Jetlag

Even after a few hours sleep there seemed to be more grandchildren around than we remembered.

We counted them again, and there are still just three, but they have become faster and more wriggly and cleverer in our absence.  Perhaps they have become noisier as well.  We can't work out if all the hugs and cuddles are for their benefit or ours, and we don't really care.

They took us off to the nature reserve to try to walk off the northern hemisphere, but as they scampered along the boardwalk, the colours seemed even more disorienting.

We quietly bade them farewell and slowly made our way north to make an attempt at recovery from jetlag in the silence of our own company.

No doubt firmly in its clutches, one of us made a rash and uncharacteristic decision that he would attempt to cook a nice cup of tea  for the other as she remained blissfully recumbent at some part of the early morn.

With unfocussed eyes he managed to fill the kettle and place it on the gas cooker.  His practiced hands reached to the left for the ignition switch, and groped a couple of times until the nuero-transmitters of his brain manage to send a message  back that on the boat, he would have been correct, but at home the switch is on the right.   With a gentle click-woof the burner ignited, and with kettle in place he turned his back to find the teabags.

The kitchen became enveloped in a dull orange flashing glow.  He turned to find the electric kettle which in fairness had until that point been quite similar in shape to the one the he had used daily on the boat, somewhat ablaze.

After carefully writing "Kettle" on the shopping list, he decided it was time for his journal to take a short break, lest even more foolishness be inadvertently recorded.

We liken the Singapore wait in the airline lounge to being in the Restaurant at the end of the universe.    We try to balance that confusion that comes with not knowing whether we are coming or going with the familiarity of our surrounds, but it is to no avail.  

Whenever we are there, our life flashes in front of us as our minds try unsuccessfully  to come to grips with the fact that it has been six months since last we passed, and six more until we will be back.  We  shower and try to relax while at the same time struggling to shuffle the various parts of our lives so that we may deal its cards in their new order.

Have we left the bilge pump on in the boat?
Where did we put the spare car keys in the house?

Despite running over a thousand questions like these, the answers don't come readily to mind, so we board our flight, settle back in our seats, wait our time, lose our night and a day and in our semi-conscious state, walk out through customs in Brisbane one more time.

It's very bright, the sun.  It feels as though it might get hotter too.

Everything is as brown as we want to remember it, but no matter how familiar we try to convince ourselves that we are with these colours, the khakis and beiges of the bush are once again a novelty to our spinning senses as we drive along the motorway.

We are back.

But are we home?

Up and away London to Singapore

Well that's that then.

It seems too soon to be on our way, we know we have been here a while but the usual signs of autumn have not yet appeared and we feel a bit short changed by the lack of colour other than green in the vegetation.  There should be flurries of golden leaves on the streets, and trees tinged with red which can be photographed against clear blue skies, but there aren't.

If we were birds we would probably not yet be flying south.  Perhaps we'd be caught here for winter as a result of the late change in season.

But we aren't and we are flying tonight although we did spend much of the day plotting and planning a return in winter, as though the delay in the start of the season has actually affected us as well.   Perhaps we will think differently tomorrow when we have straightened ourselves after the flight.

I wonder.

Packing Bayswater

The forecast this morning offered a high probability that we would receive a month's rain in the next twenty-four hours.

A month's rain in London is not particularly a lot by the standards by which we usually measure rainfall, but it comes apparently with quite a lot of wind and nowhere near as much temperature as one would prefer if one is to be out and about for the morning, so we stayed indoors and practiced packing our bags to make sure that all was in readiness for tomorrow.

As it turned out the afternoon wasn't much better because it takes quite some time to deliver a month's rainfall, and the growing pile of ruined umbrellas along the footpaths was perhaps suggesting that we would be well advised not to go too far into the outdoors ourselves.

So we didn't.

The Last of the Summer Wine Kensington

Yesterday, as we sat having lunch in the Windsor Castle Public House in Kensington, watching the patrons drinking as much of the late afternoon sunshine as they were other beverages, we were not to know that it was probably the last we would see of the sun in London this year.

This morning in terms of weather was as forgettable as yesterday was memorable.  It made the setting for a perfect Sunday really, a good lie in, a late breakfast, a short time braving the elements followed by an even later lunch.

It was a pleasant day indeed, but we just can't help but get the feeling that perhaps yesterday we really did drink the last of the summer wine.

Bank London

"Open House London is your chance to explore hundreds of inspiring buildings in London for free" said the brochure of this weekend's event, but a quick calculation had us dividing that number by the two days of the weekend to come up with fifty each day, and further mathematics brought it down to tens per hour, so a little sifting needed doing.

Jules was appointed chief sifter, and after a good deal of doing so produced a list of four buildings worthy of our presence and an itinerary to go with it.

The Bank of England on this fine sunny morning was to be our first stop.   We arrived a polite time after the doors were opened to find ourselves standing in a line which was even longer than the one for the iPhone released earlier in the week.  If one were to study the above photograph very carefully, one can just make out a red light at the intersection, just a few hundred people ahead, between us and it.  When eventually we reached that point, travelling at a rate of twenty-five persons per ten minutes, we had just a further one and a half city blocks and two and a half hours to wait before reaching the entrance.  At that point we suspected that we may not quite make the other buildings on our schedule this day.

The Bank of England is only open to the public on four occasions each year, or at least bits of it that are normally not open to the public are.  If one is fortunate enough to decide to visit on one of those four days, and if perchance the day does not bring with it precipitation, one may even be allowed to traipse through the office of the governor himself, and accompanied by a nice lady guide and a rather large "no photos allowed please sir," security guard,  that is exactly what we did.

Of course by the time we had finished being enthralled by the banter of our guide to say nothing of the countless artefacts and historical snippets, sufficient time had elapsed for us to abandon all hope of visiting any other building that day, but we'd already had our money's worth even in the absence of any samples being handed out.

Tomatoes Honiton to Waterloo

Having spent a little time yesterday installing a set of louvres and some automatic opening stays in David's greenhouse roof vents,  it was quite satisfying to see them wide open when we arrived home in temperatures soaring into the twenties,  and even more so peer out of the window into the cool of the morning gloom to observe that they had indeed automatically closed, working exactly as advertised.

On our return to Waterloo later in the day I didn't see anyone else with the sort of interest I had in finding vents in the glass roof, nor for that matter could I see any open.

I suspect that's why the tomatoes don't grow all that well on the platforms.