It's beginning to look a lot ,like Christmas

 

My last Asian run of the year took me to Malaysia, for a short workshop in their relatively new capital city, Putrajaya. Last time Cherry and I went – around 2006- it was in the process of being built, and I must say that they have made a pretty good job of it. Unlike Kuala Lumpur it’s all very calm and orderly, except for the construction of several gigantic and ultra-modern shopping Malls which I find totally confusing. If it wasn’t for my colleagues, I would probably still be there wandering distractedly between Gucci handbag shops and Versace design outlets, wondering whether I would be ending my days there. But there was one thing that even I couldn’t miss and that was the grand centre piece in the enormous multi-layered rotunda. It was Christmas on a gigantic scale. A giant tree made up of smaller trees suspended from the roof, snowy buildings all around, Santa and his reindeer, tinsel glittering everywhere and Christmas carols belting out. I couldn’t resist this picture especially as it had a Muslim lady al in black sitting on the stairs high above taking it all in. For a country that might be modern but is still mostly Muslim and getting a bit more so, it all seemed wildly incongruous but everybody seemed to find it all great fun.

In a calmer and more contemplative mode, the day before the trip was spent in Salisbury. It was what would have been Cherry’s birthday weekend and so followed the 6^th anniversary of her death by a couple of days. I had bought the obligatory Christmas tree (in fact two) the day before, as we always did. I attended They were having a concert in the Cathedral, Bach’s Mass in B Minor, and I thought that attending that would be an appropriate way of marking the event, since this year the usual family event with fireworks wasn’t feasible. We would certainty have gone, especially as there were actually two receptions for the Friends of Wiltshire Churches, one before-hand and one in the interval. The one beforehand was held in the Walton canonry in the Close, and was a marvellous opportunity to have a poke round one of the sumptuous mini-palaces in the Close that I used to deliver letters and cards to when doing my Christmas postal rounds, decades ago. It was all very tasteful, as was the company and the small eats and wine on offer. The Cathedral itself, all illuminated, looked quite spectacular, of course. As for the Bach, which is largely choral, it was splendidly absorbing.

I only had a partial view as I was sitting in one of the cheap seats in the south aisle near the tomb of Sir Robert of Hungerford. The reason for this wasn’t parsimony, it was just that, not being very sensible to do so, I had havered about attending and everything else was booked out. There were hundreds of people there so it was a clear sell-out. The reason it wasn’t sensible was because the concert only finished about 2230 and I had to get home and do my last packing and pre-departure preparation before getting my taxi at 0330. No sleep that night of course.

This followed a pretty hectic week mainly in London, exposing Humphrey to the delights of the capital for the first time. A talk with my publisher, running a special lecture by the Chief of the Brazilian Navy at King’s with a very nice dinner afterwards, another dinner at the Reform Club and seeing some old US Marine friends at the In and Out. Plus two Churches, St Dunstan-in-the West on Fleet street with its extraordinary Romanian Orthodox screen and the Temple Church, nearby. The Reform club dinner with with a chap I had met at the Friends of Friendless Churches trip a few weeks ago. He was one of those committed volunteers who had been driving pick-up trucks most weekends into Ukraine for the army to use against the Russians. He wanted advice on how best to write his experience and conclusions up in the form of a PhD at Kings. As can be imagined, the chit-chat over the lamb was fascinating, as indeed was the Reform club which I had ever been to before. (An amazing library). He was full of admiration for the ingenuity of the Ukrainians in making use of whatever they could get their hands on; but now the Russians are getting good at that sort of thing too, and there are more of them. But the main event of the London trip was an audience with my delightful and youngest grand-daughter in Walthamstow, and of course her parents. That was lovely.   

So after a week and weekend like that, and of course because of a second night without sleep on the planes (I stopped off at Doha, so there were two of them) I was pretty tired by the time I got to my hotel in Putrajaya. I arrived early in the morning but they let me into my room early. Normally I make a fetish of conforming immediately to the dictates of local time, as a way of managing jet-lag but on this occasion broke the habit of a lifetime and went to bed once I had showered and unpacked. I slept for nearly six hours, surfacing in time for the first event a local  dinner with my colleagues from Singapore.

I expected to pay for this abandonment of principle, but in fact later on had another six hours before my talk first thing the following morning. After that, everything was fine, although falling asleep that afternoon meant I didn’t get time to enjoy the pool which I had planned to.

The talk seemed to be OK and the rest of the time was interesting and for me hassle free, even a bit relaxing. Too much food of course. It’s hard to be restrained with buffet style arrangements especially when they are so cosmopolitan, though I was disappointed the bread-and-butter pudding was gone before I could get to it. On the final evening the Singapore maritime gang went into KL as I wanted to see the Petronas towers again. These are two really rather special metal clad towers – the tallest twin towers in the world apparently, built I think in 1996.

They have a mobile bridge between them a third of the way up and spectacular views from the observation level two floors down from the very top. They are indeed high at 452 metres (three times the height of Salisbury cathedral)  but now there’s a taller weird blue one in KL which for all the world looks as though Sauron from the Lord of the Rings ought to be living there. The twin towers were built on oil money and from the top you can really see that KL was built in a wide valley surrounded by mountains. No wonder we found it so difficult to defend in 1942. No such sombre thoughts later on in a large underground Singapore style Hawker market they thought I should sample for dinner. Large numbers of tiny stalls selling all manner of Asian foods at knock-down prices. It was a great way to end a busy week.

And so home, again via Doha where I am always struck by the giant teddy they have as an emblem of the place. It always strikes me as very sinister and threatening, but see what you think.

