26 March 2001

Dear Mum and Dad

Did another 22 miler yesterday, Sunday. I’ve got a sore right knee, but the archilles and knee problem I had in my left leg has gone! That’s funny medicine, all right.

Daylight saving started this weekend so we got up in the almost dark this morning, but I’ll be running in the light, after work, for the first time since we came back from NZ. I forgot that when I was signing on for the London Marathon I was also signing on to train all through winter. Tell you what, though, these long runs are the business, all right. Every single time I have done one, things have improved by a big leap. I have so far done 4 runs of 18 miles or more.

They don’t consider 15 miles to be a long run and they think 16 miles is the lowest limit, but 18-22 miles is the band. Each alternate weekend has been a 1/2 marathon as fast as I can go. That time hasn’t changed (1:36-ish) but my 6ml time is down to 41:30-ish and my 3 mile time is 19:51 When I input my 6-mile time, the calculator said I could was capable of a 3:12:00hr marathon. Not this year, mate. Also, my pulse is down to 39/min. I checked it at lunchtime today – how sad, no-one to talk to so he took his own pulse.

We went to Waddesdon a couple of weekends ago. Normally one goes to Waddesdon to see Waddesdon Manor, built by the Rosthchilds in about 1880 in lavish 1800 French style, then dumped on the taxpayer for the National Trust to run. Well, sort of, anyway. It’s a fabulous place with stone towers and Louis XIV wall panelling, a huge fountain of plunging horses and mermaids near the front gate and large, ornate gardens. It was closed, but we weren’t going there, anyway. We wanted to see the garden centre and to wander around the little village, which has two beautiful Victorian buildings, one a pub and the other the town hall, as well as a building that was very similar to the alms houses in Wing.

On close inspection, we could see that it did use to be an almshouse and is now 5 privately owned cottages. Lovely. Opposite is one of the local antique shops, calling itself Junk and Disorderly and right outside it was a quite magnificent Victorian bed warmer. What caught our attention, apart from the long handle, was the brass lid. Normally these bed warmers are made completely from copper and Elaine doesn’t think the colour is right, but brass is the perfect colour and with a brass lid and that long dark handle, it looks really good hanging in our living room. We had a coffee in the pub (very nice) and a wander around the garden centre (very ordinary) but it was a nice sunny day, made particularly beautiful by having lots of snow lying about.

When Elaine paid for the bed warmer with a cheque, the storeowner said, “Now there’s an old Waddesdon name,” and handed us the telephone book to see for ourselves. There were three Tearles in the book.  Two of them lived in Waddesdon, one a plumber the other a builder, while the third had a Wing address and of course, that was Millie Tearle, Thelma’s mother.  He’s the first person we have met in England who knew a Tearle.

Then last weekend, while Elaine went to the market, I took a short drive up to Woburn to have a closer look at a most peculiar church there.  I had lunch at a Greene King pub, the Royal Oak, which is quite a large and unique looking thatched building with huge beetling brows scowling over thin, hoop-topped windows. I had a very passable cottage pie.  The day was cold for wandering about in and his fire was very comfortable but St Mary’s Church, right in the middle of Woburn, has this most odd gothic steeple stuck on top of its Norman tower and I didn’t want to go back home without having had a closer look at it.  

Now a Norman tower is massive, square and has those battlements along the top.  Imagine a short steeple from the Notre Dame stuck on top.  It’s very dramatic against a dark sky, but it just looks odd.  St Mary’s church is decommissioned and now belongs to a group of guardians.  It’s a very small church with a detached tower – I haven’t seen that before – and there used to be a bell in the gothic steeple.  It is now a museum for the local district and won’t open till May. I’ll go back and have another look then.

That reminds me – this last 12 months has been the wettest ever recorded and the records started in 1765.  The water table in the Sandridge and Jersey Farm district has risen by 16 feet!  In Kimpton, not far from here, the River Kym is flowing again and that hasn’t been seen for 50 years.  The springs that used to bubble up around here when it was a marsh are flowing again and lifting the seal off the roads.

The foot and mouth outbreak is almost a complete disaster.  So far there are 612 cases, with forecasts of up to 4000.  That’s 612 farms and tonight the disease is in the Lake District.  We are very lucky that it isn’t here yet, but no one is thinking that it won’t come.  We are much less likely to get it because all our stock are housed, but it takes only one careless person to bring back something that is carrying the disease from the Lake District or the Cotswolds (and we were there only a short while ago) to spread it to our local farms.  You can feel the sense of dread.

I hope you are well and that you are prepared for your next winter.  We’ll be in touch soon.

Lots of love, Ewart and Elaine.

15 April 2001

Dear Mum and Dad

I have received my latest Marathon Update magazine and with it the registration card. Someone has to go to the London Arena near Greenwich and get me registered because I’m not allowed the time off work.  Elaine has volunteered to go because she will still be on holiday that day. With registration comes a gear bag, my running number and a big sticker with my running number on it that has to go onto the gear bag. There is also the ChampionChip that I have to wear on the day of the race. No number and you can’t run, no chip and you won’t get a time. You wear the chip on your shoe, and relace it to take the chip.

The gear bag gets taken away just before the race starts, and they will only accept the official LM gear bag. You pick it up after the race and hopefully it will still have your warm clothes in it. I’ll put in Elaine’s cellphone, too. If it gets pinched, too bad we can always get her a new one.  Elaine will have mine because that phone has better reception in London and its number is the one all my agents ring me on and it’s cost me an awful lot of money to get that number known. I have photocopied the relevant pages from my Runner’s World mag and from the Marathon Update. I’ll ask Elaine to go on the Wed so if there is anything missing, she will have time for a return visit. We looked at the railway timetables yesterday and found out that if we catch the Thameslink train to Brighton, get off at London Bridge and catch the Connex South train to Blackheath, I will be there on Sunday morning around 8:00am ready for a 9:30am start.

The marathon starts on Shooters Hill Rd in Greenwich Park and ends in The Mall, outside Buckingham Palace.  At about the 6-mile mark we go past the Cutty Sark, cross Tower Bridge just before the half-way point, run past the Thames Flood Barrier at about the 30km mark, then along The Embankment to Birdcage Walk, with St James’ Park on our right, swing past the Victoria Monument outside Buckingham Palace and finish a couple of hundred yards up The Mall.

There is an area in Horse Guards Road where they have put up A-Z letters on poles. You arrange to meet under the letter that corresponds with your family name. Good idea. But the best news is that I have a BLUE start. Only the elite and serious runners get to go from the blue start. The green start is for the not serious and the red start is for the Football Challenge, the fancy dress runners and other team and fun events. I can only guess that from my entry form where I said that my best time was the Petersfield 1/2 Marathon at 1:38:12, and was aiming for a 3:30:00 time, someone must have deduced that this was my first marathon and I wasn’t mucking about.

After having watched me start, Elaine can walk through the Greenwich tunnel under the Thames and see me pass the 6 mile mark, then walk about 1/2 mile further along and see me pass the 20-mile mark. We’re still trying to work out how she gets to Buck House to meet me at the finish, but it looks most likely that the Docklands Light Railway will be able to deliver her very close to The Mall.

The weekend before last we took a trip to Birmingham so I could to run a 22-miler with the Runner’s World magazine pacing team and that was quite interesting. I rang the Sutton Court Quality Inn hotel to make sure the park was still open, and they said it was. I thought that was a bit unusual because there should be deer in the park somewhere and the Lake District, where the heaviest concentration of foot and mouth disease cases is to be found, isn’t very far away. However, the park was open, and in spite of the rain on Saturday afternoon it looked very pretty.

I looked up the postcode for the Sutton Court hotel on multimap.co.uk and printed the maps to get there. We followed the maps carefully and then, when the landmarks looked right I said, “It should be here, on your right.” And there it was! A Victorian building, with creaky oak stairs, tarted up with modern signs. We thought it would take about 3 hours to get there, but going up the M6 was very smooth and we were there in around 2 hours. The locals call themselves Brummies.

Sutton Park is huge – 2400 acres – and it was easy to devise a 22mile run there. A while ago it was used for a leg of the International Motor Rally. There’s a forest in there of a 750 acre stand of oak trees. The town itself is called The Royal Town of Sutton Coldfield and Sutton Park was a hunting ground of Henry V111, that man again. He was there with Bishop Veysey in 1528 when he was charged by a boar, but before it hit him the boar was felled by someone’s arrow. Henry looked around for the huntsman and a rather attractive young woman came up to him, bow in hand and it was she who had killed the pig.

In gratitude, Henry gave her family some land and gave her village the Tudor Rose to use as its emblem. The town charter for Sutton Coldfield was given to the town in 1528 by Henry himself and you can see the Tudor Rose on many of the civic works and, of course, in the town’s coat of arms. There’s not much of the old village left, apart from a few Tudor buildings in the main street but there are lots of very nice Victorian buildings and evidence of an enormous amount of 1930s and 1950s building.

Running with the paced group in Sutton Park has highlighted the need for much better organization on my part. I didn’t organize my Saturday well enough and I didn’t organize my breakfast and drinks well enough for the Sunday run. Unfortunately, there were only 2 drink stops, one at 10.5 miles and the next at 20 miles. We were told at the beginning that the laps were 7.5 miles each, so I was not prepared for such big laps with so little water.

