Elephants on the Roof and Other Exciting Things

Elephants  on the Roof and Other Exciting Things

From my house on rough and stormy days, I can hear the crashing of the waves. One weekend I went out to nearby Brenton Point to see what I could see of it, closer up. As always I lamented the fact that the great coast defence works around the point (built in the late 1930s as the US was coming out of the great Depression partly to provide jobs for the locals) made access to the beach a bit of a challenge. And there were notices galore warning people to stay off the rocks (which are ignored of course). But  to be fair I can see why. The sea is battering the defences, solid as they are,  to pieces and there are nasty iron remnants of old walkways all over the place that could do the unwary serious harm.  Nonetheless it's frustrating looking down but not being able to get at great baulks of timber on the beach that would be really useful for bridging the ditch at Wansdyke.

                I wasn't alone in my wanderings. There's an endless fascination about a turbulent sea lashing at the coast. Quite a few people  were trying to capture the drama of the waves with phones and cameras including a  nice young lady from Delaware with lots of hair. She asked me, as an evident local, for some directions to the nearest lighthouse, and then said that I didn't sound as though I was from around here either. I owned up to coming from the UK. She said she hadn't been there but to make up for it offered that she had been to Prague. So that was alright. And it was awesome that I was teaching at the Naval War College.  We parted with mutual expressions of esteem.

                Tourists like her are beginning to reappear in Newport and some of the Mansions have started opening up for the season, which really only begins in May/June time. But the weather isn't all that accommodating. Strong winds brought down several big trees along the Avenue, closing it for a while. One big branch came off just over the fence which would have made quite a difference to my plans had it fallen ten feet this way. The squirrels are out in force pairs of them chasing each other around in the tree and lumbering over my roof  - hence the elephants. Rats with tails they might be, but fun to watch if not listen to. Birds are appearing too. I put up an improvised feeder but had to come up with a serious strategy to keep the squirrels from raiding it. Great success with a better shot of a Tufted Titmouse, a nice little thing with button black eyes.

However the pesky squirrels are evidently not ornithologists.  Their final victory came last week as they not only raided the feeder but stole the whole thing.  How they did it I cannot imagine, as it was nearly 12 inches long and 4" wide and had a great heavy sea shell wedged into the top as an improvised cover. Moreover it was suspended from a high tree branch swinging in free air with no other branches nearby. I even used a  long piece of fishing line I found on the beach to hang it, thinking there was no way squirrels they could climb down it. I've looked everywhere to see where the feeder ended up and cannot locate it. Game set and match to the rats with tails I am afraid.   

                Some passing excitements too. A big dinner with all colleagues at the Victoria Military Society  which they model as closely as they can to a British Military Mess Dinner, and everyone who can turns up in uniform - some quite bizarre - the Honourable Artillery Company of Massachusetts and so forth. I squeezed into mine too at the earnest representations of my colleagues and it wasn't too much of a disaster. I could eat my roast beef of old England at any rate . The beef was paraded around the throng with the inevitable piper of course. It was all quite weird.

                Talking of weird,  this is what most sane people would think aptly describes what I thought the biggest excitement for me over the past several weeks.  First though I should say that to have a change from things naval I sometimes indulge myself with dabbling in family history. It really isn't easy, although I think when ordinary people have access to Artificial Intelligence family history will become much, much simpler. Tracing all possible permutations in family relationships is hugely complicated. I think in fact it's the most intellectually challenging thing I have ever done. I had one breakthrough last year when I realised that one William Till was another's father. With a lot of really complicated reasoning I managed to construct a possible family tree going back to 1674, but there was a lot of reasoned surmise (one step up from guesswork)  in it. The magic moment for me suddenly came when I spotted the date (1787) and place of the death of yet another William Till. Since his age had been recorded, I instantly realised who he must be and that validated the whole thing.  It wasn't inspired guesswork any more. It was actually true !  All that agonising had paid off !  Wow...

                Well, at least it keeps me off the streets.

Gong Xi Fa Cai

Happy New (Lunar) Year

The last few weeks have been busy indeed including Christmas and two new years, ending with the Chinese one -  the Lunar New Year. The trouble with being away from home for so long is that when one returns there are a million and one things to do, especially over the holiday season. But these started for me with some work commitments at Kings, Portsmouth, Brussels and Breda in the Netherlands. The later seemed especially ill-starred as both my Eurostar trains were cancelled, obliging me to shift to less convenient alternatives. Then twice in one week there was an 'incident' on the line near Maidenhead (a phrase that often denotes a suicide attempt) which closed all the lines going in and out of Paddington. Confusion. Hopping off and on trains going back to Reading.  Stress ! Would I be able to connect with my Eurostar ?! I made it though. The same thing happened on the way back two days later ! To cap it all, after a lovely London day out with the family out on the Saturday of that week GWR cancelled my last train home. (I didn't think they actually did that kind of thing !) I was a lot luckier than many others who wanted to go further down the Plymouth line - as the 'Swindon and paid-for taxi option' worked quite well for me. This was all a bit deleterious of the festive spirit I have to say.

                But it didn't take away one highlight of that day - which for me was accompanying Philippa and Martha to a little shop in Covent Garden to get Martha her first pair of ballet shoes with points. The shop was full of Russians; that expectations, drama and tensions were running high was evident as soon as one crossed the threshold. Particularly,  a family whose daughters were visibly upset and jealous of a girl younger than them getting the coveted shoes when they had been found to be 'not ready'. The air was electric. Wonderful ! 