     

 

In recovery mode

 The couple of weeks back from Sri Lanka were sufficiently quiet to allow me some real recovery time. That was just as well because the prolonged absences of the past couple of years have only allowed the minimum in house and garden maintenance. This in turn has meant just rolling on arrangements, without checking if they were still convenient or appropriate and putting up with decay unless physical collapse seemed imminent.

The front porch is a good illustration. Because I am chronically short of storage space and shelving,  it’s where I keep past copies of journals. Skimmed over, maintenance wise, they and the porch provide a paradise for ants, spiders,  woodlice, and even the odd slug – though I have no idea how they get in. These invaders have even been known to penetrate the second door and get into the front hall and sometimes my study. They make use of my journals, but not for reading. So that’s quite a big restorative job waiting to be done. In the meantime, past journals have been piling up all over the place. Once, long ago, they were put aside for a later reading that has never happened. Sorting them out and discarding as many as I can is a related task. All very time-consuming, which is why it hasn’t been done, but increasingly needs to be.

Much the same applies to my books, and I sometimes worry that the library in the first floor computer room might come crashing down into the kitchen below. The urgency of the need to do something about them so I can just ‘get straight’ was underlined by a second trip to Dartmouth. Here the incentive was to unload some of my historic papers into the College archive. They were a set of letters written by naval officers in the First World War to their history master at the College (when it was in effect a naval public school). They were given to me decades ago by a departing colleague.  I made good use of them, but were now surplus to requirements. Locating them meant clearing one of the lofts – and dealing with the mice and worse that tenanted it. 

The problem was that my very kindly and welcoming hosts insisted on giving me quite a few books, which I could hardly refuse to accept, so as an exercise in load-shedding, this was a decidedly counter-productive transaction !  Worse was the fact that I simply didn’t have anywhere to put the said books, and this led to a total refresh and restack of the whole lot so the new ones could be slotted into more or less the right places. Another couple of days of R&R gone, but at least a few surplus books in the box for Oxfam !

However, the Dartmouth trip was thoroughly enjoyable even so.  I stayed again with the Alexanders, old friends from the time we were there. So once again I had opportunity to enjoy the quite fantastic vista from my bedroom window of the River Dart. What an amazingly beautiful place it is. We had half planned to retire there.

While I was having my cappuccino in the wardroom at the College, the sun was shining straight into the window so I couldn’t photograph the River view, but this shot of the Boatfloat in the town shows the sort of place Dartmouth is. 

But out of a side window in the Wardroom,  I got a shot of the young people (mostly graduates these days ) busy on the parade training.

I remember my first ever lecture at the College – on the ‘Tactics of Trafalagar’ to about 200 Libyans and Iranians (which shows how long ago it was). They had been doing parade training since early that morning. Not for nothing was the Caspar John Hall known as the ‘Z Shed.’ It certainly was that day. Afterwards my new boss the Director of Studies who had been observing my effort, said sympathetically, ‘…if you can survive that, young Till,  you’ll survive anything.’ The visit inspired many such memories.

But it also provided me with the consoling knowledge that I was not alone, working in conditions that envelop one in chaos. My colleagues in the Museum and Archive live and work surrounded by piles and piles of things to be sorted that make my storage and stacking problems seem utterly trivial. This included the two boxes I had months ago sent over from Newport, which I spotted on one table ! They had been opened at least ! The task before them is simply stupendous.

The same point emerged last weekend. Living on one’s own tends to encourage the notion that one’s situation is unique, when it clearly isn’t. This was again brought home to me on a recent visit to Team Powell in order to watch Grandaughter Number One’s superb dancing in a production of Coppelia. People often remark on how busy I seem to be, but my activity rate pales into complete insignificance in comparison with the frantic and full-on equivalent in the Powells’ existence. Everything was happening all the time – constant comings and goings as all manner of members of the dynasty appeared and disappeared amidst a vortex of rehearsals and performances, shopping trips, cooking and meals, music gigs in Brighton, no 1 Grandson being man of the match in hockey, dancing exams in Southampton (passed with distinction of course), and a physio-therapy session in the living room. All this in two days. My role in this was to sit open-mouthed while all this swirled around me, and then inadvertently let the un-belled cat out of the front door – a cardinal sin. To the consternation of some passers-by I manged to wrestle her to the ground, but fell over in the process, damaging both knee and dignity.  Nonetheless the whole weekend was an absolute delight. But it all served to show how prosaic my life is by contrast.  So, I came away with a bruised knee and a little humbled.

The fallibility of memory and perception was also demonstrated in the Dartmouth visit, when the Quarterdeck in the College looked to me much smaller than I had remembered it to be, and our first house in the nearby village of Stoke Fleming seemed both tiny and poky, not the palatial ‘Bag End’ we had both thought it all those years ago. A big van parked in the very small drive obscured most of the bungalow and I was sad to see my carefully landscaped front garden, complete with Dartmoor style dry-stone wall,  now disappeared and just weedy gravel in its place. But the big beech hedge, at least, was a living testament to our presence.

We started it with tiny seedlings taken from Grandma’s garden in the late 1960s. Now it’s a solid and healthy-looking green wall eight feet high, an apparently indestructible survivor.

And as another bonus in the whole Dartmouth trip,  I found in the College Chapel I could light a candle to Cherry, now gone for almost six years, incredible though it seems. My daughter and I have an informal competition in who  can light the most in different places. She of course is ahead, in a manner entirely consistent with life-style.

Far Eastern Adventures

 

It was back to a bit of globe trotting in the middle of October. First to the Maritime Dialogue in Galle,  Sri Lanka. When I was invited to this I knew it would be a bit poignant, as it was here that we first began to suspect that what Cherry had might be a lot more serious than a passing bug. She had no appetite for the special celebratory birthday dinner under the stars by the sea and on the flight back to Singapore she felt faint and was nearly sick, a worrying first for her. Moreover one of my hosts was the SL Naval officer who waded into the river to recover the phone an over-excited Chery had dropped into the water from a bridge when filming the washing of elephants. He even salvaged some of the pictures for her. Now of course he was very sorry to find out what happened to her not that long afterwards.