As a result, the last 1.5 miles I spent almost walking. It was so humiliating. If it had been the marathon, I’d have been 5 miles short and looking at taking at least another hour to finish. The time for the run was 3:15:00hr and I finished in 3:17:00hr, so that’s not too bad, but it has woken me up to the perils in store. Physically I think I’m ready but I suppose because of the lack of race experience, made worse by all the races I have entered being cancelled, I do not have a good organization worked out for race days. I’m very pleased I went and got such a knock to waken me up – it would be truly horrible to put in so much effort and then have it all ruined because I ran out of energy 4 miles from the end. Proper organization for London should get me to the finish on time.

For a while, I ran with a small group that included a young woman who said she’d run London before and this time, to raise funds for her charity, she was making pizzas. I told her I was running London as my first ever marathon and she said, “You’ll enjoy it so much, the atmosphere is huge. There are bands playing and groups singing and people all along the track; you’ll love it.  Don’t try too hard for your time because London is to be enjoyed rather than raced.” She said she had run it several times but that running the London Marathon was still the most important thing she had ever done in her life. “At the end of my life,” she said, “I don’t care what they do to me, but I want to be buried with my London Marathon medals.” How cool.

I wish someone would make some decent socks! All of the socks I have worn so far have got raised seams and most even have knots. The 1000 Mile socks were no good, either. The only ones that are ok-ish are new Nike terry socks. As soon as they are washed, they are too stiff and scratchy to run in for a long distance. All the rest are too scratchy anyway. I couldn’t find any Thorlos socks, but I’ll try them next. The main thing I have missed out on in the build-up to the LM has been racing.  I have had so many races cancelled on me. I realised last weekend that if I’d had more races, I’d have been better prepared for the event. My organisation would have been better. So fun runs and races are good. Fun runs, where no-one expects or wants you to race, will be good out-and-about stuff and won’t harm training.

At races you meet people who are different from people you have ever met before. Elaine and I have been very pleasantly surprised at the friendliness and quality of the people we have met. I think the reason for their extra qualities is their willingness and ability to concentrate on a task and organize themselves to achieve a goal they have set themselves. It’s quite interesting. If you are a member of a team, you help the whole team achieve its goal(s), but usually those goals are set for you. As a runner, you set your own goals and only you care whether or not you achieve them; most of the time, also, you are the only one who knows.

Thank you very much for your letter explaining your situation. The last time I spoke to you, you thought you would be out of the house within a month and you have lasted two months.  Well done. I couldn’t see how you were going to get through the winter lugging all the wood in and keeping things going while you were so obviously not very fit. Elaine and I are very impressed with the huge amount of work you have done and the responsibility you have shouldered in sorting out your affairs and taking care of all your property.  Sheryll has emailed me to say that you have given Bryan all the photos and correspondence to look after until I collect them.  She and Bryan are quite happy to look after that material and I will pick it up in due course, or arrange for Joni to collect it.  Rest assured it will be well looked after.

I have spent a most interesting weekend reading all that material that Janette Stallman and Jim Spence sent me.  When I read it first I saw it only through the fog that was left of my brain after Jason’s death and I got all sorts of facts wrong.  This weekend has been most enlightening. Mum’s parents were born in NZ, but her father’s parents were all from Ireland while her mother’s parents were English. Janette Stallman’s father, Robert, was my grandfather James Ewart Dawson’s (Mum’s dad, Lofty) brother.  He would have been Uncle Bob to Mum.  Did she know him?

That makes me and Jeanette second cousins, though I have never met her. The Dawsons have been in Lisburn, just outside Belfast in what is now N Ireland, since at least 1776. They were Presbyterian. It’s interesting to speculate whether they considered themselves Irish or British, isn’t it, in the light of the division of Ireland. Anyway, if we skip to 1852, that was when Richard Dawson’s son, William (1821-1889) married Ann Ewart, in Lisburn.  

They had 9 children; one, William, was to be Lofty’s father, and another, James Ewart Dawson (1860-?) is of interest to me.  Lofty’s father, William  (1857-1910) served in the Royal Irish Constabulary in Sligo, Eire, until he was dismissed in 1881 and soon thereafter he emigrated to NZ.  Janette Stallman says that the Dawson name is Scottish and the Dawsons would have gone to Belfast from Scotland, a distance you can almost row, to work in the plantations.  

She says that Ewart is a Saxon word to do with sheep-herding, so that the Ewarts probably have an English ancestry, but from where is unknown.  Ann Ewart (1826-1898) was the daughter of John Ewart and Jane Kirk, also of Lisburn, married in 1809. She names her fourth son, James Ewart Dawson.  Now, Mum’s grandfather, William goes to NZ in a ship called Crusader, in 1882.  My bet is he went from Belfast to Christchurch.  8 Years after he arrives he marries Margeurite Matthews.  Married in The Manse, Leeston, Canterbury, 12 April 1889.  Look at that name, Margeurite.  Mum’s grandmother.

The Matthews come from the other side of what is now N Ireland.  Remember the Omagh bombing?  The Matthews come from near there, in County Tyrone; a place called Lisnacloon, 11 miles south-west of Strabane.  They were a farming family, paying rent on properties which were let to them “for life.” Margeurite’s parents were Matilda Kinnear and John Matthews. Matilda’s father was David Kinnear, born in the 1790’s. So they have been in the area for a while, haven’t they? And it clears up the mystery of Mum’s two names. There is another very interesting point, though, and that is that John Matthews’ older brother, James, married a girl called Marianne KYLE, in 1827.  John and Matilda are married in the 1840’s so Matilda would have known the Kyles well.

Now, when she gets married in NZ, look what Margeurite does:  

• A daughter, Matilda
• A son, James Ewart
• A son, Thomas Edwin Kyle (whom Mum called Uncle Kyle)

Isn’t that interesting!  And Lofty, in his turn, called his only daughter Margeurite Matilda.  He probably called Mum Matilda after his sister, Tilly, who died at only 36yrs, of TB, but you can see where the name came from – Matilda Kinnear of Linsacloon.

And then I had a look at Mum’s mum and I got an awful shock.  Elsie’s parents were English.  Not only that, but they lived not far from here! Elsie’s father was Albert Edward Orange (1865-1942) and he was born in Glen Parva, Leicester. He came to NZ in 1878, via Garonne in France and Melbourne.  Now Leicester, as you will know from a few of my earlier letters, is about 2 hours up the M1 from here and we go there to see Elaine’s cousin Jack Dalgliesh and family.  So Leicester isn’t exactly unknown to us.  

There are several Glen … places to the south of Leicester city and just in the crook of the M1 where you turn onto the outer ring road is Glen Parva.  Next time we go to Leicester, we’ll have a little wander and see what’s still standing from the 1870’s.  All of that would have been familiar to Albert.

When he got to NZ, Albert married Helen Hinkley (1888-1928, div 1924.)  She had come out to NZ in 1883 and was the daughter of John Hinkley and Susan Henderson.  She was born at home, 53 Union St, Southwark. That place name rang all sorts of bells and I found it on a street map of London.  Union St, Southwark is about ½ a mile from Blackfriars.  It’s on the south of the Thames, you just cross Blackfriars Bridge and keep going south until you get to Union St.  Simple.  We are going to go there to see what remains of 1860’s London.  There could be a lot, there could be a little.  But it will be interesting.  

Frank’s mum (Sadie) came from Wing in Buckinghamshire and his grandfather, Levi, came from Stanbridge in Bedfordshire, six miles away, on the other side of Leighton Buzzard. I have

walked from Leighton Buzzard to Wing and it’s not very far. Levi and his new wife, Sarah, shifted to Wing very soon after they were married and their first son, Arthur, was born in Wing but baptised in Stanbridge.  I found out recently that you can’t baptise your children, nor be buried, in just any church. Levi’s mother was still in Stanbridge and he went there often all through her life to see her.

Because of where he had been born, brought up, got married and only just left, he was required to go back to Stanbridge to have Arthur baptised.  As I said, it’s not a very long trip from Wing to Stanbridge.  Arthur grew up in Wing, where Levi built a very prosperous blacksmithing business. Sadie’s parents were killed in unusual and tragic circumstances and her brothers were sent to an orphanage where they were very badly treated while Sadie grew up with her maternal grandmother, Catherine Scarlett, in deep poverty in the almshouses in Wing.

She and Arthur courted while working for the Rothschilds in Ascot House, Wing. Dad’s brother, Fred was born in London and Sadie and Arthur emigrated to NZ in 1911. Dad was born in Hastings in NZ in 1915 and his father died the same year, aged just 40. If Dad had been born in London instead of Hastings, I’d have a right to a British passport the same as Fred’s kids do. They don’t want it.

The most interesting thing to me is that almost every Tearle in the world is from the same family. Unfortunately, there are now a few people whose first name is Tearle, but it just migrated there, like my name is Ewart and that’s my Irish great-grandmother’s maiden name, hence it was my grandfather’s middle name. Mum wanted to call me after her father, but she didn’t want to call me Jim, so I got his middle name. Bryan was called Bryan because Mum liked the name, Theodore after Dad (but I’ve never found out who the original Theodore was) and Richard after Mum’s brother.

I had a very interesting night late last year when Ivor Adams, Donn Heath and I all met for the second time. We were discussing our respective grandparents. Mine is Sadie, Ivor’s was Joe, Sadie’s brother and Donn’s was Fred, Sadie’s other brother. When they got it clear, both Ivor and Donn sort of stopped and looked me. Their relationship to their Adams grandparent was exactly the same as mine. They thought I was a foreigner and in the end, it’s just my accent. It was a fascinating moment – even though I had lived with Ivor for over 6 months and he knew what my relationship with Sadie was. It sometimes takes more than just saying something actually to make real sense of it.

