Sentosa island which Cherry and I liked to frequent for some swimming and beach time. Nice to see it again this time from the sea.

One the memorable events though was not Singaporean at all, namely a stupendous and very large exhibition of the Impressionists at the National Gallery. There were at least a couple of hundred of them. Must have been worth a fortune. They were nearly all from the Boston Art Gallery so I suppose I must have seen at least some of them before as Cherry and I visited the latter several times in our last ten years, but I couldn't  say I remembered any of them. But it did remind me of how much I liked Pisarro, radical revolutionary though he might have been.

         

Another treat was being invited to the Christmas party at the High Commission. It was packed and very British. Carols sung by a choir of little girls from the ‘Brighton School, ’ mulled wine and some really nice mince pies.  And so on that un-Singaporean note, this ends with the usual Season’s greetings, outside one of the shopping malls nearby. But somehow the sunshine and hot temperatures make this look all wrong !

Prowling in the City of Cats

 

My time away in Singapore certainly began with a bang. I arrived on Friday evening, settled in over the weekend, got some groceries, unpacked 3 suit cases and a big box, then packed for a departure on Monday. This was after a morning at work meeting my students for the first time. No time to register and get access to any of the office systems,  but straight off to a workshop on Maritime Law Enforcement  that was organised by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in Kuching, Sarawak.

The clientele were about 60 officers from 5 Southeast Asian coastguards. It sounds tedious but was actually rather fun. I especially enjoyed being part of an inspection team going aboard a suspect vessel, and finding dodgy paperwork, 4 stowaways, three ill and possibly contagious, and the fourth carrying a bag of white powder. For me it was an eye-opener in how complicated all these procedures are, and how sticking to the letter of the law (in order to secure a conviction) makes things so difficult in a boat heaving about on the sea. (Ours wasn’t). The Trump administration’s approach is certainly simpler. Although the purposes were serious, it was fun all the same.

        My lot christened themselves ‘Team Geoff’ in my honour and very solicitously made sure I didn’t fall down any hatchways, There was lots of socialising and good eating, but of course since this was official business in a Muslim country no booze. Here's me at the podium, not wandering around as I usually do.

 However the foreign elder experts ( two ex-naval captains, one Spanish and one Colombian and me ) were recommended a restaurant in the city where we could satisfy any such cravings. It was excellent and so was the food. And then it was all over.

Except for me. I had arranged to stay on a couple of days as I wanted to redo Kuching which we had visited and much liked I guess about 20 years ago. It's supposed to have an association with cats and you see cat motifs all over the place,

statues, restaurant names, pictures etc etc. Staying on was a very good decision and I really enjoyed myself goggling at temples, doing all the museums, finding all the old colonial buildings left over from the extraordinary and amazingly enlightened times of the three famous British Rajahs called Brooks (whose family home I think was near Sheepstor in southern Dartmoor, as different as different could be) who ran the place until the Second World War. Quite a riposte to the all-pervading anti-Empire tropes of today. One price of this which, incidentally comes over very clearly wandering around the memorials in the Anglican cathedral in Singapore. Hardly any of them lived beyond 50, though I suppose that's partly because they would normally have gone back to the UK on retirement. Even so the poignancy is noticeable.  Certainly to judge by many of the street names, the locals have no problem with their colonial past. How about this as the colonnade of the general post office. The only corinthian columns in Borneo.

The best of the museums was the ultramodern Borneo Cultures Museum which certainly had things to goggle at, like this carved head. Talking of heads, the remains of that of the so-called Niah Lady who had been formally buried in a cave  with some rock art of boats an incredible 35,000 years ago was a real eye-opener.  Still on the subject of heads, some of the locals were head-hunters, of course. One of the museum’s displays had 5 of them suspended from the roof of the replica  ‘head house, ’ all blackened by the smoke of countless files, but still just about  recognisable. I presume they were real !

Anyhow enough of Kuching. I have a big class for my elective, the biggest ever in fact. Here are some of them. All very keen and so far at least bright. Very varied, a senior Malaysian policeman, a Chinese naval officer, civil servants from Singapore, a contingent from India and a young lady from Honduras. Etc etc.  The fees here are not negligible, so they must really want it ! Otherwise I have been settling back into the university routine, getting my residency permit that kind of thing.

Not that much sight-seeing so far. settling means getting supplies,doing my bit for King and country with some patriotic cheese,

setting out my work area etc. All outings for a purpose, but I have patronised my favoured locales, got some more tea from the Wang San Yang Tea Merchant, bought some books inevitably, pottered around antique shops and off to meetings in the British High Commission tomorrow. I managed to get a bit more sea-time with the Navy going out on one of the tank landing craft on a day reserved for naval families. I tried to find candles to light for Cherry but nothing doing at either of the Cathedrals or even the Armenian church.

Many of these outings do enable one to get little pleasures like coming across this charming mix of interwar shop-houses with what looks like a 1937 Art Deco cinema squashed in the middle.

But being right next to the Singapore Botanic Gardens, the natural tendency is to take the soft though usually very hot option of having a poke around there. You never know what you’ll spot. It might be working out why the denizens of the ponds are called red eared terrapins. 