She would have liked the ‘Jetwing Hotel’ which despite its name was quite a grand affair right by the sea. I had a balcony looking out over it. The only slightly unsettling aspect of this was seeing the armed guard down on the beach.

They were clearly taking no chances as Sri Lanka has had a very serious terrorism problem in the past. Indeed the naval side of this is one of my special interests. My hosts arranged a few of what they call ‘bilats’ with some if the veterans of this which was very valuable for me.

For this and other reasons I was too busy to be too sad for long. If apologetically, they worked me pretty hard. What I thought was the last straw occurred the evening of the big conference dinner of some 350 diners, including the President of Sri Lanka. The guest speaker was Scott Morrison, the last rather controversial  Prime Minister of Australia. I had heard whispers that he was stuck in Singapore after a plane cancellation. The Chief of Navy sidled up to me in the afternoon and asked me whether I might be prepared to stand in for him if he didn’t make it. No pressure,  but I could hardly say no. An hour later when I realised I had my own car to the Conference venue and was given a great garland of flowers on my arrival,  I suspected that Morrison indeed hadn’t made it. The evening went off Ok but it was nearly midnight when I was returned to the hotel and I was chairing a session first thing the following morning. Then they pulled me out of that conference and drove me for 2.5 hours back to Colombo  to attend a small dinner party the President was holding back in the capital. At his express wish apparently. I wondered why, of course.  Halfway there my minder’s phone crackled into life. Would I mind saying a few words after dinner as Morison still hadn’t made it.  I couldn’t do a repeat as the President and about half the gathering had heard the first one so scratched out a few notes in a pocket book I happened to have on me, bouncing around in the car.

Before this, and leaving Galle, which has a very fine old town inside the castle walls, my minder asked whether I would like a quick tour and obliged when of course I said yes. Here I am in typical tourist garb outside the maritime museum.

Although this was fun, the delay meant we only arrived at the dinner venue a few minutes before the President and I was whisked straight to the top table, and had no chance to write up my very few notes. Of course when the time came, I couldn’t read what I had scrawled in my very small notebook so it certainly wasn’t an ace performance. But there you go. One does what one must, being in such illustrious company. On my table of eight people there were three Presidents – of Sri Lanka, the Maldives, and a very impressive old lady who was the Director ( I felt sure she warranted a capital D) of one of the country’s biggest companies employing 25,000 people and the owner of the sumptuous conference venue. Two others were the Presidential wives, one of whom was an alumni of King’s College London like me and a Professor of English.  Again frighteningly on the ball.  I couldn’t place the two other big wheels. Another big, late dinner followed.

And 0400 the following morning off we went after bumping our way through the Colombo docks on my way to the airport and Singapore. Hardly restful !  The flight was fine, but I needed a good night by the time I arrived.  The morning after off to Jakarta, which was significantly less stressful since just giving lectures is more my comfort zone, and I had a bit of time for a swim in the pool. I was one of a small party from my other academic institution, the RSIS in Singapore.  The last Chief of the Indonesia Navy was one of my students and is a big fan. Two private dinners for me followed – one unfortunately Japanese which isn’t my favourite, but all very grand again. I was introduced to someone apparently slated to be his successor. Lots of bonhomie and fish-heads. Like the Sri Lankans, Indonesians are great gift givers. I had taken a spare soft bag, just in case. This turned out to be a good thing. Here’s my collection of goodies laid out on the table at home as I unpacked. Lots of tea and conference presentations, cookies, a brass capstan with a compass on the top, medals, books, the lot. Altogether it weighed more than my suitcase. I was rather touched when my minder – a SLN Commander went off and bought me a picture at the Galle Museum. They really were very generous. Rather humbling.

By contrast being back in Singapore for the last two days of the trip  was much more restful. I had a couple of meetings and met up with some friends, and managed a couple of hours in the National Archives, reading copies of the Straits Times just before the war which I find fascinating. The last day I decided to be a total tourist. By this time all this rich eating had had dire effects on my diet so I decided to be energetic. I went for a walk around some old bits of the real Singapore, Kallang and Geylang where I know there is a really splendid little tea emporium which sells tea direct from China. We tracked it down years ago; it’s hidden away in a small industrial estate, but contact failed, because the little lady in charge was clearly alarmed at my possible appearance and didn’t speak English. My Hokkien is likewise non-existent. So I put that off and resolved to go with a photo of the tins I want, on the next trip. Otherwise I just wandered around poking my nose into a temple to light some candles, having a Tiger beer in a local café, spotting unusual things to eat, exchanging compliments with the parrot outside the ‘Jesus Mission’ and so on.

As a historian, I always find it interesting to see reminders of the old British presence all over the place. Unlike other countries such as Mr Modi’s India,, the Singaporeans take care of these. Some are not so obvious as this lorry,

such as the 5 foot shaded walkways which Raffles (the founder of modern Singapore) insisted on being built for the comfort of shoppers and shop-keepers in the early 19^th Century. The resultant Chinese shop-houses can be very elegant. Some tempting local delicacies were on offer too. 

Some tempting local delicacies were on offer too.

The only problem with all this were temperatures in the mid 30s and very high humidity. By the time I staggered back to the hotel to pack for my departure I had done 17,000 steps and really, really needed a shower.

