A Normal Christmas ? I don't think so...

 

Brussels at Christmas time was as attractive as ever, no snow or rain and the temperature quite convenable  as some of the locals would say. In fact as my Eurostar emerged from the tunnel after a slow and slightly delayed journey through a Kent landscape that looked awfully like Siberia in Dr Zhivago, we came into a smiling French land all blue sky and with not a trace of snow. Being protected from French weather is  another of the benefits of BREXIT I suppose.

Mind you there is a downside to the EU as far as I am concerned and that is that the metro station  I use to get to the Defence College is appropriately named Schuman but right underneath the EU headquarters. When they have a lot of big wigs coming for meetings etc they tend to close it at the last minute and without warning. This is nuisance as it means a much longer walk for me and the really nice Starbucks where I have my breakfast (much more convenient than the hotel) is in the station. Otherwise things went pretty much as normal, goggling at the simply amazing son-et-lumiere in the Grande Place, getting the customary chocolates for Christmas, dining with the students (Belgian, Dutch, German and Portuguese) and patting the stuffed horse in the Roi d’ Espagne, as  I have been doing once a year for several decades. I was pleased to gey my favourite widow tables in both the restaurants I frequent. A glass of Leffe Bruin over my e-mails and then a light supper. Perfect.

Getting home from Paddington wasn’t so perfect though. My taxi driver got stuck in awful traffic on the Hammersmith flyover and I had to wait 90- minutes  or so before he made it. Worse, both my phones were on low charge and Paddington is a big beast of a place to be picked up from. One needs to be able to talk people into the RDV point. Fortunately I had my charger handy and was able to locate an ordinary plug in one of its many exit hallways, so stood by until I got enough charge to communicate.

Once home all was not well. It had been very, very cold and in some mysterious way which I totally do not understand frozen external pipes had caused a couple of leaks. The first was a slight drip from the tun dish of the water-heater, which wasn't a serious issue. The second, apparently unconnected, leak happened the day after I got back, the Sunday evening after our friendly and effective plumber Pete had sorted out the first one. I was cooking in the kitchen (well, doing what I call cooking anyway) when I realised I could hear running water, and in fact saw it was coming in under the kitchen door. Weirdly, the water was pouring up out of the plug hole in the washbasin in the downstairs loo, not the tap. It was rapidly flooding the kitchen, hall and advancing on the dining room. Panic. Another phone call, Sunday evening or not. Turning the water softener off seemed to stop the flow for some reason. That was a mercy but it meant I had to spend the next 4 hours mopping up and the next 4 days drying everything out. Not ideal !

Then there was a short gap, where I was supposed to go down to Dartmouth to stay with some old friends, attend a funeral and do some business at the naval college, where my career had started. It sounds dreadful to say that I was really looking forwards  to a package of events around a funeral but so I was. The day before, though, all packed up for an early morning start I could feel a cold coming on. It arrived with a bang the following morning and turned out to be a real stinker. I was not nice to be with, though it wasn’t Covid. The weather was foul too, so I called the whole thing off. The following day, I was much better, and the day after that the cold had practically disappeared.

And then of course, all of the carefully articulated plans for a family get together on Christmas day got seriously dis-articulated when Covid struck the host and hostess. Disappointed but resolute, the survivors put Plan B into effect. This involved one party coming to me on Christmas (despite the fact that I had deliberately run supplies down to a minimum because of projected absence elsewhere and to make room for a big order coming in for a planned new year celebration. That was a nice interlude of course, if much quieter than anticipated.

The following Boxing Day morning we were to depart early to separate Boxing Day festivities. They made theirs, but I didn’t. Halfway down the A303 one of those worrying warning lights saying ‘Engine fault- garage !’ came on and I pulled into a large and convenient lay by. There were dire warnings of imminent disaster in the handbook, if I just carried on.. Cutting a very long story short, an RAC chap came to my rescue had a couple of goes at sorting the problem out both there and later at a service station a couple of miles down the road. He couldn’t fix it, thought it probably wasn’t serious but all the same  advised me to drive home. He said I should follow him so he could keep an eye on me. The warning stayed on, flashing away. We stopped at Ludgershall. He said If I hadn’t noticed anything else wrong with the car's performance by then I should be Ok to go home on my own. So that’s what I did, arriving home mid-afternoon, and tracked by the family all the way. 

At this point I began to think that Christmas was starting to feel a touch over-rated. But hope springs eternal....