My contract at Tesco is on its last legs but may go until the end of June. So it looks like I am about to find a new adventure. It’s been very nice working there and it has been very good having a steady income for such a long time, that has certainly helped us to stay here AND we got home for Christmas AND we got Elaine a nice little car AND we paid our taxes, both in NZ and in Britain. All of that doesn’t help us to save very much, but at least we are still here, we have a nice little flat and we are still debt free.

Oh, yes! I got an award. It’s called the Tesco Values Award – for living the Tesco values, you see. “No-one does better for customers,” and “Treat others as you want to be treated.” It seems that a whole department nominated me. It came right out of the blue and is relatively rare. I was quite chuffed, still am.

It was very sad to convey to you the bad news about Clarice. She was a lovely lady and when we needed her, she was there. She and Thelma and Sheila came all the way to NZ to be with us in the year Jason was killed.  I spoke to Thelma about it last night and it was one of the great adventures of her life.  Thelma and Clarice had always been close, but their trip to NZ was a special bond.  It depends on when the funeral is, but we’ll try our best to go and we’ll go and see Keith and Jill soon anyway. Let’s hope they like Ilfracombe, because they have only just shifted there – they moved farm, stock and everything to be closer to Clarice. We have bought a card to send from us, but we have also bought a card to send for you and Mum.  I know it will be deeply appreciated and it was a privilege to be asked to send it for you.  It’s also a lovely card.  The English make beautiful, thoughtful and memorable cards.

Outside at the moment the weather is doing its best to imitate the blasted heath in King Lear because the wind is noisy, the rain is being whipped along and the sky is a deep and heavy grey.  However, the cheeky daffodils are nodding and if they are not overly bothered, why should I be concerned?  And I have the funniest news.  You know there is quite a decent sized pond outside our flat; it’s kidney shaped and about 30m x 10m with trees planted closely around its banks but heavily overgrown with raupo.  There’s a lot more reeds than water.  

About three weekends ago, I noticed a lot of fish jumping about near the bank closest to our flat so I went over to see what was going on.  It wasn’t fish, the disturbance was being caused by dozens of spawning, brown froggy things.  I contacted the University of Hertfordshire by email with a message to Christine Shepperson, in which I asked her to pass on my worries about whether the creatures were frogs or some nasty little noxious toads.  If they were the latter, I reckoned that someone who knew these things would have a very good opportunity to clear out lots of toads.  

Christine said that she would pass on the message about the frogs/toads but would I like to keep an eye on the pond and let her know when the dragonfiles were flying.  So I said I’d keep a lookout.  Next thing I get in the mail is my membership of the Hertfordshire Dragonfly Group … unbelievable. Their bi-annual newsletter is theBrachytron and I am the proud owner of issue only number 3.

My job for the rest of my sad life is to haunt the ponds of Hertfordshire, beginning with our little Milford Close pond, on the lookout for Small Red-eyed Damselfiles, Azure Damselflies, Blue-tailed Damselfiles and the Large Red Damselflies.  Keep a sharp lookout for the Brown Hawker and the Norfolk Hawker, both true dragonflies.  Elaine says if I go out on a Sunday afternoon, with flask, binocculars and hamper at hand wandering the countryside looking for dragonflies then she’ll know that I will finally have totally flipped and there’s no further hope for me.  

But I suppose that means that you can send a search party to retrieve me should I ever write to you in great excitement that I have found only the second breeding site known in Britain of the Lesser Crinkle-back Banded Demoiselle.  The dragonfly enthusiasts are migrated bird-watchers. I’ll keep an eye on the pond because Christine asked me, but don’t worry I won’t be wandering through the copses looking for mating dragonflies.  The toads, by the way, turn out to be common English brown frogs and perfectly respectable to have as neighbours.  At the moment their frenzied efforts of a few weekends ago have become thousands of tiny, black, wriggling tadpoles.  Good luck to them.  May the herons be blind.

Keep well, won’t you.

Lots of love

Ewart and Elaine.

8 May 2001

Dear Dad

I received your letter dated 1/5/2001 this morning.  We will be delighted to welcome Jan and Gilly to England.  If they let us know asap when they will be at which airport when, we may be able to pick them up.  If they are going to be in London for a while, we are always on for going there to show friends around.  We can also put them up for a few nights on our spare bed in the lounge. If you recommend them – and you have – we’ll look after them for you. We live only 40 minutes by rail from Kings Cross station in London.

I heard you were having some really foul weather – even some flooding in places – but I guess with the onset of winter, the good weather has to end.  Jimmy Mark, the cocky who leases our farm, says it’s one of the best seasons he’s ever had and he’s still milking twice daily.

I hope the visit to the doctor next week goes well – be careful and be cool.

My next target is a sub 40 minute 10km.  The best I have done so far is 2km at 4 min/km, so 10km at that speed will be a bit of a challenge.  I am recovering nicely from the marathon and I did my first 8 mile run this evening. I feel fine.

I have finally been given my notice for the job at Tesco – I am out of work as of 25 May.  I have had a few phonecalls from agents so far, but a really promising one today of work in Hatfield, about the same distance from home as the present job, and a pay rise.  He said my cv was very impressive.  He’s right – my cv has some very good jobs done for some very big projects in some very large companies and I am well qualified for the sort of work I am looking for.

I have written back to you straight away so that Jan and Gilly know at the first available opportunity that they will be very welcome. Our address and phone details are attached.

Lots of love to Mum

Ewart

19 May 2001

Dear Mum and Dad

I took my London Marathon medal into one of the local jewellers to be engraved, but after telling me it would cost GBP13.00, he said the engraver wouldn’t do the job because the gap left on the medal was too small for the machine to write in. He also thought the metal wasn’t the right sort. I then took the medal into the Maltings and spoke to the fellow on the trophies stall, who had done other jobs for me. He spoke to his engraver who said the space on the medal was too small for machine work, but he would hand engrave it for me. I asked how much, “7.50.” Done. We went next door to one of the best coffee shops in the country, Costa, and had a beautiful big latte while we waited the 1/2 hr he said it would take. When I picked up the medal he said, “Blinding time, well done!”

We had a wonderful day yesterday at the Duxford May Display. Duxford is near Cambridge and was one of the Battle of Britain air force bases. It holds the first air show of the year and they had mostly WW2 planes. It was so exciting to see these wonderful and historic planes swooping past and doing aerobatics under the clouds. There was a whole section devoted to De Havilland and we were interested in this because De Havilland had his factory in Hatfield, just down the road from us.  There’s a full-sized model of the De Havilland Meteor that broke the world long distance speed record when it flew to Australia, mounted by The Meteor Roundabout opposite The Galleria, near here.

Ivor said that late in the war they could hear the huge screams of jet engines under test. De Havilland built the Vampire, and the Meteor and today, the only two non-military aircraft in the world that can cruise faster than sound are Duxford’s De Havilland Meteor and Concorde.  Both of them are over 30 years old. We also found a most peculiar link.  Elaine’s father’s boss, Maurie Andrews, flew Hurricanes and Iris’ father put the electrical wiring into them. I didn’t say it was a close link, but we did stand there and digest that while we looked over the Hurricane on display.

There was an entire flight wing consisting of two Hurricanes, a Spitfire and a Corsair all in RNZAF colours and all NZ owned. I didn’t find out if they had actually seen active service for the RNZAF.  The most impressive flying we saw all day was the Harrier jump-jet. He climbed vertically off the runway, hovering noisily but perfectly still, then he went sideways, backwards, drifted slowly forwards and then took off up into the cloud cover with a howl and a roar of pure power that still gives me goose-bumps just thinking about it.

There was also, of course, the Avro Lancaster and a section devoted to the Dam Busters.  We have an interest in that because the mayor of Te Kuiti, Les Munro, flew over 100 missions in the Dam Buster squadron.  There was also a mounted practice bomb, filled with concrete, of the type used in the dam attacks and a piece of film showing the planes practising dropping the bomb.  It’s a big, cylindrical bomb and there was a small motor in the plane to make the bomb rotate backwards at 500 rpm. The plane had to be 60ft off the water and travelling at 220 mph when the bomb was released.  Barnes Wallis’ office was in London Rd, St Albans, where we get our cars serviced.  He also was on the design team of the Wellington bomber.

On static display, and taking up most of a huge hangar, was the B-52, 4-engined Stratofortress: measure it out – 182 feet of wingspan. There was also the Vulcan bomber and I can still remember it coming to Rotorua when I was in primary school. Concorde was there and so was the Blackbird. This is a spy-plane and it carries no weapons, just a camera – mind you, a good one, it can read the number-plate on your car from 100,000ft.  

It’s much bigger than I thought a single-seater, twin-engined plane would be, because it’s about the size of Concorde.  It probably goes about Mark 4 and travels at around 200,000ft, but it broke world records at Mark 3.1 and 120,000ft and no-one’s seen it do anything more.  Anti-aircraft missiles are too slow and can’t get high enough to catch it.  One of the guys who works at the museum was chatting to me about it and he said that when a missile blows up near it, the plane is going away from the blast so quickly that the blast seems to implode rather than explode.  We didn’t see all of Duxford by any means, but it was a very good day out.

On Monday it was the May Bank Holiday so we thought we’d go and have a look at the Knebworth County Show in the morning and then visit Chenies Manor House in the afternoon.  Knebworth is on the A1(M) just out of Stevenage and when we got to within a mile of junction 7 the traffic just stopped, on both lanes going north.  We thought that since we were only a mile short of the turnoff, we’d wait in the queue but 3/4hr later, when we were still ½ a mile short of the place, the queue was still pretty well stopped.  

