Reunited we fall

For some reason I have failed to grasp, the Old Bat seems to be keen on a forthcoming reunion.  A school at which she worked as an assistant librarian for several years will be celebrating its 60th anniversary in 2015.  By my calculation, that is at least 18 months away and I rather suspect that the actual date is in September so we are, in reality, looking two years into the future.  So, the folks at the school are trying to make contact with as many past students and staff as possible to learn what the alumni have achieved.  To this end, a cream tea is to be held in September this year.  It is word of that get-together that the Old Bat has been spreading assiduously.

All three of my children were students at the school.  I'm not sure if the Old Bat has mentioned this matter to my daughter (who lives way up north from us in Sutton Coldfield) but the reaction of my two sons was rather, "So what?"  They are obviously chips off the old block, by which I mean the Old Bloke, ie me.

There is, I believe, an understanding - or perhaps I should call it a misunderstanding - prevalent among foreigners (sorry, that sounds almost rude and a touch xenophobic but I mean people who are not English) that Englishmen have a fondness for their old schools; the old school tie and all that.  A form of nepotism whereby any applicant for a position who attended the same school as the person responsible for making the appointment, automatically stands a much better chance than other applicants.  That really is something of an urban myth, certainly among the lower classes.  Perhaps there is a smidgeon of truth in it if we are referring to the middle or upper classes who can afford to send their sons and daughters to posh public schools like Eton or Harrow, Oundle or Shrewsbury.  Frankly, most of the people I know couldn't care less about their old schools - or their one-time fellow pupils in general.  Many are, I suspect, rather like me and have pretty well lost touch with all ex-fellow pupils by the time they are 30 or so.

I don't do reunions, can't stand them.  I have only ever been to two.  The first was a reunion of my old Scout troop.  I can't remember why the reunion was held, but I decided to drag myself the 65 miles it took to attend only to find there was nobody else there who had been a member of the troop at the same time as me.  I knew nobody and nobody knew me.

The second such gathering was a little better, mainly because I had left that group not so very long before and still knew quite a lot of people who were there.  Not that I found it very rivetting all the same.

I think perhaps if the other four men who were part of the "gang of five" - not really a gang but just five of us who were at school together and did things together - were to get back in touch I might find that we would relive some of the more hilarious escapades of our youth and have a thoroughly good time.  But otherwise, count me out.  Reunions and me don't mix.

~~~~~

I took a walk along the Waterhall valley yesterday, hoping that the lilies I had seen last week in the dewpond would be in bloom and worth photographing.  They weren't - worth photographing, that is.   All the same, I did take a picture.  The two lads were having a great time with their dog.

Road rage

What I call the French disease has spread and is now seen quite frequently on this side of the English Channel.  Despite all the signs on French motorways urging drivers to leave two markers between cars, nearly every driver comes up close behind me, almost close enough to see what I have in the boot, before swinging out to overtake.  And while all this is going on I am driving along at 70 miles an hour, the overtaking driver travelling at 80 or 90.  Tailgating is becoming increasingly common here in England and is one of the faults in other people's driving that annoys me most.  Possibly the one that is the most annoying.  I don't have one of those bumper stickers that declares, "The closer you come, the slower I'll drive" but that is often what I resort to doing.

Yesterday, I regret to report, I lost it almost completely.  OK, so we were in a 30mph zone rather than doing 70 on a motorway, but I swear the guy behind was only 4 feet off my rear bumper.  If I stopped suddenly there was no way he could have avoided hitting me.  So I slowed to a halt, got out and asked him if he wanted to get into my boot.

"Why?" he asked.

"Because you're driving too bloody close to me!"

Perhaps I was lucky that he didn't smash his door into me and follow that up with a good kicking.  And I didn't really feel any better for my outburst.

Nor did he drive any further away from me.

I really do try to keep my cool, but sometimes it just has to come out.

~~~~~

On the way down west we drive past the town called Arundel.  I have long wanted to take a p[icture from across the river but have never yet taken the time to stop.  On Saturday, I happened to be in a long line of traffic and was held up just long enough to snatch this shot.  On the lft of the picture is the Roman Catholic cathedral.  There must be others in England but I can think of only two - Westminster and Liverpool.  On the right is Arundel Castle, the seat of the Duke of Norfolk, Earl Marshal of England.

