Back in Newport

Getting away from home was stressful as I discovered that water was coming in through the roof of the annex kitchen, seeping in via the decayed thatch on the garage next door. It had also knocked out the all the electrics. Obviously I couldn't leave things the way they were for two months before I got back.   So in the three hours or so before the taxi came to take me to Heathrow I had to locate a thatcher to remedy the leak and once that was done an electrician to restore the power. It was after that awful weekend weather and, to judge by the number of unanswered phone calls , all such people  were out dealing with other disasters . I managed it in the end, sort of, but left for Heathrow feeling a bit limp. It was a good job I was packed up and ready to go well beforehand: even so I had to get Mick the taxi-driver to stop just to check I really had packed my passport in all the excitement.  I was really glad to immerse myself once more in the comforts of air travel.

Once back in Newport the repair process set in motion before I left actually worked amazingly well - with the help of Nathan and his Dad. The leak was stopped with a tarpaulin the following day and unbelievably the thatcher got to work in a couple of weeks. My normal thatcher couldn't have fitted it in before the Summer but coincidentally the chap who did the garage back in the 1990s had already contacted me and since it was a simple job said he could squeeze it in before his next big project. The only problem is that he's a foreigner - from Somerset- and won't do it quite in the Wiltshire way. Sharp rather than rounded edges. I was able to keep in touch and, with the aid of photos, sent by e-mail helped sort out, from the other side of the Atlantic, the original leak problem caused by badly fitted lead flashing under the thatch. Amazing what modern technology can enable you to do !

Newport seemed much the same as far as I could see. Autumn, as they call it here - not 'Fall' - is quite advanced with leaves all over the place and some great colours to be seen. The town is famous for its mansions but it deserves some recognition for its many magnificent trees, really big ones. As this photo shows, if you stand still long enough they will physically engulf you.

 

 

I visited one of the mansions left over from the Summer tours - Chateau sur Mer again marvelling at the trees which looked far older than the 150 years which is all they can be. Over the road at Bellecourt there was a lot of excitement with the wedding of a 'famous film star' Jennifer Lawrence (who I've not heard of, but never mind). The place was full of the police, press, fire engines and of groupies and gawpers watching all the comings  and goings until late at night. I should have hired out the front bedroom with its perfect  view....

Just over a week later I left Newport again for a conference in Australia, one of a regular series that Cherry and I have been too on many occasions over the years. It was based at a big conference centre at Darling Harbour  in Sydney, an attractive place we knew well, stacked with nice restaurants and a big Maritime Museum at one end. My hotel is the tall dominating block with a hard rock cafe in the basement - not that I heard a thing.

I quite enjoyed re-visiting old sites. The conference was fine, the attached naval defence exhibition bigger than ever. We always enjoyed these - Cherry to pick up all the freebies, me all the industrial gossip about who was selling what to whom and why.  Most of the people who staff these stands must be bored out of their minds unless occasionally dealing with people who seriously want to buy a Destroyer or two and are quite candid and expansive when talking to harmless academics like me with no axe to grind.  I did get a few freebies, but nothing like the amount that Cherry would have cajoled out of them for the grandkids - pens, notebooks, bags, glasses cleaners, adaptors, koala bears and so forth.

Newport also has a lot of tiny intimate burial grounds, as they call them, attractive places in which to meditate on mortality in the best historic tradition. I had gone to a lecture on gravestones in the area and so resolved to explore one of them - Clifton Burial Ground near the Library.

Obviously with Cherry's second anniversary coming up I've been thinking even more than usual about such things and was particularly struck by one tiny gravestone to a Phoebe Marsh who died in 1729. I wonder who she was - a child ?- and thought now she would have been forgotten as though she had never existed if it wasn't for this small piece of engraved and fragile stone and maybe some documentary evidence.

But because of it she lives on - in a way.  Cherry does too, of course, mainly in the memory of those who knew and loved her but with much more tangible evidence all around. I talk to her photos all the time and, glory be, have found a local Episcopalian Church on my way to work where they still have real candles you can light.

It's turned much colder now in Newport, but in the main the weather is still generally bright and sunny, and there's a certain amount of tooth-sucking going on that it's going to be a bad winter. But there was a brief spell when some really savage winds and heavy rain tore across the island. Regardless, as they would say over here,  I had a Sunday lunch pic-nic in the Snowbird, as I have named my Jeep, at Brenton Point watching the waves crashing against the rocks.

Such a contrast with the week before in which the same place was warm and sunny, the sea flat as a millpond providing plenty of opportunities for artistic shots of rock and waves and of a cooperative cormorant or two. One of things I've done recently is attend a presentation in the Redwood about a famous photographer of the interwar period called Russel Lee - quite inspiring.  

We've had Halloween as well, which they make much more of than we do though my colleagues say there's been a noticeable decline in the number of trick-or-treaters calling at peoples' houses. Maybe that's just as well since some of the tricks are on the unfunny side involving toilet paper, spray painting with shaving foam and even egging cars ( which I am told damages the paintwork). Sounds a bit more like a protection racket. 'Nice place you have here, Sir. Shame if it got damaged.' To avoid that kind of thing localities are now doing these things more collectively. Nothing like that happened here but I was amazed at how seriously they took it in the staid War College - with departments competing for the prize in who displayed the most pumpkins, skeletons and pumpkins. We didn't enter it of course ! But anyway, next stop Christmas, and I'm already beginning to think about the next trip home to see family - and the new thatch.