And so back to the UK to a few weeks of necessary recovery 

Topping Out

 

It’s not just nasty things that come, as Shakespeare more or less said, not as single spies but in whole battalions. Nice things do too. I had a recent example of that. First of all I was invited to join in a topping out ceremony in Salisbury Cathedral. This was in recognition of my having funded a stone in the refurbishment of the roof of the North Transept to mark the 5^th anniversary of Cherry’s passing. Her initials and dates are up there somewhere. Obviously, I wasn’t going to miss that. Then soon after came another invitation to give an after-dinner speech down at the Britannia Royal Naval College the same day, only later of course. I started my career there decades ago and have hardly been back since so I didn’t want to miss that either. As our American cousins say I ‘did the math,’ consulted Googlemaps and decided that it was just about feasible, given a following wind. Needless to say the day turned out to be one of the hottest days of the year, when if anything, one would want to slow down a bit.

The Guardian gave the Cathedral event quite a splash, nearly a whole page, in recognition of the fact that the project had finally ended after 37 years, just one short of the 38 the medieval masons had

needed to build the whole place back in the 13^th century. After the ceremony the scaffolding would be removed and for the first time in 40 years there wouldn’t be any on the cathedral anywhere, until, that is the next project began. There were about 40 of us, nearly all white-haired, nervously gathering outside at the foot of the transept crossing. We’d been warned that there would be stairs and ladders to climb and that a head for hights would be good (which I don’t have these days). As it turned out it was all very easy, and there were stalwart masons between us and any point of danger. Tremendous views of course, the Dean blessed the newly repaired stone cross and I got a mason to explain how they joined the old and new bits together. So it was fine. I scuttled off early, thereby having to miss the afternoon tea in one of the Close gardens unfortunately.

I then drove to Dartmouth. Unfortunately all my sat nav systems went down, and my phones too so I couldn’t warn Dartmouth I would probably be late. I just plugged on in the old-fashioned way relying on glances at a map and memory. For a straight no-stopping three and a half hours. I made it but in that heat arrived in something of a lather ! My room turned out to be on the top floor of the Captain’s house, as well !  Anyhow everything went well and I enjoyed myself in the evening and the following morning, pottering about in the College reminding myself of all the memories, seeing what had changed and what hadn’t. It’s a magnificent building, beautifully situated looking down on the river and Dartmouth and the warm misty morning weather was glorious. I looked up at the building from the parade ground and remembered that every Saturday morning, and some Sundays too I used to stand up there in my regalia with all my academic and naval colleagues  for ‘Divisions’ when all the cadets and sub-lieutenants are marshalled together. I wonder if they still do that ? Probably not. Once, at a leaving dinner, one of my retiring colleagues in his speech quoted St Paul. ‘Let there be no Divisions !’ It almost brought the house down. And that was 50 years ago.

On the way home, I stopped in at Cullompton services, and mysteriously all my systems kicked into life again and I could reconnect with the 21^st Century. I indulged myself by dropping in at the National Trust’s Lytes Cary Manor. Quite small but utterly delightful. Sir Walter Jenner bought the place in a pretty devastated state before the war and filled it with antiques of the period. He did a pretty good job. Inspiring.

And so back to the house, my own little world for a hectic weekend preparing it and the garden for the arrival of some American friends from Newport, first thing Monday. Two fun-packed days followed, as I took them round Old Sarum, the Cathedral, the close and Salisbury generally. We ended up in the Haunch of Venison, one of the oldest pub-restaurants in Salisbury. I couldn’t compete with the really posh places, food-wise, that they had taken me to in Newport, but I think they were duly impressed by the ‘severed hand and cards’ still on display in one little room !  The following day it was Avebury, complete with any number of stone-huggers, the circles, the amazing barn now used to display Stukely’s extraordinary prints of the place, the museum and of course the House (owned once by a cousin of Sir Walter Jenner I noticed) and garden. And so to Devizes for lunch and a quick tour of the town, ending at the famous ladder of locks. They loved it all. Took huge numbers of photos, before returning to London.

Then I got down to some academic commitments not exactly overdue, but certainly some that were getting pretty close, and back to something a bit closer to the normal routine - and of course preparing for two foreign trips. There were two delightful breaks in this pattern, the first being a weekend visit by Son No 1 and  his ladies ! This was delightful and packed with activity. Highlight has to be a return to the ‘starwell’ that we visited back in 2018.

This is an unobtrusive little spring in the middle of an anonymous field near Chippenham in the clear waters of which little star-shaped fossils can be found. Even though we had been there before it took some finding and plunging around across rutted fields and through the undergrowth. With the help of some locals who knew all about it to my surprise success was achieved and we managed to assempnle quite a collection in a remarkably short time. They’re not tiny starfish in fact but from the stem of a plaant aons ago. Quite remarkable. On top of that, Violet found a four leave clover ! We celebrated our success in a nearby hostelry in the charming very Cotswoldsy little village of Biddeston. A great success: the following day before departure we lunched in the mist and drizzle in the lee of Adam’s grave. Who could want for a nicer weekend ?

The next one was a bit special too. I’m in the ‘Friends of Friendless Churches’ and they were to hold  a service and an AGM in a quite charming little rescued Church in the middle of nowhere but near Cardigan/Aberteifi in Pembrokeshire. I thought I would attend and stay overnight in the country hotel where the mini-busses were to collect us all. It was a 3.5 hour trip again and I thought 7 hours driving in one day excessive. The whole thing was really interesting and I enjoyed every minute of it, though It won’t have done my diet any good. I was seriously impressed with the professionalism and expertise of the dedicated volunteers who actually run the organization which only has two staff as such. They made what I knew about historic churches look amateurish and shallow indeed. Very salutary. The little church was idyllic. The coracle in the porch wasn’t just for show. Four or five years ago, the church although on a hill, had a flood that reached high up enough to obliterate the bottom half of the words on the mural memorial in the picture.