High Society

I've had a song running through my mind - the way one does at times.  Actually, with me there is rarely a time when a tune of some sort is not running in my brain.  It can become aggravating in the extreme when the same tune runs time after time after time.  As Macbeth said, "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow until the last syllable of recorded time".  (That is about the only Shakespeare quote I can really remember from the days when I studied English Literature for my GCE 'O' and 'A' levels.)

As I was saying, I've had this tune running through my mind, a tune from the musical High Society.  There's a film to conjure up the memories: Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and the divine Grace Kelly, with whom I was deeply in love.  Sadly, my love was totally unrequited.

Anyway, that song.  "What a swell party this is".  It is particularly apt as the OB and I drove down into deepest Somerset on Saturday for a party on my cousin's farm which was held to celebrate a number of significant anniversaries in the family such as 70th and 40th birthdays.  And it really was a swell party.  Two adjoining barns had been cleared of all the clutter that is normally stored in them (I wonder where it went?) and the walls had been given a quick coat of white paint.  Outside those barns a large marquee had been erected and tables and chairs laid out out.  Various salads were provided, along with several barbecues for people to cook the meat they had brought with them.  Sundry desserts were also supplied, along with seemingly never ending bottles of wine and barrels of beer.

A couple of smaller gazebos had been erected in the paddock off the yard, as well as a bouncy castle for the children's amusement.

The weather could have been kinder but wasn't bad.  A couple of showers - one particularly heavy - meant the the slide on the bouncy castle became extremely slippery, much to the enjoyment of the children who were all drenched to the skin.  The adults, meanwhile, ate more than their fill, drank (in a few cases a tad too much) and chatted.  Given that there were about 60 or 70 people there, chatting was easy, even for those like me who have little small talk.

It all seemed to me a little un-English, reminiscent of the way French villages hold feasts with tables spread out under the plum trees and the whole village turning out.  Great.

It's a dog's life

Why is it that phrase - it's a dog's life - is taken to mean something less than satisfactory?  Rather like 'a dog's breakfast' (or dinner) indicates that something is a mess.   As far as I can see, my dog's life is not at all bad.  Fern gets taken for two walks every day and is fed regularly so she has no problem trying to find food.  She has a blanket in her basket and a kong to chew.  I even throw tennis balls for her sometimes when we are out for a walk, and nearly every day we have a game with the kong.  No, a dog's life is not such a bad thing at all.

We could learn a lot from dogs, to them life is amazing. Balls are amazing. Sticks are amazing. Chasing your tail is amazing.   Dogs don't think, 'This walk is not as good as yesterday's' or, 'I preferred last night's dinner'.  They just live for the moment and think, 'This is a good walk' or, 'Great! Food!'  Or so I am told.  How anybody has managed to discover what dogs actually think is beyond me.

All the same, it is sometimes quite obvious that a dog is, for example, enjoying a walk.  They don't seem to mind if they follow the same route every day, although a new route is interesting as well.  Their menu never varies, but that doesn't matter; what is important is that they are fed.  They don't get bored the way that we humans do.  If, after they have been lying in one spot for a while, they do feel they want a change, they get up and move to the other side of the room.

It seems to me that life would be so much better all round - for everybody - if we thought and behaved more like dogs.

So why not take a walk on the dog side of life?  No more cattiness. No more indecision. No more "meh". Be more dog.

G'dday, sport

Actually, I have never been to Australia and, to the best of my knowledge, have never met an Australian.  The nearest I can get is having a cousin who emigrated down under and who was visited by my elder son when he went walkabout during his gap year.  And my wife's godson has been to Oz as well.  Oh, I nearly forgot.  Talking of the Old Bat, she has a smidgeon of Aussie blood in her as her grandfather was born out there and emigrated in reverse when his mother died.

Not that the Aussie greeting - nor all that drivel in the previous paragraph - has anything to do with what I propose writing about today.  Except that a greeting features quite strongly.

My introduction to small town America was back in 2002.  The Old Bat and I had previously visited New York, but I was well aware that NY is to the USA what Sydney is to Australia (to continue with the Aussie connection), that is, a world apart.  We were determined to see something of what could be described as the 'real' America.  Not being exactly knowledgable about these matters, we settled on visiting Virginia, specifically the Blue Ridge Mountains.  That trip came as something of a culture shock.