Last time I was looking a bit vaguely at a bunch of flowers but became aware of something big buzzing around and managed to get an excellent shot of the culprit hovering above a big flower before diving in so deep only a little bit of black bottom was visible. I am told it was a broad footed carpenter bee. He was about 4 centimetres long. Quite a sight !  

Farewell and adieu

 

The title seems appropriate, even though there are no Spanish ladies in sight. Beth would get the allusion. After an unusually long time at home I am on my travels again – in fact typing this on the plane to Singapore. Although it’s split in two by a short flit home for Christmas, this will be the last long trip away, as I have definitely reached the end of the road as far as this sort of thing is concerned. It’s not that being away in itself is bad, it’s all the opportunity costs that accumulate and await one’s return like assassins in the dark. Quite apart from missing out on precious family occasions, it’s all the domestic business disorder, the garden on the verge of going completely wild and the house on the edge of potentially uninsured collapse. It’s not that my part time gardeners an cleaning ladies have been slacking at their jobs. They have no more spare time to compensate for my absence than I do – a condition that seems to afflict  all of us these frenetic days.

The upshot is that the last three months or so, have passed not with relaxed time sitting about in a sunny garden that I had been half expecting (or at least hoping for) but instead with a blur of activity in all three domains (personal business, garden and house) interspersed with one trip to Sweden and several family occasions in which I could do none of them ! On top of that there was a super-abundant harvest to cope with. In carrots, just as the apples, greengages and potatoes mentioned earlier. My best ever production of copious numbers of carrots that looked just as they should – unearthed the day before my departure, and demanding preservation. 

And in the background of course the unending task of keeping up with the news, lest it embarrassingly invalidates the judgements arrived at in my forthcoming book, now with publishers. So far so good ! Anyhow, by teetering about on the top of ladders painting window in the top story of the house or sawing off the tops of overgrown Thorn trees, endless trans-Atlantic business phone calls (now embargoed by the US shutdown), digging extra flood defences, etc, much has been achieved.  But it was decidedly not a rest cure.

It was not, however, all unremitting hard labour. There were quite a few family occasions to remind me of what really matters. There was the opportunity to participate in the primitive fire banner processions of Sussex with the Cross-in-Hand gang and, more recently, a stay with Team Powell in Burgess Hill with a tour of the fort and port of Newhaven, on a bleak day which made the whole area look like the end of the world. I had thought it was another Martello tower built to keep Napoleon at bay. Actually, it was an extensive late Victorian coastal artillery fort which morphed into a naval base for fast boat operations in the Channel during World War II. It was certainly big enough to have room after room of miliary displays of the whole period. A great place for small boys - with long corridors to run through, spectacular views of the sea down below and any number of mysterious nooks, crannies and rusting bits of aggressive looking military kit.

I also played host to an ex-student from Newport days over here for a course. Now a Captain in the Chilean Navy he presented me with a  bottle of wine, commissioned by the submarine he commanded. It’ll take some resolution to drink something so special. In return I gave him my de luxe special Wiltshire weekend – a guided tour of the Caen locks and Devizes, Stonehenge, Salisbury Cathedral including the Magna Carta, the doom painting in St Thomas’ church, the watermill, lunch in the top floor of he Antique centre, Old Sarum, West Kennett long barrow, Silbury Hill, the stone circle, dovecot, old barn, manor gardens and Church at Avebury ! I had a whale of a time. Even being presented with the first picture of myself outside the front door of the Arts building of my school in the Cathedral close !

I think he enjoyed himself, too. He certainly took lots of ace pictures. I really like this picture of Stonehenge though it’s a pity about the people on the right.  At least he went away knowing a lot more about Wiltshire, than he started with. 

Very interested in the house, and that weird stuff on the roof. He seemed  pleased about all this at least since with a name like Green, he is of British/Italian extraction. Chileans keep the surnames of both parents,  but normally follow the male line). His English is impressively fluent. Altogether a high-flyer. The tour was over 2.5 days and there were more restful evenings at the Peppermill and the Kings Arms of course where  the steak supper for two was good enough to impress a Chilean which is really saying something.

There was, though, a sombre side to my time here with two particular friends bravely battling through a cancer diagnoses and my needing to attend the funeral of a close naval colleague. He was another ex-student, brilliant, and going on to become a law professor, after leaving the service. Much younger than me and a real shock. I suppose I have reached the age where one must expect that kind of thing. I was also struck by the announced death of Shirley Abacaire – an Australian zither player of all things  A bjg name in the 1950s, (how innocent that sounds !) but not thought of for decades and certainly one  that means nothing to anyone now in the family, although it does to me.  The transience of things.  Such news, though reminds me how lucky I am especially after my fun and games in May. It certainly puts an overgrown garden and administrative hassles into their proper perspective.

…and finally here is proof that I made it to Singapore ! The black case, though wasn’t mine. It was brought in from store by mistake by the very nice people running the apartment block. Even I don’t travel with four large suitcases, a big cardboard box full of kitchen paraphernalia and two carry-ons, heavy with laptops etc.