We thought that perhaps the priority was Chenie because it was open only seldom and we’d been to Knebworth before. The right lane was moving quite a bit quicker, but so it should have because no-one was turning off it. We drove up to junction 8 and used the cloverleaf there to get us back onto the southern lanes.  When we got back to junction 7, we could see that there was a considerable tail-back and no reason at all for the right lane to be stopped. We measured the tail-back; three miles of it.  People must be starved for a bit of country, so the entire population of Hertfordshire must have decided to go to Knebworth.

Chenie is a tiny village just to the east of Amersham, on the A405, but it makes up for its lack of size in being entirely exclusive.  There are two-storey expensive houses and a very toffy school, but the manor house and church were a revelation.  It was a Norman church, built around 1220, because the first minister was recorded on one of the walls as having been there from 1232.  On the walls were the most beautiful brasses.  In medieval times the rather more wealthy would have a brass plate made on which was a portrait of the occupant of the grave.  

Many of the plates are deeply carved and quite ornate, with biblical inscriptions and descriptions of the deeds of the person portrayed.  They were usually on the floor of the church and lately people have realised that 800 years of walking on these brasses is ruining them, so the brasses have been lifted and mounted on the walls.  In their own way, they are highly expressive and deeply moving.  Not all that many are dated, but those that are have 1300 and 1400 dates. I haven’t yet seen a date later than 1540.

These churches are basically walls, about 3ft thick, with arches held up with elegant round pillars. There’s a bell-tower which doubles as a lookout tower (or the other way round) which has a steep stone staircase inside.  From the staircase people inside could fire missiles through narrow slots in the walls out onto attackers.  The roof is usually framed with wood and then tiled or slated.  A very simple roof, it’s the walls that do the work.  These Norman churches feel solid, protective, comforting and somehow ageless and solemn.

They are not very big and must have been relatively cheap to build, because England’s population wasn’t very numerous or particularly wealthy and yet these churches are often only a few miles apart in the centres of very small villages.  They are always built of local material so they have a regional flavour which reflects whatever the commonest building material of the time was.  In spite of their great age, most of them are still in use and for me they are the most romantic symbols that England has. There was an annex and we could see through big windows that there were quite a few big sarcoffigi and some large carvings against the walls.  The most remarkable was of a Norman knight in full chain armour lying with his head on his dog, also wrapped in a chain.  Next to the knight was his wife, dressed in beautiful medieval clothing.  They were full size and carved to represent as closely as possible the people in the coffins they lay on.

Chenie Manor, it turns out, was the original home of the Earl of Bedford, the Russell family, of Bertrand Russell fame.  The whole house was built over a deep, dark crypt which was first a wine cellar and then a dungeon. Nice – people were actually incarcerated there.  Henri V111 gave the Russells Woburn Abbey when he dissolved the monastries and they shifted there, but retained ownership of Chenie Manor until about the 1700’s.  In a small paddock close to the house is a 1000-yr old oak tree, rather battered by time, but with a huge, broken trunk.. Henry V111 visited the Russells quite often, once with Anne Boleyn when Elizabeth was a baby.

We were sitting on a seat outside the house discussing the oak tree and Elizabeth when we noticed the manor’s unusual chimneys.  “That’s Christopher Wren,” says Elaine, because those are the same chimneys as Hampton Court Palace.  Well, she was right.  It may not have actually been Wren, but it was the same workmen. The chimneys have this unique twisting brick pattern built into them. Then we found out that the Russells had built the extension on the church and that most of the Russells are interred there.  It was private property, so we couldn’t go inside, but I would have loved to have seen in there.  The statuary was quite remarkable.  A funny little thing I found out – Midsummer Night’s Dream was written for the marriage of the Third Earl of Bedford and Lucy Harrington, I assume at Chenies Manor. And lastly, think of this; there is a young oak tree growing in the same paddock as the old one and is intended one day to replace it.  The young oak is planted from an acorn taken from the same branch of the tree used to hang the last Abbot of Woburn ….

We saw on the front page of the local newspaper that on the weekend immediately after 22 April, St Albans was going to celebrate ANZAC Day at the town cemetery opposite St Paul’s Church in Hatfield Rd.  This area of St Albans is called Fleetville, but I’ve no idea why and the cemetery is quite a large one.  We thought that if St Albans was going to put on a service for the ANZACs the least we could do was to be there.  I suppose about 50 people turned up along with the Girl Guides, the Burma Star soldiers, a man in full military uniform from the Australian High Commission, the Secretary to the New Zealand High Commissioner and the Mayor of St Albans, Rona Phillips on her very last official engagement.

It was a quiet and dignified occasion and people remembered the soldiers who had died of their wounds in the two hospitals in St Albans.  There was a cup of tea in St Paul’s afterwards and there we met Mark and Margaret Gill from the NZ High Commission in NZ House.  He was a very nice chap, thoroughly enjoying his stay in Britain and have, like us, lots of adventures and taking full advantage of the travel opportunities being close to Europe gave him.

Now you may not believe this, either, but Elaine and I were invited to Die Fledermaus, the opera by Johann Strauss 11.  I was pretty worried because I wasn’t too keen on being bellowed at all night in German, but it was actually quite a light-hearted affair and it was sung in English.  It’s an awful plot concerning a wealthy man and his wife, both of whom want to have a fling and actually end up with each other.  I even knew a few of the tunes; I simply didn’t know they came from this opera.  Pretty up-market for St Albans, all right!  

The costumes were good, and the orchestra was very good, but the singing was a bit … average.  It’s called Die Fledermaus – The Bat – because she gets invited to a ball but she has to dress in disguise and she comes all in black with a high-winged mask looking somewhat like a bat.  It’s part of the plot that he doesn’t recognise her in her bat dress, she looks absolutely stunning and very mysterious and he tries to seduce her.  Nice music, though.

So to follow that up, we also get invited to the Phoebus Trio: harp, flute and viola.  They were superb.  At times the viola sounded like a cello and the music they played had been written especially for this trio of instruments.  The most beautiful piece was written by an English composer, William Mathias and was a musical portrait of the three musicians he wrote the piece for.  Not particularly lyrical, but evocative and emotive, at times wild and at times peaceful, just like real people.  On Monday night we go and see the last of the musical goodies, the Ionian Singers who sing mostly unaccompanied.  That should be a treat.

I’m about to start my last days at Tesco and Elaine has made a very nice feast of afghans and apricot fudge for me to take to work..  I’ll miss the people at Tesco because they were a very pleasant group to work with.  It’s a very good company, keen to keep its traditions and to upgrade its members’ culture.  To that end I now have THREE Tesco awards.  I am the only one on the helpdesk who has so many because these awards are nominated entirely by the customers – by the people who ring up the helpdesk. The other guys say, “Oh, yeah, that’s just because they like your Australian accent.” All my awards have been nominated by women, and the other helpdesk analysts know I’m not Australian – they just want to “take the mickey” as it’s called here.  I have had two or three phone calls a day from IT placement agencies, but no offers of work, so it’s a bit of a worry.

I have largely overcome the effects of the London marathon, I’m back to being able to run 10 miles and tomorrow morning I do 12 miles then some sprints.  I’m having a go at getting my 10km time below 40min.  That is hard work.

Last weekend we got invited to a football match where a group of kids from Elaine’s class was playing in the Barton Town club team.  They were playing in the final of their competition and were so thrilled to have made it to the final, they wanted us to go up and cheer them on.  They were such charming boys and they played their hearts out, with a lot of skill for boys of only 9 and 10yrs.  They didn’t win, but they still treasure their finalists’ medals.  After the game we drove into Bedford and had a walk along the banks of the Ouse. It was a beautiful, sunny day, the third in a row as though it were full summer and people were lying about sunbathing or picnicing under the trees.  

The Ouse itself is big enough to allow quite a large ship to sail to Bedford from The Wash, which was one of the reasons it was such a strategic city.  These days it’s not so important and the river is the most horrible greenish brown colour you have to wonder how polluted it is.  We called in to explore the lovely St Paul’s Church in the middle of Bedford and we lit a candle for Jason.  We walked back along the river tow-path to our car and then the three-day drought broke with heavy clouds, a dozen flashes of lightning, crashing thunder and a torrent of rain as we drove home.

Remember we went to Leicester to see the Leicester Tigers’ grounds with Jack Dalgliesh?  And we met Dean Richards?  Well, today we watched Leicester win the Heineken Cup in grand style with three tries to none, over Stade Francais.  It was a great game – Mum would have loved it. The Heineken Cup is THE rugby trophy of Europe.  We watched it on TV, of course, but since we had been to the Leicester grounds and we’ve got the tiger to prove it, we’re happy to support Leicester.  Many of them are in the Lions team which is about to tour Australia and guess who is the coach of the Lions?  Graham Henry.  Go Graham.  Another interesting thing is that the assistant coach for England was John (?) Mitchell – he’s gone back to Waikato and we hear he’s doing great things with them. Talent will out.

The foot n mouth outbreak is nearly over.  Yesterday was the first day in which there were no new cases and the countryside is slowly opening up.  There are lots of arguments and recriminations, of course, but the thing that is most clear for me is the massive extent to which English farming is subsidised.  But the same is true for all European farming.  Some of these farms are 45 acres sustaining 100 ewes and 170 lambs.  The farmer concerned stands in front of the camera bawling that his livelihood is being taken away from him.  I’d cry with him if he was talking about his little flock that he had carefully bred up in his spare time – but a livelihood?  