                 Brussels was in its full Christmas  regalia with a hugely  thronged Christmas market  and a spectacular sound and light show in the Grand Place. I did all the usual things and patronised the familiar cafes, not forgetting to pat the stuffed horse in the King of Spain, as I have been doing since the 80s at least. My picture of it didn't come out for some reason. There were a lot more students in my class than usual ,from all over Europe and they were very good.  No problem at all. Some of the products of this trip (Belgian chocolates and beer) were distributed round the family over an extensive and varied Christmas period. Chris and Beth checked in to Wansdyke first, closely followed by Shelagh and the next day Team Powell, and it was very jolly and included a service in Salisbury Cathedral which was a bit shortened as I got the time wrong ! The weather wasn't inviting but we managed a trip round the village to see the cows.

 

 

 

Team Powell and I rendezvoused again at Simon, Ruth and Violet's new house at Cross-in-Hand in Sussex (Weird how that Tills keep returning to the county of our ancestors !) for the first of my New Years, which was great. On New Year's day we all went for a walk on the Downs guided by Angus, who disconcertingly kept disappearing into thick fog before our eyes. On my way back home, Maxi, the car, clocked up his 100,000 miles.

 

                Other incidents of note in all the rush ? A visit to Salisbury Museum where a young chap pored over the various little bits of pot that Deborah over the road and I had picked up in one of the fields in the village.  He kept back some of it for further analysis with a colleague from Dorset, but said about a quarter of what we had was Roman or pre-Roman and another group early Medieval, so that was very interesting. I had to mark out the finding spot on a large interactive field map. On the same history note I had an industrious day at the Country Record Office in Chichester taking notes on the countless Tills of the area from the 19th Century backwards.  On not quite so old family history,  I also met an old school chum in a delightful pub in Mere and visited Pat and James for a spectacular old-fashioned high tea on the way back. And of course I met up with Graham and Lo for  the commemoration of Grandad's Battle of Heligoland (18th Dec 1939) first at the RAF Memorial  high on the hill overlooking Heathrow and then to Brooklands. Somehow after the great success at last year's effort at Ely Cathedral, this seemed a bit of an anti-climax but perhaps I was getting tired by then. I also managed to squeeze in various medical assignments. And had a last minute IT crisis when both of my computers went AWOL. Christopher, remotely, helped me out by tracking down a local expert who came and worked out what the problems were. Black magic, as far as I was concerned.

                Then it was time to return to Newport for a rest. The weather was still surprisingly mild but with ominous warnings of cold weather threatening. I flew back out of Boston hours before it arrived starting what was a 27 hour journey straight through to Singapore, where the temperature was 29 degrees and my thick winter coat just a touch superfluous.  Here another busy academic period followed which included a fun trip to Jakarta as well. Fun, because for the first time in my life I had the disconcerting experience of having keen young students press their foreheads against the back of my hand in fulsome respect. Selfies and book signings I'm fairly used to but this was a new one on me.

                The trip just underlined the fact that I really do like Singapore, and explains the fact that Cherry and I toyed (quite unrealistically) with idea of buying a flat here. Pity we didn't in some ways as the price of accommodation over the past ten years has sky-rocketed. I make a habit of revisiting as many of the favoured places as I can in the time available. The impressions of Cherry are especially strong in the Tanglin Mall where all the ex-pats go to get their food supplies. The associations are so strong that I half expected her to come walking round the corner at any minute. A strange feeling. I wasn't sure if I liked it or not.  I also met several people who hadn't heard about her death, including a former head of the Indonesian navy, and who were visibly shocked. One, a Malaysian, swiftly  countered 'Well, we're your family now' which rather took me aback.               

                Despite our familiarity with the place,  there's a lot that we never really got to know, and my hotel was in just such a place. It was a weird building that looked like the moving Black Fortress in the film Krull.

No princesses though - at least not on my floor.  It's near the upper reaches  of the Singapore river - a quiet leafy area with just enough  bars and restaurants for locals and resident expats away from the major crowds. From my 23rd floor I could see what looked like an abandoned  Chinese cemetery in a wooded area and on my last afternoon decided to go an investigate.  Just another of those fascinating little corners of the City of much steel and glass that you can still find tucked away amidst all the high-rises. I did a bit of bird-watching, getting a yellow-vented Bulbul,

I also discovered what was clearly an old rubbish dump with loads of bits of pottery (if I'd had my little trowel,  I could have picked out a suitcase full). Best of all I found two decayed merchants'  tombs going back to the first half of the 19th Century. The eyes of the guardian Liondogs were painted red and there were old joss sticks in front of the inscriptions - so someone still cares. I was fascinated to discover that one of the departed, a  Madam Chua, was the widow of the merchant who introduced the Governess Anna  Leonowens to the King of Siam. Just one of the little surprises that Singapore still has to offer.  By a curious coincidence, the other tomb it turned out to be that of a merchant I found myself reading about in a book I was reviewing in Newport.

                On the way back to Newport, I stopped off at Wansdyke for one night and the family came for an official birthday party - the real birthday was early on in the trip. That was lovely.  Fire, cake and candles, chatting, old films, village walk, cows and canal. Once back in Newport I was taken aback to find that the first of  our regular 10 o'clock meetings was another birthday party for me. I didn't think anyone knew about it. Complete with balloon, cards, singing and cake - no candles though as we were in a heritage room. I was quite overcome. A nice and encouraging start to a new year.