Noises Off

  

Two very busy weeks back in the UK, and no sign yet of much in the way of R&R - rest and recuperation. The tree surgeons very expensively  took down one dead ash tree and trimmed another very big live one, cut down four dead elms, a dying maple, a very dead plum tree and trimmed a large elder blotting the sun from the lean-to tomato green house. They left a huge pile of detritus which I have been working my way through for 2-3 hours every day. It contains quite a lot of log potential and useful kindling, but this has to be sorted out, sawn and stacked for storage. The rest is going to a planned big bonfire (but maybe not if the drought continues) and three huge wild life sanctuaries in the wooded area. It's taken a lot of time and energy, but I am nearing the end of it.

I've learnt a lot about wood in the process. Elm is very tough to cut and doesn't snap. Try to break a branch off and you end up twisting it round and round. I have a vague memory that hurdle or trug makers used to exploit that characteristic in some way. Elder strikes me as completely useless. The Bullas trees are hard to cut too and dangerously prickly. Compared to them, ash is a doddle. Anyway when I'm finished, I think I'll have probably four to five years worth of firewood for the wood-burner. Given the soaring cost of energy that might be quite a bonus.

So one of the sounds of the past two weeks has been that of sawing interspersed with the odd bout of cursing. Another one I've missed over the past four months is the sound of heavy agricultural machinery trundling past. A further rural sound of course is that of horse-riders trotting past. It's a kind of background one gets used to and doesn't really focus on. Except one day recently that these seemed rather fast. So, I went to investigate, and found two riderless white horses in the front garden panting deeply but clearly about to have a whale of a time. So having failed to rouse the local farmer, I dialled 999. I was trying to explain to the local police  (whose record in attending to public calls, rather like the ambulance service, is amongst the worst in the whole country)  where my village was when I heard an explosion of hooves and through the window saw the horses racing off down the road, clearly having the time of their lives. No reports of subsequent accidents, fortunately. Selfishly I closed my gates that evening. It clearly alarmed my newspaper deliverer who simply threw the Guardian over the gate instead, American style, but without the protective plastic wrapper. So I gave that up pretty quickly The nervousness remained for a day or so. A bout of clip-clopping the following day sent me rushing to see, but it was only a girl from the village riding past.

The other adventure of the fortnight was a talk on the South China Sea for a long time friend and colleague to an organisation called Probus. It has nothing to do with the saint my prep school was named after, but stands for Professional and Business. 'Oh it will be at the High Rocks Hotel Tunbridge Wells' he said blithely, ' you can't miss it.' The project was complicated by the fact that the same morning I had to take the car into the garage in Salisbury and collect a hire car. Assuming it would have a satnav I didn't take a map. It didn't but the young lady connected my US phone(the UK one wouldn't work)  to the car's audio system , the route came upon the car screen and off I went. The system flipped out before I had left Salisbury. So I stopped, having correctly guessed which road to take, and dialled up satnav just on the US phone, and switched the car audio system off. Fine. There was no phone-holder of course, so I laid it on the passenger seat  and did what Vera (the satnav voice) told me to do. It all worked and I made such good progress I decided to stop for a cappuccino at Fleet services on the M3. Resuming I realised that Vera had gone. The picture was still there, but I couldn't restore the sound. But with a lot of looking down at the passenger seat I ploughed on.

The issue is that High Rocks is to Tunbridge Wells what Stonehenge  is to Salisbury, only worse because it's inside a maze of very hilly single track roads with inadequate signage and a lot of other cars hurtling about. Sudden stops and the phone slid onto the floor, its map screen included. Nowhere to pull off and find it again, a car right behind me invading my space. It was awful. At one stage in the middle of this unexpected nowhere, I had the help of a glamorous young lady-receptionist  in  a nearby Restaurant called the Beacon who assured me that the steep track by the side of the building was indeed a road and that if I kept on down it I couldn't miss the High Rocks. She was right. Weirdly I was only ten minutes late. Much more delay was caused by my friend and his colleagues trying to a make the electronics work ! Getting the hotel 'techy' in solved the problem eventually. After that everything went fine.

I went on and stayed the night with Ruth, Simon and Violet. The occasion was the latter young lady's graduation from pre-school. The parents all gathered for this charming celebration to watch them all miming with hand movements the lyrics of two pop songs. It was all very sweet, bordering on the hilarious. Equally so were stories of Violet's attempts to put spaghetti up her nose, one of those issues where the 'how' is as difficult to understand as the 'why.'

The other family catch-up event was the hot weekend before when I was privileged to see both Barney and Martha in the school play - 'Legally Blond' - the musical. It was a lot better than I had been led to expect and I was really quite impressed by the overall standard, though I could see why some parents had reservations about the school's choice of play. The following day the whole dynasty turned up for a splendid day chatting, eating, drinking, staying out of the sun and being splashed by the kids in the paddling pool. It was terrific. Many photos of course, including the one above with me and all four grandchildren. Somehow I never imagined that one day I would be in a photo like that !