They were paid 26 POUNDS per sheep destroyed.  It’s unbelievable.  It’s also incredible that a whole family can live on 45 acres with 100 ewes.  Although it was poor farming practices that caused the outbreak, as they have caused the BSE/CJD outbreak, it wasn’t just the farmers who suffered and it wasn’t even them who suffered the most, but they are the one who will get compensation.  The ones who suffered the most were the tourism industry, which itself is worth 10 times more than farming, and rural businesses dependent on farming and tourism. And they will get no compensation at all.  They shouldn’t either; in business you take the smooth and bank it to get you over the rough.  If you don’t you shouldn’t be in business.  The same applies to farming.

By the way, no, we do not eat beef on this side of the equator.  We eat lamb – there’s no mutton or hogget here – and pork and poultry and we don’t use Bisto or any other beef extract, nor beef sausages, nor hamburgers, or steak n kidney pies. It’s likely that the current crop of  CJD cases is the forerunner to a very much larger group of people who will all die in the pandemic.  It’s estimated that one-tenth of Europe will die because the affliction can take 20 years to develop.  This recent group are those most easily affected – there are many more to come and cattle are still being found, in France and Germany, for instance, with BSE. We’ll try to stay away from it and only eat beef on our visits to NZ.

 That reminds me; we left NZ on 31 May 1999 and arrived in England on 3 June 1999.  Very shortly, we will have been here for two years.  Whenever I see my workmates feeling depressed and harassed because they feel their life is jailing them I tell them that the only walls they have are the walls they erect around themselves.  They are in a jail of their own making.  There are so many jobs here, and many of them pay very well for people of skill and talent, there is no need to feel that life is closing them in.

We have a long weekend coming up – here they call it a Bank Holiday – and we are going up to Suffolk to interview someone who has applied for a job in NZ.  It should be most interesting and we’ll see lots more countryside we haven’t seen before.  That reminds me, one of the guys at work was looking on the Internet for a castle to take his girlfriend to for a holiday and he said to me, “Hey Ewart, you’ve seen more of England that most of us have, what’s it like in Bristol?”  

So I was able to tell him about the incredible bridge over the Bristol Channel and how the tides rise 16 feet in Infracombe on the North Devon coast because of the amount of water that flows up and down the Bristol Channel every tide. And the sheer between the incoming tide and the outgoing tide. And the smugglers coast. We had a good look, too at all the castles pictured on the Internet and how few of them were actually castles at all, more like manor houses.  The only one that looked really like a castle – like Warwick Castle, for instance – was GBP400 per week, I think per person. He thought he might take her to Ilfracombe instead.  Cheaper and still very pretty.

I hope this note finds you well and that you are enjoying life in Tairua.  Dad’s sharpener is ordered, it should turn up any day and I’ll forward it to you as soon as I see it.  We’ve sent Geoffrey a very nice birthday card and a present we hope he’ll have a lot of fun with.

Lots of love

Ewart and Elaine

10 July 2001

Dear Mum and Dad

Thank you VERY much for the photo of Hahei.  It’s a real beauty and Elaine and I will put it in a frame this weekend and hang it in our living room.  Those lovely blues of the sea and the sky will provide such a contrast to the other two pictures we have of Verulamium last winter.  I know you miss your little house, but we do hope that life in Tairua is not too bad.

We were very distressed to hear of Mum’s fall and we are pleased that it was not as bad as it could have been. Still, a cracked shoulder bone is not fun and we hope it doesn’t hurt too much.

I know a broken shower is a pretty weak excuse, but if it works – to get yourself a new workshop – I reckon you should go for it and exploit the situation to the ultimate.  If you’re lucky, you may be able to remove the wall between the shower and the bathroom and so expand the workshop … best of luck!  I knew that sending you the sharpener would lead to better things.  Sharp tools call for a sharp workshop.  Well done ….

Also well done to Dora and Ian – it was good of them to go and see you.

Elaine is all ready for her inspection and a couple of exams to finish off her QTS – her Qualified Teacher Status.  Incredibly, the EU does not recognise NZ teacher qualifications and it takes between 1 and 3 YEARS to gain it here.  In the meantime, the local education authorities benefit handsomely because they get good, highly qualified teachers at rock bottom unqualified rates of pay for up to three years while they put them through the QTS hoops. Elaine will be finished – they allowed her to take 6 months because she is so highly qualified and experienced – by September, but even then we’re not sure whether she will be paid full rates right away or not until they have actually sent her the paperwork.  All the more reason for them to delay. I’ll stay in IT.  At least it’s fun.

There you go.  Have a good week.

Lots of love

Ewart and Elaine

29 July 2001

Dear Mum and Dad

I have landed a very nice job as a Technical Support Analyst on the Help Desk for Sainsbury’s head office in Rennie House, Rennie St, Southwark.  Pronounced SUTHic.  The place is often confused with Suffolk because lots of Brits can’t say the th in Suthic, so it comes out suffok anyway and people say to me, “Oh, you’re working in Suffolk – that’s a long way from St Albans ….”

Now Mum’s mother was Elsie Orange, eldest daughter of Edward and Helen Orange.    Helen was originally Helen Hinkley and she was born in 1865 and lived at 53 Union St, Southwark.  When she left for NZ in 1883, she left from a very good place to leave. It’s easy to picture the Dickensian pea-soup smogs and imagine peering through slit eyes as you pick your way to work through the grubby brick buildings listening for the trains hissing and rattling noisily overhead.  She was a nurse in London, did you know? I don’t think Mum ever met her – she died in 1928, and Mum would have been 7 at the time.  Also, and she divorced Edward Orange in 1924, so it’s quite possible she would have had nothing to do with the Orange family, including Elsie, after that.  

However – back to Southwark.  I was very surprised indeed when I was asked to go to 168 Union St for my job interview with Sainsbury’s and I had a brief look around the area that afternoon.  Since then, I’ve taken to walking all around the Bankside area that Helen would have been familiar with and I have been looking for anything older than 1883, so that what I am looking at, she would have seen.  Well, there is a lot.  

Firstly, her house is still standing.  It’s just the shell and is being refurbished for business premises, but many of the houses around it are still in 1883 condition and you can easily get a sense of the dust, grime and poverty of the area.  It was primarily a warehouse district and many of the Victorian era buildings still standing, although converted to modern use mostly as offices, have retained the lifting gear attached to the outside walls.  

She would have been familiar with the Southwark Cathedral, which was called the Church of St Mary Overie when she lived there – it became a cathedral in 1910 and it’s only a few streets away.  She would have been familiar with the stories of The Clink – the prison that gave all others the name.  It’s just a few streets away, even though it wasn’t an active prison when she lived there, the rubble from a huge fire in the area in 1814 was still there in 1883 and its underground vaults still exist, too. It was the prison for the Duke of Winchester in Winchester Palace and it started life in the 1300’s.

It’s a really horrible place.  Southwark has been home to prostitution and crime since Saxon times.  The Duke of Winchester “regulated” the brothels and owned a large section of Bankside since King Stephen gave it all to the Bishop of Winchester in the 1130’s. As you can see the title has become a secular one. The Clink was his private prison and he held life and death over its inmates until the prison was destroyed in 1780. Incredible. In its turn it was a firstly a prison for the population under the Bishop/Duke’s control, then it was a prison to hold Catholics for Henry Viii, then to hold Protestants for Mary, then reverted to holding Catholics for Elizabeth 1.

Its last use for most of the 18th and 19th centuries was as a debtor’s prison.  For all of this time, the owner could extract fines and payments from the inmates.  He made an awful lot of money out of misery.  I saw in an issue of last week’s Metro newspaper that the Duke of Winchester is the wealthiest man in Britain.  He owns 300 acres of inner London and is worth 10 billion pounds.  So now you know it; there is wealth, power and respectability in being a pimp. There is a little bit of Winchester Palace still standing – a wall and a large rose window – and under that is the Clink. In Clink St, of course.  The palace itself, in its heyday, was inside a fully-walled area of about 200 acres; all that’s left today is that bit of wall with the window, and the remnant of the Clink.

She would also have been familiar with St Paul’s Cathedral towering over the Thames on the other side of the river, and all the other works of Sir Christopher Wren in the area built in the late 1600’s, early 1700’s.  His chief mason, by the way, was a man called Edward Strong who was a citizen of St Albans and is buried here in St Peters Church. The Blackfriars bridge Helen crossed to get to The City from Bankside is the same one I cross to get to work.  It’s called the Blackfriars New Bridge, built 1860 to replace the original bridge built in the 1760’s, by an engineer called Rennie, incidentally.  

She would have been familiar with the Blackfriars rail bridge, too, that crosses the Thames and swings through Southwark on a big brick viaduct.  I suspect that then the arches would have been open, but today they are bricked up for lockups – and there is a very large amount of space to be let under the arches of a rail bridge.  Blackfriars Bridge would have looked a quite a bit different from what I can see today because on the Southwark side of the bridge was a huge Romano-Greek building in stone called the London, Chatham and Dover Railway station.  

On its facade were carved the destinations you could travel to by rail in those days.  Part of the facade was placed in the railway building I walk through, so I was able to read what she saw: Paris, Moscow, St Petersburgh, Rome, Marseilles – lots and lots of places on the Continent.  Maybe it gave her itchy feet …  There were two other interesting things I found out – one was that the City of London ends on the other side of Blackfriars Bridge.  I always thought the City ended on the north bank, but at least in the case of Blackfriars Bridge, the City extends right over it and a few yards on the south side.  The other interesting thing is that Blackfriars Bridge, Tower Bridge, London Bridge and one other (I think Waterloo) belong to The Bridges House Trust.  It was given property in London, I think by Henry Viii, and it looks after those four bridges, including replacing them when necessary, “without recourse to public money.”  In other words those four bridges were built and are maintained entirely without calling on taxes or rates.