New and Old Amsterdam

 

My last two weeks in the US and the first week in the UK have certainly been busy. Apart from the business of packing up the house and closing down the office, I had a splendid long weekend with a colleague in New York, - which used of course to be called New Amsterdam. This included a very long Amtrak ride from North Kingston, a car journey away from Newport. The railway station looked the ones in old Western movies like 'High Noon'. I did the driving as my colleague was recovering from cataract surgery. It being Veterans’ day weekend, the car park was absolutely packed but I managed gingerly to mount the pavement in Snowflake III, my Toyota Camry hire car,  and park hopefully on the grass under some trees. When we got back we saw that many others had followed my example. No parking ticket yet at any rate ! The train ride was very long and likewise packed but all seats have to be reserved. The seats are so close to each other, one’s knees touch those of the person sitting opposite, or even have to be inter-leaved. It rained and was dark as we pulled into the station, but we got safely to the Yale Club. No tea-making equipment in the room to my dismay. What sort of country is this, I wondered ?

The treat for the first night was 'Don Carlos' at the Met. Not exactly a barrel of laughs and fiendishly expensive, but worth every cent. Simply being there in good seats underlined the enormous difference there is between listening to an opera on a CD and actually being there and watching it at the same time. As it happened we sat next to two Scottish ladies who were obviously regular opera buffs at the Met, who helped me at least really get into it. The benefits of expertise. Mind you, I scored heavily in the first interval, by being the only one who had ordered drinks for us in advance. Perhaps they don’t do that in the US ? 

The following day to the other Met where there was a superb collection of Tudor art, collected from all over the place. A big queue to get into the building but it was so vast that unlike pre-Covid London Art exhibitions, it wasn’t a question of seeing bits of paintings over someone’s shoulder. I recommend the café there too. Great cappuccino.

That evening to the New York Yacht Club for a dinner organised by the American friends of the Royal Navy Museum in Portsmouth  and of the 1805 Club, dedicated to the memory of Nelson. The occasion was HMS Pickle night, commemorating the day when the sloop of that name reached Plymouth with the news of the Battle of Trafalgar. The Club house, predictably, was a grand affair with models of innumerable racing yachts and the like stuck on all the walls, and an enviable collection of silver. The speaker was our Second Sea Lord (who I didn’t know at all) minded by our naval attache over there who I had met the week before. Great food and by British standards an early end which was fine, after such a day.

Thereafter, as I said, the packing up and departure process. Much less wearisome than usual because I was able to put all my stuff into a cupboard there since I will be going back to the same place in late February. Snowflake had to be returned as well, and college arrangements made. I left at 0300 on Monday and for once had a completely painless journey home. Getting into Boston airport when it’s almost completely empty is well worth the awful departure time. Two films to watch on the way back and I was surprised to be given a whole bottle of good wine, as I was the only one who had chosen it and the steward said otherwise they would only have to pour the rest down the drain !

No disaster awaited me at home late that evening, and the water leak which had plagued me just before my departure in early October had not re-appeared. But sadly the string that held up my soaked paperbacks in the garage had broken and its burden, dumped on the floor which won’t help their recovery. Really sadly some of my 19^th Century Wiltshire books won’t be the same again. Otherwise all was fine. The following day I rushed around unpacking and repacking for the next departure, getting some essentials from Devizes, dealing with a mountain of mostly surplus post, getting our first Christmas tree up from the garden. After such a day I treated myself to the first fire of the winter. While I was away, and bearing in mind the energy prices, the house was kept on a very low temperature and it was pretty chilly.

Next morning I was off early to the original (Old) Amsterdam on a combination of Eurostar and Thalys trains for a talk on the naval side of the Ukraine war to a Dutch naval group. This was fun. I was met at Amsterdam Centraal to my surprise and taken to a restaurant for the nicest steak I’ve had for many a long year. The following day was the talk in the old Stock Exchange, now turned into a conference venue.

I was one of four talking in a small room with perhaps 30 people while many more were watching via a screen in another room. It was an interesting  experience and exchange. What I didn't realise was that candid photos were being taken of me, while in full flow or reflective mode. It's always  sobering to see oneself as others do. I had always thought I looked like George Clooney. Apparently this is not so.  The evidence for this fact is displayed below. I also realised, once again, that nearly all Dutch people are much taller than me !" 

Otherwise Everything went well, and before I left for home, I managed to squeeze in a visit to ‘Our Lord in the Attic’ – a charming Catholic house church, so if anyone was tracking me and wondering what I was doing in the red-light district at my age, that’s the explanation and I have photos to prove it. 

But of course the main event of this period was the big family event to mark Cherry’s passing, five years ago incredibly. On the Saturday, a fire, fish and chips and despite rain and wind a firework display plus the decoration for the Christmas tree we always put up for Cherry’ birthday on the 24^th . She had always wanted to do a parachute jump for some bizarre reason and it was on the bucket list for our last six months back in 2017, but twice the weather defeated us and she never managed it.

It had seemed very cruel of fate at the time.  So two heroines in the family jumped for her, again in pretty dicey weather and with great aplomb and success. Here they are rehearsing

not praying for deliverance. They were splendid. After that we went to a Mexican restaurant in Salisbury, opposite the pub I used to use when in the sixth form, which I had forgotten all about. And so dispersal, while for me Wiltshire life resumed its  more normal path, for a few days at least.