It was also interesting to be in Wales and to try out these new 20 mph speed limits. They certainly give you more time to examine the villages you go through.  No doubt we shall have  get used to them since they seem likely to be coming England’s way even more before too long.  Having also done an anti- speeding course, I am very aware of these things these days ! 

What we did on our holidays

 

It’s been a busy and hectic few weeks. The highlight has to be 10 days holiday in Cornwall with ‘Team Powell.' Of course, we went to the usual place, Clovelly. In fact Higher Clovelly, a sub area of which rejoices in the unfortunate name of Slerra, which always sounds like slurry to me. It has the enormous advantage  over the rest of Clovelly in having easy car access and the village hall over the road provides safe parking. The cottage itself is small and old and suffers from having been unsympathetically modernised. I must have been there 22 or 23 times over the years and spend some of the time musing over what I would do to rescue it. Put back the plaster on the grim beach-boulder walls for a start. Make the fireplace a much more congenial by installing a red light behind the beam over the woodburner, re-design the garden for some privacy, etc etc.

Its potential is such that once I had the lunatic idea of entering into a part-ownership of the place with its then owner, who was an old school friend of Cherry’s. I had visions of weekends away from the hurly-burly of Southeast England, and our developing nautical interests by keeping a boat down in the harbour and getting in with the locals.  My academic career being all about boats, it seemed to make sense. Cherry, thankfully, put her foot down, knowing that a combination of my incompetence with anything to do with DIY and lack of money would mean that the proposed rescue would take decades, absorb huge amounts of money and time and probably fail in the end. Even more to the point, it would mean our always going to Clovelly with our free time instead of engaging in the globe-trotting we both wanted to do, and that we in fact did. As a clincher, she would brutally remind me of how often I got sea-sick. Fortunately wisdom prevailed.

The compromise was that whenever we didn’t have somewhere more exciting to go, we would consider Clovelly, hence the large number of shortish visits over the years. And let’s face it, Clovelly and the surrounding area is really beautiful.  The village itself with its steep narrow cobble streets which can only be used by people and donkeys is so picturesque that it’s been used as a backdrop to countless films and tv series – the  most recent being the charming ‘Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie’ Society.’ Then there’s the glorious coastline and a  wonderful variety of coves and surfing beaches. Despite being uncertain about heights I did some great coastal walks when briefly there on my own. There’s a sheer drop on the right in this pic, which I was very glad to pass ! Hartland Point lighthouse is pretty stunning too.

We got to know the area well. In fact some of our most important family events and/or decisions got to be made there. We very nearly gave our No 3 a second name of ‘Shipload’ because that was where he was conceived - as an idea, I hasten to say, not a product. The following year a heavily pregnant Cherry led the party down the long steep and perilous path to the beach to show Shipload bay that we meant what we said ! Since then the path has collapsed and abseiling via the roots of bracken is the only way of getting down there and very rarely attempted.

Over the years, we essentially compiled a list of attractions we just had to see or do, whenever we went there. It became a habit that has certainly continued into the second generation. Accordingly , this time, all the usual places and activities were revisited or done- and, despite indifferent weather, very satisfactorily. In fact for the first three days I was there on my own and investigated the possibility of redoing something we had only done once, decades ago- namely to drive to Speke’s Mill mouth and its famous waterfall along an unmarked mile-and-a-bit back-track. I walked it this time. Frankly I couldn’t believe that we had done that with an old estate car packed with three kids, enormous amounts of beach paraphernalia, surfboards, picnic stuff and a Grandma. I concluded that since then I have got a lot less adventurous and/or stupid. 

 This time there was a rowing regatta in Clovelly which was interesting. Team Powell swims regardless of the weather and developed a nice line in beach barbecue breakfasts, complete with fried eggs after early morning surfs. When a frying pan and fish slice was brought out of the bag in the drizzle became one of the trip's major memories for me, 

Another was a a major success in the beach-combing which is one of

my favourite activities in remote parts of any beach. I was very pleased to come back with a buoy and lots of rope. A buoy will stop the pond freezing over and rope always comes in handy ! Anyhow in our various ways all members of the party had a great time - and the weather wasn't quite as dreadful as some of these pictures might suggest.  

Other than that it’s been a continuous story of catching up from the past five years of partial neglect of house and garden, not helped of course by having been away in the midst of the growing season for ten days. Its harvest time as well and taking in all the produce and doing something with its before eating or, mainly, consigning it to the freezer has taken up a lot of time and effort. I keep hoping that it must be good for me.

Academics have slipped down in, but not disappeared from,  the priority list. Things, including a few invitations are still coming in and proving quite hard to resist. I’ve realised over the years the extent to which what I have been able to achieve in that line was actually due to the fact that Cherry did so much underway support and replenishment despite her own career. Having to do everything myself now explains why I so frequently seem to be running out of time for everything, and worryingly apt to miss things, because I forget to keep sufficient note of commitments or even look in the diary. Quite sobering actually. I must ensure I don’t degenerate into a stereotypical absent-minded professor, and can definitely see the prospect looming on the horizon.