Ivor Adams, my cousin on my grandmother Sadie Tearle’s side, who has worked in The City most of his life, said that Bankside was the haunt of the Teddy Boys in the 1920’s and 1930’s and even today, in spite of all the upgrading that has been done there, areas just to the south, like Elephant and Castle, North Peckham and Peckham, are still poverty-stricken and crime-ridden.  If you stay close to the river, you’re ok. It’s very nice.  In Southwark, there are two named areas close to the river.  One is called South Bank and extends from Waterloo Bridge to Blackfriars Bridge and the other is called Bankside and extends from Blackfriars Bridge to London Bridge. I work in South Bank.  

I walked 7 minutes from work down The Thames Walk to the Tate Modern, a coal-fired electricity station that has been converted into the largest indoor space I have ever seen. And they use all this space for an art museum. Free admission, too.  I could only spend 10 minutes there but the building outside is massive in brick, dominated by a tall red-brick chimney that has been a feature of the Bankside skyline for nearly a century.  Inside, it is light and airy and there are overhead cranes quietly tucked away waiting to move large and heavy exhibits.

The last night of Music in Marshalswick turned out to be the best night of them all because it was a celebration of Elizabethan madrigals. The choral group was about 20 strong with 8 men and the group was usually divided into four voices and sometimes six. They sang these really lovely, lilting tunes from the 1500’s, many with direct reference to Queen Elizabeth I, for whom they were actually written, but some also were religious pieces.  

It’s interesting that musicians and poets of the time wrote about religious and secular things in the same idiom. And it’s also interesting that some madrigals are still being written – Vaughan Williams wrote a couple for QEII’s coronation and Aaron Copeland, the American, wrote some, too. But arranging “Home Boys Home” as a madrigal is rather like a Barber Shop Quartet singing Heartbreak Hotel in 4-part harmony; it sounds pretentious and insincere. The modern madrigals lack the romance and feel for the genre that the Elizabethans had and those songs were uplifting and so, so sweet.  

We found ourselves at a loose end a couple of weekends ago, so we drove up to Stockwood Park in Luton.  Now, I have driven past the park lots of times and always promised myself that I would call in to see the Mossman Collection – whatever that was – but I had never got around to it.  It was a bright sunny day and Elaine said her kids had told her the whole thing was free, so since they had recommended it, we thought we’d go and see what it was all about. It was a revelation.  

The first thing we saw was a gypsy caravan exactly the same as the one Graeme made.  It was mounted on a dray with the front steering wheels able to swing in under the tray of the caravan, a centre section of the roof lifted for head clearance and lots of carving and colourful paintwork all over it. Graeme’s caravan could have showed the constructor a thing or two about craftsmanship, though. It wasn’t rough by any means, but Graeme’s was better.

After that, there were sections on display of the crafts and farming activities of the 1800’s; brickmaking (10 million bricks a year in Luton alone) haymaking, poaching, hatmaking (the Tearles of Stanbridge were heavily into strawplaiting and hatmaking) the blacksmith, heart and soul of every village in the country, as well as displays of kitchen life and home crafts such as tatting and lacemaking.  It was very impressive, the displays were detailed and had authentic clothing and tools.

Stockwood was originally a large farming mansion very close to Luton, but its owners sold it to the council and in the 1960’s the council demolished the house, but left the grounds and the tall imposing brick wall that enclosed the grounds.  Inside the grounds they have set up Victorian gardens and some large hothouses.  Inside one of the hothouses is the cafe. Nice.  That was all we had time to see and we’ll have to go back to see what the Mossman Collection is all about, but it’s free, so one day when we are at a loose end and want something interesting to do for free …

Last Saturday afternoon we went to Harlington, of all places, to see The Pirates of Penzance. Actually, they were really good.  I haven’t seen the show since Rotorua Girls and Boys High schools combined to put it on when I was in high school.  They made their own costumes and set and hired a very good set of lights. Remember “Poor Wandering Heart,” and that beautiful trilling that Mabel does that sounds like a skylark?  Well, this Mabel did it really well; I still wake up in the morning with that powerful impression of her sparkling eyes and perfect pitch and I can’t rid myself its simple, clever little tune.

Harlington is one of those little villages with a very old centre of Tudor houses heavily cloaked with protection orders and surrounded in expensive modern houses.  It even has its own railway station and almost everyone who lives there gets on the train and goes to London every day.  It’s the same train I use. When they are on their way home these are the stations they pass and in this order: Blackfriars, City, Farringdon, Kings Cross, St Albans, Harpenden (another little, expensive, commuter village) Luton Airport Parkway (you catch a free shuttle to Luton Airport), Luton, Leagrave, Harlington, Flitwick (you call it FLITTick) and Bedford. They travel from Southwark to Bedford in about an hour.  

In the morning the train also stops at Gatwick airport and terminates at Brighton.  Although I don’t know of anyone who commutes from Bedford to Brighton every day, I do suspect that some commute to and from Gatwick because it’s a very big airport and it would need lots of engineers and IT people, so why not from Bedford?

At the bottom of our hill is House Lane, which goes in a more or less northerly direction to Sandridge and above the lane are large fields of rape and barley.  For most of the last three weeks there has been a gradual reddening of the rape field so we walked down to see what was happening.  The rape field in full flower is bright, bright yellow and very dense because the raceme of the rape plant is about 8 inches high with about 100 flowers on it.  Spread that densely over a 50-acre field and you can see how the colour could become so intense.  As the yellow died away, the red colour had been spreading and intensifying and now we could see what it was.  Poppies.  Here they call them field poppies to distinguish them from cultured varieties.  

I thought they were weeds, probably brought back from France and Belgium on the clothes and in the pockets of soldiers of WWI. But I’m wrong.  William Cowper, English poet and man of letters during the 1700’s was in St Albans recuperating from mental illness and he wrote about the field poppies of St Albans, so they have been here for a while and this spectacular display of massed blooms lasting about 2 weeks is repeated almost every year; it’s just that some years, like this year, are better than others.  

So Elaine and I have become much more thoughtful about English wildflowers. They are not weeds, they are real plants and Jennie and Thelma are very enthusiastic about them, as was Clarice.  I thought why get excited about weeds?  I’m beginning to see why. Remember last spring we went up the hill to see the bluebell wood?  The bluebells have a 10,000 year history here.  The ground was set up for them by the retreating ice at the end of the last Ice Age and they come up, flower and die away early in spring before the other forest floor creepers and greenery get a start.  

There are bluebells all through Europe, but they don’t mass anywhere there like they do here. It seems that the timing of the poppies is just as fortuitous.  The rape flower drops and the poppies are tall enough to catch the light while the rape seed pods are ripening.  The bright yellow turns to bright red. Alongside the roads are massed bunches of pink blooms held stiffly like feathers on tall spikes – there is plenty of hemlock, but the pink blooms are packed together rather than just scattered about. Thelma says they are willow weed. Jennie says that all these things are governed by the seasons, which are so pronounced here, so that without having to read a calendar, the person who can read the wildflowers can tell exactly where in the year she has got to.

While we were inspecting the poppy display, Margaret Martin, who was staying with us on holiday for a while, asked us for a couple of flint stones that she could take home.  That’s not difficult – pick and field stone and it’s flint.  As the glaciers retreated north about 10,000 years ago they left this land smoothly undulating but the terminal moraines are heavy in clay and water-rounded flint stones.  I thought I’d have a go at being a new-age Stone Man, so I picked up a couple of likely looking flints and banged them together. Nothing.  Why didn’t they shatter and give me a nice axe or something?  

I threw first one then the other very hard down onto the road.  Still nothing, they just bounced away. So I picked up a broken one that had a very obvious flaw in it and looked around for a stone to bang it with.  I decided I’d try a nice round stone because it would probably be stronger than a broken one and, holding the broken one in my left hand whacked it on the flaw with the round stone.  This time the flawed stone broke nicely into two.  I then whacked the very edge of the break and with a satisfying little ping a shard fell off.  When I picked it up and examined it, my little shard had a razor edge and a thick, blunt edge. It could easily cut meat held as it was in my fingers, or be mounted into a piece of wood with glue (they used resin) or tied in with string to make a slicer or a scraper. In ten minutes I’d gone from 21st Century Man to Cave Man.  Elaine and Margaret both reckoned I’d only make it to Neanderthal, but I’d still have been able to carve the roast.

My last piece of good news is that Elaine has successfully finished her QTS. That means she has qualified teacher status. We were both flomoxed when we arrived here to discover that Elaine’s NZ teaching qualifications and experience counted for nothing.  She had been recruited in NZ for supply teaching in England by Select Education and they hadn’t told her this rather important fact.  For the past two years, Elaine has been teaching in England as an untrained and unqualified teacher, even though for most of the past year she has been the mentor for a teacher in training.  Britain has an acute shortage of teachers – about 10,000 too few and it is heavily recruiting in NZ, Australia and South Africa.  

Because it doesn’t tell these people that their qualifications and experience are not recognised and won’t be paid for, they come here in all innocence and don’t know for months firstly that their are on the lowest pay a teacher can get, but they also don’t know that if they don’t get their QTS in two years, they won’t be allowed to continue teaching and therefore will have to go home when their money runs out.  Accidentally or not, Britain gets lots of highly qualified and experienced teachers almost for free.  The QTS usually take one to two years, but Elaine was allowed to do hers in six months.  She has now finished and will be paid at the proper rate in due course.  It also means, of course, that she will be able to continue teaching if she wants to.