It started on our very first day.  I had made the electronic acquaintance of a Lion living in Maryland and I suggested to him that it might be good to meet up for a coffee when we were so (comparatively) close and he invited us to spend the first night of our trip at his house.  He gave me detailed directions how to reach him from Dulles Airport.  Kent duly booked a table at what he told me was the best restaurant in the area for our evening meal.  Unfortunately, he had failed to allow for the length of time it would take us to pass through immigration - and had missed one vital left turn from his directions.  The result was that we got well and truly lost.  But I managed to retrieve the situation and we arrived with Kent at about 8.00pm - just about the right time for the restaurant, I thought.  But Kent was jumping up and down and had cancelled the reservation - which had been for 6.30.  We had no idea that Americans ate so early in the evening.

For the rest of our trip I had taken the precaution of booking rooms at motels - the cheap ones like Days Inn.  But there was no motel to be found at one of the towns where I planned to stop overnight - Front Royal - so I booked a bed and breakfast.  This came as something of a surprise to us.  Over here, B and B tends to be relatively cheap and cheerful.  Not so in Front Royal.  We had a private sitting room and were invited to help ourselves at the bar when our hosts and their friends ate.  And we needed a stepladder to get into bed, a bed which was almost as wide as our bedroom at home!

Now it may well be that my memory is playing tricks on me, but I have in mind Front Royal being a small town with no hotels or motels and only one or two restaurants, one of which was a German establishment which closed at 9.30.  I have just checked and discovered something like 42 restaurants(!) in a town with a population of a bit over 10,000.  But be that as it may,  back in 2002 we ate at the German place rather earlier than we would have eaten here in England.  We got into conversation with another couple who were, they told us, locals.  But they had driven 35 miles to what they assured us was their nearest restaurant.  35 miles to get to a restaurant!  That made a round trip of 70 miles.  Here in England - in Brighton, anyway - people would think twice about doing a round trip of 20 miles.

Walking back to our B and B we passed a lad on the street - the very, almost eerily, quiet street - a lad of about 15 or 16 years.  And he spoke to us!  Very politely.  "Good evening," he said.  Now that would never have happened in Brighton.  If we had seen a lad of that age walking on a quiet street we would have been a bit wary.

Despite speaking the same language (almost), it was all so different.

~~~~~

From small town USA to small town France.  This is Tourtour in Provence.

What kind of cheese was that?

I'm sure I can't be the only one who thinks of a suitably witty retort minutes, or sometimes hours, too late.  It happened to me again only the other day.

I should explain that my dog, Fern, an English springer spaniel, is white with brown patches.  I say white, but of course when she gets wet, the white looks a bit grey.  She also has long fur.  I was walking with her through the woods the other day, along a narrow path through the denser part of Stanmer Great Wood, when a woman with two dogs came towards us.  Fern, as is her wont when faced with other dogs, went into the undergrowth and lay down.  As the woman came up to me she remarked that she had thought Fern was a sheep, not having seen the brown patches, and wondered what on earth a sheep was doing up in the woods.  I told her she would be quite alright when the men in white coats arrived.

It was only later that I thought of a better response: should have gone to Specsavers.  Of course, all I'm doing is introducing what I consider to be one of the best television adverts for years.  It doesn't hurt, either, that when I do the blind club transport run, there is a couple at the meeting that reminds me of these two.

Robin redbreast

For a week or more, a robin has been using one of the arms of our rotary clothes line as a staging post.  At one time there were two of them side by side.  He (or maybe it's a she) perches there, sometimes for several minutes, with a beak full of something.  If he (or she) thinks there is something or somebody fairly close by, he flies off a short distance to perch in the tamerisk before coming back again to the clothes line.  When finally satisfied that the coast is clear, he (or she) darts off to a spot behind the daphne, only to emerge fairly quickly with an empty beak.  I have come to the conclusion that there is a nest with what is probably a second brood of chicks.  It doesn't seem a very sensible spot in which to build a nest, being only two or three feet above the ground and easily within reach of one of the many cats in our neighbourhood.  Or the foxes, with which we are plagued - although maybe a robin chick is too small for a fox to bother with.

I had been planning to get into that spot to prunes the branches of our next-door neighbour's leylandii trees and to cut back the ivy (also from our neighbour's garden) which cascades over the fence and has grown a bit too thick.  Obviously, I will now have to wait until the robin's have finished their business.  The perfect excuse for doing nothing.

And here is one of the parents.  Not the greatest example of wildlife photography but I'm not unhappy with it.  (For our cousins across the pond, this is a European robin, erithacus rubecula, 5" in length, little more than half the size of the American robin.)