Settling in

 

If I had any idea once back that my return would usher in a period of lolling about on a deckchair in the sun-dappled shade of an apple tree, G&T in hand, the last month or so have thoroughly disabused me of any such idea. To start with,  for me as for everyone else the weather hasn’t been cooperative. Endless grey skies, cool temperatures, rain showers and only the occasional glimpse of the sun. Indeed at one stage I thought I must have spilled something on the stair carpet when one step had a curious streak on it. It turned out to be a ray of sunshine stealing diagonally from a nearby window. Two connected results for the garden have been the more than usually intermittent presence of my necessarily  part-time gardener and vigorous growth of everything green, especially if noxious. So I have spent a lot of time trying to rescue the garden from the saddest state I think it’s ever been in. Hacking through the bamboo to get at the pond, locating the brick path under its new coating of grass and weeds, that sort of thing. It’s been an exercise in archaeology. Quite satisfying actually but there’s still a long way to go. Of course, one comes across jungle glades, where tomatoes, onions, leeks and rhubarb are growing on an industrial scale, thanks to my gardener’s efforts. I exaggerate of course, but not that much.

And its been quite inspiring sometimes. Not only did I move and clean the existing bird feeder but I also at long last after several years of putting it off,  erected a new much larger and grander one making use of a Victorian Chinese garden seat, which has been lying around doing nothing very much for a decade or more. The result is flocks of birds that come and devour the lot completely every two days, peanuts, fat balls, niger seed, mixed seed and all. In and around them, I get all the ones in the RSPB’s top ten, plus rarer things like Thrushes, Spotted Woodpeckers and on one occasion a collared dove (introduced in 1955 but now a much declining species) that sat on top of the new feeder for at least an hour, looking enviously at what it couldn’t access.  

Much less satisfying but probably more urgent has been getting domestic business up in all its variety to date after what amounts of up to 5 years of  the kind of cumulative neglect that comes about through having to take short cuts by automatically renewing everything, sometimes only when reminded. I just haven’t had time to investigate alternatives, sorting out the filing and that kind of thing. This of course is part of the hidden costs of flitting all over the place for much of the year, especially for long periods, and played a part in my deciding not to take up the offer of an extension to my Newport contract

On top of that,  the academic side of things is still chugging away if now at a slower rate. A few foreign gigs have appeared, now that I am less constrained by Newport teaching. Like many other people I am watching as closely as I can what’s going on in Ukraine, sharing in the developing consensus that this awful conflict is likely to still be going on this time next year. I fear that Russia will ultimately emerge from all this in a better position than we would like, but hope I'm wrong. Simply ploughing through the deluge of feeds about this and other things I am interested in, that come in every day, can easily take two hours of sitting-under-an-apple-tree time, but it’s very, very hard not to do it. I expect no admiration for this kind of effort, it just reflects the fact that I am a news junkie. Sad but true. 

Of course there’s a very nice part of continuing academic endeavour, like being treated to a sumptuous ‘thank you’ dinner at the Savoy on one night and a very nice lunch in the West End the following day. Good for the self-esteem, if not the waistline. The former involved a spectacular pyrotechnic display for my colleague’s ‘chantilly.’

That was part of a self-indulgent London trip which included time spent in the V&A, checking up on Junware, one of my favourite types of Chinese stoneware ceramics. Its untypical, but has a distinctive lavender glaze and colour mix that I like. The trouble is there seems to be quite a lot around online that is so cheap it must be modern copies -which are very hard to tell from the originals. Since I got all mine from the late Jimmy Wong in Singapore I’m pretty sure all mine is original, typically fired about 1200-1550 AD at the Yaozhou kiln in north China, but frankly I can’t be sure. Nice though.

Even nicer of course has been the chance to catch-up and reacquaint myself with my delightful family after 5 months away, especially my two smaller granddaughters who are growing up remarkably fast. I don’t want to miss this process ! The elder grandchildren are likewise flourishing in their different ways. Nothing stays the same: changes come and go, blink and you miss them. There have been two occasions for catching-up. The first was a major, long weekend gathering of all the clan (including Graham and Lo ) at West Lulworth, in a modern thatched cottage near the famous cove.

Despite the evidently ravenous tics in the garden which latched on to both Martha and me and unreliable weather, this was a splendid success.

We enjoyed our time in the cove itself, marvelling at its symmetry especially from the Pepple point headland.

But for me the highlight was the sentimental trip down to Durdle Door, complete with paraphernalia that included a large and rather heavy plastic dinghy and oars that we used, decades ago, to paddle through the famous arch. I had checked it before taking it, but had somehow missed a hole in it. This was only discovered when we tried to blow up the key (and biggest) section of the dinghy on the beach, having lugged it all the way down a long and sometimes quite difficult track from the carpark. It says much for the general niceness of my family that, whatever they may have thought, there was no word of reprimand from anyone ! Perforce, then we had to make do with swimming round the arch instead.

The offending dinghy may be seen in this pic. the white dot in the sea is me swimming out to the arch. The event ended with a soggy pic-nic in the drizzle in the New Forest on our various ways home, or, as the case may be, to a Star Wars gathering in Fordingbridge. We all have our special interests. Mine was in re-visiting Corfe castle for the first time in decades which I managed to squeeze in on the way to Lulworth.

The second such occasion  was much less strenuous,  a partial gathering for Violet’s 5^th birthday at Cross-in-Hand. 5^th birthday no less – evidence of my earlier point about needing to be present in order to cope with the passage of time. This was part of a week of celebration and all concerned  found it highly enjoyable. As, despite the ravages of the mice lamented in my last transmission, have I found the process of settling back into a more normal life. So far  !

              

 

Home Again

Being realistic, I had put aside two weeks after my return to the UK to get everything sorted out and ship shape after five years off-and-on of less than necessary house and garden maintenance. Now two weeks into it I realise how hopelessly optimistic this was. Despite the attentions of my (very good) gardener, the garden was in a pitiable state. No doubt this was thanks to his having inadequate time, my roe and fallow deer visitors and a long period of drought, plus of course the fact that his priorities for the garden and mine don't always quite align. The house was structurally sound and hadn't been flooded, but had a very large number of spider residents in every corner. At least this time (so far at least) there hasn't been those disastrous water-leaks which were such a hassle last time.