Yesterday we got half of one our oldest wishes – to go to Luton Hoo.  As you know, Luton Hoo was the house used in the movie Four Weddings and a Funeral.  There was the long drive through trees and a front view of a quite magnificent house. All week we had seen advertisements for a Robin Hood Fayre at Luton Hoo, so we had to go and the half of the wish that came true was the long drive through the trees.  

The house has been sold and a hotel corporation is turning the house into a luxury hotel so sooner or later we are going to get the second half come true.  However, the fayre was a beauty and well worth going to.  As we drove up to it, we could see large white pointed tents with St George flags on the tallest poles and lots of bunting hung between them.  There were lots of re-enactments of rural life in the 1350s and there was also an ensemble playing music from the Tudor period and there was an American playing a range of musical styles using a hammer dulcimer. It’s quite a wide instrument with a peg to hold it off the ground and the musician plays it by tapping the strings with felt-tipped, curved little hammers.  It makes a very pleasant resonant sound like a clavichord, but much more mellow.

The music he was playing wasn’t particularly old, but the hammer dulcimer is certainly a Mediaeval instrument.  I mentioned to him that my younger brother makes Appalachian dulcimers and he said that the Appalachian dulcimer had a Northern European history, quite different from that of his own instrument.  Just inside the gate as we walked in was a group re-enacting family life in the 1350s.  They had a long, heavy wooden table with earthenware dishes and wooden plates.  

The women were wearing white linen full-length dresses drawn at the neck and sometimes with a tunic dress over the top.  The men wore woollen breeches, white linen blouses in much the same cut as the women and with jerkins over the top.  It was very warm clothing for such a hot and sunny day.  They were cooking meat patties for lunch.  In a small enclosure next to this little group were three colourful tents with knights and soldiers showing off their swordsmanship and demonstrating the use of Mediaeval pikes.  

In another enclosure off to the right there was a stage where small groups of musicians with Mediaeval instruments played traditional English tunes, some of which I recognised from Shakespearean plays – not that Shakespeare was Mediaeval, of course, but they always take a few liberties. On the same stage another group played a variation on the St George and the Dragon story that we had seen in a mummers play in Romeland, St Albans. They always play this story for its laughs, but St George killed the dragon and got the ever-thankful girl. She was so thankful it hurt laughing.

It’s just wonderful going to events like this and it’s one of the reasons we like being here so much.  At last we are in touch with the roots of the culture that made us who we are and we can understand better why we love the things we do.

Lots of love

Ewart and Elaine

22 August 2001 – From Elaine

Dear Mum & Dad

It is school holidays here at present until 3 September so I am enjoying six weeks of basking mainly in sunshine while Ewart travels daily to London to work by train, but has lovely lunch breaks on the banks of the Thames near the Globe theatre.

We are now safely back after a week in West Sussex and have had a lovely break. The weather wasn’t that great and at times wet and quite cold but it didn’t stop us having fun, especially me…not quite so much for Ewart as he still had to go to work each day but we went out exploring together at the weekends and enjoyed that. We were house sitting for friends and this gave us the opportunity to explore a different part of the country.

While away we had a cat called Muffy (who got to like us and enjoy our company during the week), three guinea pigs, 9 gerbils (a bit like mouse/rats sort of) which became 14 on our last night, a pool and a big house. We had hoped to use the pool but the weather wasn’t suitable so we just kept chlorinating the pool as we were asked. I had a couple of days that I stayed at the house and watched TV and slept because I had got quite tired and the rest of the time I did lots of sightseeing.

On the Tuesday my friends Liz & John (ex Goff’s Oak JMI school) came over and took me to Lewes for the day. We did lots of exploring and had a lovely lunch at a restaurant, and attended a rather wierd art show which included a little exhibit which caught us a little off guard. Part of the show was set in a beautiful garden. We passed a large bright orange pole shaped like an arrow (exhibit No1), then not that impressed followed a lovely path between two hedges. As we went through Liz and I heard a woman sobbing and sobbing. We peared through the hedge and could see no-one. This went on for some time, then John came to assist, still no joy but we were beginning to get quite concerned. Suddenly Liz noticed a black box suspended in the hedge. We had “been done” It was an audio exhibit as part of the exhibition!!!

The experience was quite unnerving, but not to be put off, we decided to look at the rest of the exhibition, just in case it improved. There were video, sculpture and photographic exhibits – not always to our taste, but I was pleased to have been able to have the experience. Some of the pieces really made you think… On our return, John & Liz stayed for dinner once John had collected Ewart from the station. The extra travelling to work meant really long days for Ewart but he was really good about it. The trains weren’t that reliable for him either so it was quite an eventful week for him.

The first weekend Ewart and I went to Ferring and had a lovely walk in the breeze along the pebbled beach, saw our first beach huts and talked with a lady who owned one, then had lunch at a lovely thatched tudor style pub. We met an artist, had a long talk with him and looked at his paintings. From there we went on to Bognor Regis. There is a large Butlins there on the beach front – quite ugly but seems to be a very big business. We didn’t go in to look because you have to pay, but we went for a long walk along the beach front and looked at the rest of the area.

During the week I set out on my own each day after dropping Ewart to the train. I went to Brighton – saw the lanes, walked right to the end of the pier watcing all the families on the rides and went into the Royal Pavilion which has recently undergone a lot of restoration. It is beautiful, but at the same time quite strange in that it is Indian on the outside and Chinese inside but very bright, ornate and colourful throughout. It was the home of George V and William 1V and for a short time, Queen Victoria, but finding it too open to the public, Queen Victoria gutted it of its possessions, took them to London and the buildings were later sold cheaply to the city of Brighton, which still owns them to this day. The pavilion has since been returned to its previous glory and is well worth a visit.

The next day I went down to Littlehampton, arriving quite early. I walked along the beach front until the shops opened, went into town, looked around the shops and had a capuccino then went further around to The Body Shop International Headquarters where I took a factory tour. I buy some Body Shop products and had learnt about Anita Roddick and her business philosophes when I worked at the Enterprise Agency so found it a very interesting trip to do.

The last part was spent at the factory shop outlet where I stocked up on my usual Body Shop purchases. I then went on to Arundel, went to a village Art & Craft Show, visited the castle and wandered through the lovey little village poking around in antique shops before heading back to Horsham to collect Ewart from the train. Arundel is absolutely gorgeous and the castle the best I have seen so far. The Duke of Norfolk has made a wonderful job of restoring it. It is absolutely gorgeous.

I even managed to climb the keep (most unusual for me as I absolutely hate heights) but I didn’t stay up there for long as the wind was gusting heavily through the turrets and I felt quite unsteady on my feet – got quite dizzy and was very keen to get down. For me the library was the best part. It is the most beautiful library I have ever been in. It would be a lovely place to sit and read. The Duke of Norfolk’s son, daughter-in-law and five grandchilden live at the castle. It is the second largest castle in Britain and built along the same lines as Windsor.

That weekend Ewart and I went back to Arundel so I could show him the lovely village. The castle wasn’t open because the Duke was entertaining friends there but we saw a wedding going to the chapel and having photos taken. The guests were beautifully dressed. We went back to the art show then on to Chichester where we went to the market, had lunch, wandered around town, explored the cathedral then went to walk through the Bishop’s Garden. While there we saw a beautiful tree covered in berries.

We met another family there. The tree turned out to be a Mulberry tree. The family showed us what to pick and we had a lovely chat and fruity treat under the tree with them. Mulberries are sweet and absolutely gorgeous. Who would have thought that a berrry looking like a loganberry, but much sweeter, would come from a huge tree when other berries like that come from vines – most strange, but well worth tasting. It was a real treat for us. On the way home we headed out to the coast and stopped at little coastal communities all along the way. We were intending to go to Brighton to watch fireworks at 10pm but stopped at Littlehampton for a seafood dinner, got talking to a lovely waitress and left it a bit late to be on time. We weren’t worried bcecause the traffic in Brighton would have been horrific as it was Gay Parade Day.

This week I have been back at the flat but out every day. Ewart bought me a month’s membership to a local gym so I have been working on fitness machines, using the steam room and sauna, swimming in the pool and relaxing in the spa pool (called jacuzzi over here). On some days I have enjoyed the relaxation it brings so much that I have sent up to four hours using the facilities. I have been meeting some nice women my own age there too.

On Monday evening I had a lovely surprise phonecall from Genevieve’s friend Kate Abel. I had never met her but Genevieve has mentioned her in emails over a long time so I felt as though I did. She is now in the UK for 2 yrs and also travelling in Europe. She came up on Tuesday on the train. I collected a parcel for her that had been sent to us for her by her parents, met her at the train then we went exploring by car through Herts, Beds and Bucks for the day.

We had lunch at Kingsbury Mill then after picking Ewart up from the train at the end of the day walked at Verulamium Park, up to the Fighting Cocks pub for a lemonade then walked through the grounds of the cathedral before dropping her back at the station to meet a friend in London for dinner. Kate is a lovely girl and we had a really happy day together. She is currenly travelling on the continent but we hope to meet up again once she gets back.

On Wednesday I went to Hatfield to Michelle’s place. She and Steve used to live in the flat above us. We had a long chat together (I am helping her to prepare for job interviews), went to the Hatfield market and ASDA for food supplies then back to my flat for the afternoon. Steve picked her up from here after work as he works near here and that allowed him and Ewart to catch up over coffee too. He is an IT contractor too. They are getting married in April in St Lucia so it was lovely to hear of all their plans.