After both events on the way home I stopped for just a few minutes of R&R at Benbow Pond. Alongside the A272 it's an oasis of calm, with no noises off.

Home Again, Home Again

 Any idea I might have had about a nice quiet period at home devoted to rest and recuperation seems doomed at the moment. Deserved, mind you, but doomed. The last few weeks in Newport were hectic indeed, but a hint that the immediate future might not prove all that different was evident in my journey home. I knew it was going to be arduous with a 0300 taxi pick-up and three overweight suitcases full of books and other such paraphernalia likely to anchor me down at all stages of the trip. I had hoped that the extravagant devotion of my 'points' to a business class trip would ease my passage. And so it did, but not to the extent of neutralising what turned out to be a 15 hour delay !

I don't think it was really BA's fault. Apparently that day back in Heathrow, Immigration had been overwhelmed by the numbers travelling and required airlines to cut or delay their flights out from all terminals. Rather than simply cut my flight out from Boston, they put it on at the end of the day rather than the very beginning, after the other timetabled departures. They texted warnings of a delay but didn't say for how long so everyone turned up as normal at 0430 in the morning  So in an otherwise deserted airport there was a conglomeration of anxious and confused people and harassed staff at the BA desk. Because they had limited storage and had to save what they had for their normal flights, we could check in but couldn't unload our luggage. My half a ton of books began to seem quite threatening, especially as Boston is one of those airports that only has cafes and shops after security and not before it and obviously one cannot go through security with suitcases ! Fortunately, a nice young lady took pity on me and said she would take my cases, trolley and all, and stash it with a note explaining the situation, in a space beside the First Class Counter so that the police wouldn't blow it up or Japan airlines (who were shortly due to take the counter over) send it to Tokyo. She also gave me  kind of boarding pass so I could go through security. At about 0500 they were just opening up and I went through all on ,my own. The staff seemed in a holiday mood and were jovial and friendly and advised me to go through and walk along to another Terminal where they thought a Starbucks would soon be opening up. And so it proved !

          Thereafter I spent the next 15 hours shifting around both Terminals, having coffee, much later a nice breakfast courtesy of a coupon from BA and plugging in my laptop and getting on with various academic tasks. One of these was to check on line the index of my book, something which easily too took a couple of hours. I had a variety of make-do offices with different views of life in an airport terminal. 

 After 7 hours or so, I had to go out through security again and check in my luggage, just as Japan Air folded their tents and stole away. I got in just before the first rush for the next scheduled BA flight and the chap agreed against the rules to take my luggage (which I was very relieved to see still there) simply because it was blocking up the space. I left very pleased but wondered when I would see those cases again. And so out through Security for a second more crowded time. Thereafter, it was all plain sailing for the next 8 hours as the BA Lounge had now opened up, and there was space and quiet, snacks and G&Ts to hand, as passengers for the scheduled flights came and went. The only concern was telling my taxi chap what my new arrival time would be which remianed uncertain until the last minute, and wondering if he could make it. The flight was fine. For once I even dozed a bit.

          It all worked brilliantly. We arrived mid morning on the Friday.- 15 hours late.  It just so happened that I was one of the first off the plane. At immigration I could see that the passport reading machines were failing a lot of people, so didn't bother to try. Instead I went directly to the chap who deals with the failures, and was though in 5 minutes. Bearing in mind all the horror stories about baggage handling problems, my expectations about luggage claim were low. I was so early , there were only one or two other passengers hanging about the relevant luggage carousel. The carousel started up as I approached with my empty trolley  and to my surprised delight my three cases were first out, all arriving together. I was through it all in just over 15 minutes which must be some kind of record. I had just finished my usual cappuccino at Costa  when Alistair the taxi arrived. So swings and roundabouts, and everything worked out well in the end.

          But two nights without real sleep meant I would have welcomed some peace and quiet. But there were three suitcases to unpack, 4 months of post to sort out. The house was fine the garden a bewildering approximation of Borneo. Cherry's Goose was enveloped in foliage.

 

One of the big ash trees had obviously died and several Elm trees too, all along the roadside so obviously required urgent attention. Plans and appointment for the next few weeks had to be sorted out, the car (working well I was relieved to find) booked in for an urgent MOT, wondering whether to get a new alarm system,  etc etc etc.

          One break was  my first Church trip with the Friends of Wiltshire Churches  exactly a week after my arrival. The theme of the day was Victorian 'restorations' of parish churches. We learned about Pearson who conserved and restored while Butterfield remodelled and rebuilt. A lot of Wiltshire Churches have been well and truly 'butterfielded,'  but at least they haven't fallen down which they might otherwise have done. Talking of which the last optional visit was to a ruined Church at Sutton Veny  now conserved by a special trust. I liked it most of all for its ancientness, and also for  a wall memorial to  a George Martin of the East India Company who died in 1815 in 'Bellary' in the East Indies, - wherever that is. A project for my autumnal Singapore trip ?  Already Newport seems a distant memory, as more urgent considerations pack in.