The immediate priority was to find somewhere to put away all the stuff I had brought back with me from Newport. It was when I discovered that I literally could not get the two suits that had been away back into the main wardrobe, that I realised that after all these years the time had come for a grand sort out and, frankly, chuck-out. This was clearly going to be a much greater campaign than I had envisaged. The process of normalisation that I guess will probably linger on into the Autumn. Another illustration of the same sort of issue has been finding places to hang the pictures I had brought back with me from the US. Many of these had gone out to the US largely because they used to be at my office at the JSCSC and when that closed (the office not the JSCSC) I had put them in store until inspiration struck as to what I could do with them. On my return from the US, part of the solution was simply to abandon the bigger ones and leave them at Newport for my successors to do what they liked with them. This had been a wrench, particularly one large one of naval manoeuvres in the 1880s which had already suffered in its journey out there. I remember being delighted by it, years ago, when stumbling across it with an unenthusiastic Cherry in tow in a junk shop on the Isle of Wight !  Instead of consigning the survivors  to the stables/outhouses I thought I would devote time to rethinking where some at least might go. Then something rather weird happened. I stood in front of one picture thinking, maybe I could replace it with another from Newport. I didn't touch it, but thought I would mull over the issue for a bit. During the second night of mulling in which I decided not to move it, the picture in question fell off the wall, strangely enough. Anyhow enough pictures have been successively slotted away for me to think the time well spent.

And so things are slowly falling into place. Another constraint on original plans also to devote time to the family and local history projects that have been neglected for so long is the fact that current events  and a continuing stream of invitations or requests of one sort or  other are combing to make it very difficult to cut back on the kind of academic activity that has been responsible for so many past neglects. The sudden, but totally predictable, upsurge of interest in the naval side of the Ukraine war of the past few weeks in the wake of Russia's withdrawal from the Black Sea Grain Initiative for example demands attention from people like me. I feel an op ed perhaps for Singapore coming on. 

Although it doesn't look or feel like it to most people who are focussed on the immediate effects of climate change or the cost-of-living crisis (both of which are made far worse, of course, by what's happening in Ukraine) we're very nearly at war with Russia and this won't help. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that the next few years could be the most dangerous since the early 1980s. Understandable that there's a reluctance to accept this and its consequences. Perhaps that's why, a week or so ago and on the day after it was announced that the US would be supplying cluster munitions  to Ukraine, and there was a particularly gloomy report on climate change, the Guardian chose as its main headline that one third of vegan meals had dairy in them. I mean no disrespect to Vegans (for they include some of the closest members of my family !) but it did seem to me to reflect an odd sort of priority. But maybe it also reflects that very human craving only to think about problems that you can do something meaningful about. Like gardening, or hanging pictures.  

Haul Down Report

 

When Admirals leave their current post, it is the custom for them to write a brief account (usually confidential) of their time and the issues confronted during their appointment for the guidance of their successor. This is passed over as their flag is hauled down for the last time. We have had an instance of that here at Newport in the last couple of weeks. I went to the ceremony as I’ve never managed to get to a US Navy change-of-command ceremony before and found it all quite interesting, although a lecture hall is not an ideal setting and means one can't see the flag in question. A shouted chain of orders snaking through and out of the building ensured that the flag was indeed hauled down at the appropriate time. I also did not see the contents of any such haul down report that the incumbent would have found on his desk afterwards. But I did get to meet the new man (his predecessor was our first female Admiral President, originally a helo pilot)  before he went on to get all of his undoubtedly mind-numbing briefings. 

This was because almost his first task was to come to the opening of our conference, and he stayed for the first session in which I was on transmit. The subject was irregular maritime operations. Apparently knowing what he was likely to be in for later on, he expressed a wish to stay and hear more, but was whisked away by his staff.  This was all very encouraging as getting on the right side of the incoming big wheel as soon as possible is a good idea, institutionally. Especially in a competitive place like Newport where budgets and billets are always at stake.

The conference went well, and benefitted by being held not on campus but in a big hotel overlooking Easton beach and the reservoir behind it, across and around which I used regularly to walk last year. The facilities were not so good but the food was much better and the view spectacular.

All in all I have also much enjoyed my time here in Newport, 5 years off and on, although I have to say that the college is much less collegial than it used to be because, since Covid, people don’t come in anything like as much as they used  to. But this is also true of all the other educational establishments I’m associated with. I think there is a bit of drift back to pre-Covid normality, but it’s slow and partial.  In consequence, there’s much less chance of picking up interesting tit-bits over the coffee. In fact there’s nowhere to drink coffee communally, which is a real lack. Another example of a great service partly strangled by its own bureaucracy I think. Still I’ve learned a lot over these past few years and made huge numbers of new friends one way and another and have been treated most hospitably once I got over the initial training courses about not eating spiders in the jungle and useful things like that. The students one teaches - ranging from their mid thirties to their early fifties in some cases were, absolutely excellent, interesting experienced, intelligent and nearly always extremely keen. Because I have found this time and time again over the years, I shall really miss sustained teaching, though I hop to keep my hand in for a little while yet through mini courses in Singapore and Brussels.

Because I suppose I’m now acclimatised to the American way, I haven’t fallen foul of the bureaucracy at all, even given a minor traffic accident. The US health service has been pretty good for me, at least as a Federal employee. I got an instantaneous renewal of my pills at the local pharmacy with no trouble at all, and very little expense. Mind you, one of my colleagues had a mild medical emergency and went to the local hospital in prosperous Newport and still had to wait 4 hours before being seen, just like the NHS I gather. None of them are on strike, but they’re short of nurses too.

