There's no place like home ?

 

 

When I got back from my last long teaching spell in Singapore, I rather thought that I would have  a lot more time and opportunity to correct the cumulative neglect of house and garden that has been the inevitable consequence of so much time away. My first sight of home indeed underlined the point that such tasks were eminently worthwhile and urgent. After an over-enthusiastic adhesion to ‘no-mow-May’ by my gardening team (in a state of transition because Nathan my original after 15 years or so had selfishly decided to get married and move to the New Forest) the house and garden looked abandoned. I was pleased to find there were no squatters in it. Perhaps that was because as I gather one passer-by in the All Cannings Gardening Club reportedly said ‘you can’t see Geoff’s house anymore.'

Lest I be drummed out of the Club, things had to be done.  For a few days all went very well on both fronts, house business and garden. . I was both surprised and delighted to hear that the State of Rhode Island had at last got its act together and sent a cheque covering the contents of my closed down American HSBC bank account to my poste restante in Newport. That took over a year of sometimes quite consolidated effort- and I’ve still got to find a way of cashing in a paper check now that UK banks have stopped doing so for ones in foreign currencies. Another complication is that my US bank is on the naval base at Newport and I don’t have access to it anymore. But I’ll cross that bridge shortly when I go there in a week or so’s time.

The peripatetic academic life style which this illustrates for some reason seems to be accelerating rather than winding down. The invitations keep coming; it’s as though they have heard that I am down-sizing and want a last chance to get me before I finally go gaga. It’s not the travel so much, but all the administrative nausea that goes with it, which I find so time-consuming and sometimes get badly wrong. But one completely out-of-the-blue example was a bit of an exception in some ways. The Tug Owners of Europe had got wind of me through an ex-Marine Colonel I knew from Greenwich days whose son worked for them and who thought I would be a good choice for a talk on the background to a recent European Union directive for them to think about their security in a time of much enhanced risk. .

They were preparing a big conference in Istanbul, which I like and so jumped at. It was held in a pretty spectacular hotel on the Bosphorus. An ex-palace actually, the sort of place where they give you 8 different choices of the kind of pillow you want. My balcony was right beside one of its Arc de Triomphe type entrances.

It was all very grand, with a Dinner Jacketed, gala dinner on the waterside, an opportunity to sail the startlingly blue Bosphorus and another dinner in another ex-palace. An Army colleague and I managed to squeeze in a grockling trip to yet a third one with lovely waterside grounds. All very over-the top and Trumpian. The Sultans did like their palaces. The conference was interesting too, and I found I knew several of the attendees. I learned a lot more about tugs than I had known before. Here’s me pontificating.

On the gardening front, a major achievement was finally to secure the services of Martin my new part-time gardener. So far so good. I also had time to engage in some useful wilderness-taming, especially hacking into shape my roadside hedge, replacing long-withered bean plants and putting in new ones to get the veggie garden back on track. Things are now looking a lot more reasonable. Indeed over my now customary breakfast or evening G&T spot in the pond-side mini patio recently I suddenly thought how nice everything was now looking. Admittedly from here you can't see that the pond has a leak and is full of pondweed that I need to get rid of. Moreover my memory for plant names is almost as bad as my memory for peoples' so I don't know what I'm looking at, more a question of wild geraniums, white things, poppies, robinia, purple things, yellow things and ornamental grasses. Most I don't remember planting. They are just there. 

All the same, though, perhaps something of a response to the jaundiced view of my barber recently, who said that after foreign travel, you realised ‘how rubbish everything was in this country.’ She was a very nice lady (even using the air blower down my shirt because I was so hot) but I forbore to ask what she had in mind, fearing political discord with someone with scissors in her hand. I merely said that wasn’t how I felt, mentioning the general look of the place and our much more gracious driving standards than, say, Singapore. But I guess I’m lucky living where and as I do, and so not in the best position to judge. So far, my home is still my castle and sanctuary, if not quite on the scale of the Sultan's.