What has really been driven home for me over the past five years is just how resilient this country is. The economy is going well despite the decayed infrastructure and I’ve seen no evidence for the common impression one sometimes gets outside the US of a broken society in free fall. There are still murderous events with guns and unbelievably polarised views on abortion, the LGBTQIA communities and so on but all the same everything seems to be working, and I haven’t encountered any unpleasantness of any sort, anywhere. It must all be happening somewhere else, in other states. Mind you it looks as though the next election will be close and a lot could depend on that. There is no question but that some of the people on the Republican right seem to me to be proto-fascist and dangerously isolationist to boot. Much, much more worried about China than Russia. From the US side of the Atlantic the view is that things seem to be a lot worse in the UK (which nonetheless and despite everything has a high reputation there) and, at the moment, France.

Imminent departure has led to me revisiting favoured haunts as much as time allowed. Three mansions this week, around a dawn-to-darkness three day conference in my last packing up and moving week. I was even having to work on a conference report while waiting for the taxi to the airport this afternoon. But I squeezed in a guided tour of the 18^th century ‘Hunter House’ on the waterside and refreshed my acquaintance with Newport in the war of American Independence when we thoroughly trashed the place once the majority Loyalists had left. I said good bye to my colleague General Rochambeau

 -  and also at last managed to get a visit to the Ida Lewis Yacht club. This is on a tiny island built round the remnants of a lighthouse  at the end of a very long boardwalk. It’s almost as exclusive as the New York yacht club ( my one major grockling failure !). My realtor who’s been looking after my rentals the past five years took me there, she being a keen sailor and long-term resident. A party of very rich beautiful young things arrived as we were leaving, just reminding one that this is not an egalitarian society, despite what Americans say. It’s just differentiated by money a bit more than ours is. But they will say that it’s equal in that everyone can make the money they need to rise. In theory, at least.

I walked, perforce, to the Marble House after I had taken the car back to the rental firm and took coffee for the last time in the teahouse and patted Cherry’s lion-dog farewell.

No matter how many times one goes to a place like that there’s always something different to see – an unspotted angle of the portico for example. Also in the basement I fell into conversation with the docent who said she thought ‘these Van der Velde’s’  deserved better coverage. I hadn’t realised that’s what they were (and still am not wholly convinced) so I checked them over closely.

Van der Velde died in 1692 and what these four large and very decayed paintings seemed to me be portraying was the departure of William III for England and the Glorious Revolution of 1688. My colleague John, whose period this is (and is the one our joint book dwells on) got very intrigued, saying he didn’t know they were there and rushed off to consult his books ! Like most inhabitants of Newport its aeons since he visited and of the mansions !

But I won’t weary you with a more detailed account of what has been a frantic few weeks which also included a farewell lunch at the Reading Room and a last sad visit to one of my very favourite places the Redwood Athenaeum. They will miss me as I became quite a fixture there. one of the ladies in attendance there was ex-English and waxed nostalgic on very occasion. She didn't want to go back home but the lady from Essex in 'June Love's English bakery'  said she often hankered for it...

All this culminated in my moving out of my new bijou residence on Roseneath Avenue, a painful process of ruthless decisions about what to try and smuggle back into the UK, what to discard and what to leave for charity. I left three large white sacks of radios, DVD players, car battery chargers  etc etc for the locals, a fair amount of food in the fridge I didn’t manage to eat – really sad to leave my marmite. My landlady, married to an Aussie is a Vegemite aficionado and can’t abide the real thing. The problem was the weight limit. I was going for 3 suitcases of 51lbs each and 3 carry-ons, one for laptops stuff, one for antiques and one for glass fronted pictures and files. All of them were ‘just a touch’ overweight.  I’m pleased to say that despite the heaving crowds and the pouring rain I have got away with it so far. Once I got the baggage trolley ($6 dollars for the hire) moving it rapidly developed the momentum of an Abrahams tank, but as far as I know I caused no casualties amongst the bustling throng.  I was dismayed when I saw they were carefully weighing each item of luggage of the person in front of me, but fortunately I was waved through with no comment, except for a slightly mystifying but genial  'how many is it this time ?' Even though I rather gave the game away by panting as I heaved each case onto the transfer rack !  Sometimes, as on this occasion, when putting my carry-ons in the overhead bins in the plane afterwards, I was in real danger of doing so again by falling over backwards.

The only slight hiccup was having one of my carry-ons diverted for further examination at security. Fortunately it was the least contentious one, the bag with the lap-tops. I was dreading having to watch my antique cups carefully wrapped in bubble wrap and old socks and pants being disinterred. But no, it was just a query about a glass paperweight from a conference in Malaysia years ago. They even manged to locate my belt which had somehow disappeared in the security process. Being over 75, I didn’t have to take my shoes off, either. I can tell you after all this, I was glad to get to the lounge largely unscathed just in the mood for a celebratory G&T. And so home to another new chapter…….

Post-arrival footnote. The trip worked like clockwork thereafter. No problem at all. It only started to unravel when I got home to discover that my new car, snugly in its garage, had been ravaged by mice who had chewed up the wiring pretty comprehensively, such that it was totally immobilised. Hence hassle and great expense in getting it towed away and fixed. This also complicated getting back to normal since I had no transport and the freezer had been emptied of food – so a long two mile tramp to the village shop to avert starvation was necessary. I also had to cancel a much anticipated local Church tour. Such are the benefits of living in the countryside. Still amidst the  chaos of a garden mimicking Borneo, I chanced across two pyramid orchids in the front, which I was delighted to see. Last time I found one in the paddock I was very excited until I saw hundreds of them at the Trundle near Chichester. So there are compensations to a quiet rural life. But, in any case, it’s good to be back…..