On Thursday I took Thelma out for the day. She rang and asked if I could help her with her shopping. We were supposed to be going on holiday together to get her some sea air but she has not been well enough to go. She gets very short of breath these days even with very simple tasks, but we managed to have a nice time together on Thursday and she was a lot happier for being able to get out of the flat for a while.

She has been ill for 11years now and is getting quite sick of it. She says she likes going out with me because I take the lead from her, others apparently tell her what to do and wear her out. To go to the places she needs to go now we stop outside each building in the car. I use disabled parking spaces as she now has a special sticker for that. That is really helpful. She goes in and does what she has to do, comes out, I drive a couple of buildings down the road an she goes into the next one after a short rest in the car. Even working this way she gets very breathless so we have to be careful. In the afternoon we go back to her flat, Thelma sleeps on the couch sitting up so she can breathe and I read until she wakes up, make her a cup of tea and then come home to pick up Ewart. Ewart and I are going to stay with her this bank holiday weekend and we will take her for a few short outings to give her a break. (this weekend)

On Friday I spent all morning at the gym. Did a good workout then spent time in the sauna, steam room and jacuzzi. Wen I got home I was really tired – think I overdid it, so spent a bit of the afternoon asleep on the couch in front of the TV. Was supposed to be watching NZ v Aus at cricket but missed it due to falling asleep.

On Saturday we didn’t need to go got the market because I had done the shopping during the week so we went for a drive into Bucks and Beds to follow the Icknield Way. Ewart had done some research about it on the internet so we went to find some of the trails. We went to the Ivinghoe Beacons, went to Ivinghoe township and Church, Pitstone Windmill, Great Gaddeston and lots of little villages along the way. We did lots of driving in the countryside, mainly on B roads and lanes.

The trees are beautiful and leafy at this time of year. We explored lovely little churches and went to one garden centre. We looked for the Buddhist Monastery but must have been on the wrong lane (little back road) because we managed to miss it this time. We were told at the garden centre it was worth seeing. It is those sorts of times that it is great to still have a kiwi accent.

Frank used to always quote “Wing, Tring and Ivinghoe, three little churches all in a row”. We have now visited all three – something we planned to do before leaving home. At Ivinghoe Church we bought a copy of the church newsletter and discovered a tale by the Minister about discovering a wonderful new breakfast cereal from a company who cared about its customers and even put a newsletter in the box!!!! You guessed it, Hubbards has arrived in the UK and is available at Tesco supermarkets!!! We are delighted and bought a copy of the parish newsletter to send to Dick Hubbard who I met some time ago at a Mentor briefing I attended in Auckland for the Enterprise Agency.

On Monday I took Jennie out to lunch to the Raven pub near my school in a little village called Hexton. This meant that Jennie could have a nice day out in the countryside in the sunshine. After that we went exploring at the Poplars Garden Centre at Harlington. Garden Centres here are huge, lots to buy and wonderful places to go exploring. Around here we are really spoilt for choice for them. There are quite a number of very large ones within a very short drive from here.

The last couple of days I have been giving the flat a treat by cleaning and tidying it…been a bit of a gad-about these holidays. Our neighbour Christine dropped in some ripe bananas so I made a couple of banana cakes when I got back from the gym today. She took one back to work for her staff for afternoon tea and Ewart and I have the other. It is a lovely sunny day today so I did a big workout at the gym, had a steam in the steam room and jacuzzi then dropped Ewart’s car off at the garage for repairs – that done I walked close to four miles home then spent a quite afternoon at the flat cooking and cleaning to give my poor little feet a chance to recover!!

They did not like walking that distance in my sandals at all. Should have been sensible and changed back into my running shoes I guess, but I got a bit lazy walking in the lovely sunshine. I am currently in training to run the St Albans three mile fun run at the end of September. I have managed to get together a group of young girls from the flats around here to do it with me so it should be fun.

Tonight after dinner we have been invited to have supper with Ivor and Iris.  It is a lovely evening so we will walk round.

Hope you are having a great winter. I understand you already have some signs of spring appearing. That doesn’t bode too well with our summer continuing does it?

Love from Elaine & Ewart

22 October 2000

Dear Dora and Ian

Our NZ itinerary looks like this so far:

• 13 Dec   Last day at work
• 14 Dec   Fly to NZ
• 16, 17 Dec  With Joni in Auckland
• 18-21 Dec  In Otorohanga with Elizabeth and Ross Marshall – check the farm
• 22-28 Dec  In Pauanui
• 29 Dec   Go to Hamilton
• 6-12 Jan  With Joni
• 13 Jan   Catch plane to England
• 15 Jan   Back at work.

We drove all the way up to Leicester last Friday night to stay with Kate and Jack Dalgliesh so that we could have an early Sunday morning start to go even further north to Denstone. Susan, their daughter, took us in her little black Escort. Denstone is way up north near Stoke-on-Trent and it took us 1 1/2 hours to get there because Susan won’t take the M1, which is the short route. Denstone is a beautiful village with mostly turn of the century red brick houses – nothing very old – and a most magnificent stone college built about 1880 in that Victorian baroque style with the round windows. They call it a Lottery College because you have to win the lottery to afford your kid(s) to go there. Elaine met some of the inmates and they said it cost 3000GBP per term to go there. Apart from the rural agriculture, Denstone is mostly famous for the huge JCB factory there. JCB make diggers and this factory is set in magnificent, expansive grounds with a lake that has a statue made up of about 8 stainless-steel birds landing in the middle of the lake. There is also a very comical statue of a one-footed insect looking monster made entirely of grab buckets on long arms.

We got a very good park right on the finish line and were about the second car there. However, lots more competitors arrived very soon afterward. It seemed to me very odd that so many turned up on the day and registered, whereas I had registered a month before. The track went steeply downhill and then turned to go along a disused railway through very scenic countryside with a river on one side and a steep cutting on the other. We crossed the river at a stone cafe and began a 1/4 hour ascent of the most diabolical hill I have ever had to negotiate, then a slight downhill and another 5min grind uphill, then a very long section through the forest on the other side of the river, crossing again at the stone cafe and runing back to the college along the wet, dirt track in the middle of the disused railway, through the village and up the nasty 1/4 mile incline to the college. Everyone I had ever seen pass me I killed …. along the railway track about 6 of them, up the incline to the college another 5 or six, and in the last 200m I ran down another 11, 5 of them in the last 50m. The last one I passed swore, because he had passed me about mile 3 and there, within 5m of the finish he lost a place.

I have just seen the list of the All Blacks; I think they could have done without Anton Oliver, otherwise it looks like a pretty good selection. Remember when we went to Leicester for the first time and had a look around the grounds of the Leicester Tigers? The man who was being shown around was Carlos Spencer! He was negotiating a job there, but it appears he turned down whatever offers they came up with.

I am not happy with my Denstone 1/2 Marathon performance at all. The time was a dismal 1:42:13 and now I have the results, that put me 161/266 overall and 33/64 in the M50 class. I’m down from top third to only half way. One L50 woman beat me and she finished at 1:37:44 and three M60’s beat me. This M50 class is very competitive because the first M50 home was 6th overall and at 1:19:01 was just 2:03 min behind the winner. Only 2 M40’s beat him.

I decided that this morning I’d better put things right so I aimed for 16 miles in under 2 hours. I got 1:58:44 and I ran the hard way – twice over the Nash’s Farm Road hill. And my 13 mile time was 1:36:12. If I’d done that in Denstone I’d have been 114th overall and and I’d have been 26th in the M50. Those few extra minutes make a lot of difference…. I’d have beaten the woman and one of the M60’s. I realised this morning that you have to push yourself all the way to maintain that 7:30 pace, and I think that when racing I’m too conservative so my race times are slower than my training times.

But I am so stiff and sore …

It’s getting close to Bonfire Night, so there are the odd loud bangs outside as people let off fire crackers, the Jersey Farm Residents Association is advertising its bonfire night and we are looking forward to our second bonfire here and a very pleasant evening being entertained by a live band while we watch the fireworks. Last year it was pretty crisp outside and the smell of mulled wine and cordite was a heady mix. It was also the first occasion that we met many of the leading lights around the estate. This year we are going to go over to the field where it’s held and we’ll help them put up the big white tent and add whatever we can to the bonfire.

Lots of the local shops have Halloween masks and stuff, so trick-or-treat day can’t be far off. Elaine’s kids at school are highly excited that some of them might be going trick-or-treating, so Elaine has warned them to be careful. Last year we had a couple of beautiful little kids (with Mum in tow) arrive at the door, so we gave them a biscuit each, but this year we have bought some gold and silver coins, which are really just yummy chocolates, so that we can give them a nice surprise.

The weather is still very mild, but you’ve probably heard of our flooding down south in Kent – it really has been raining quite severely. We are way out trouble here in St Albans so we’ve been watching with some sympathy as people in other communities have had trials heaped on them. Except for a couple of absolutely beautiful, clear days we have had lots of grey skies, wind and scudding, drizzling rain.

Because our little flat is so warm, we don’t have to worry about the conditions outside and since both of us work inside, neither is too upset about inclement weather and most of the time we hardly notice what the weather is doing. It is, odd, tho, looking out the window at work and seeing it almost completely dark at 5:30 when it’s time to go home. In a couple of weeks, daylight saving ends and then it will be dark going to work at 7:30 and dark again at 4:30pm before we come home. Thanks to daylight saving, we don’t get very long in the dark, because all this dark is over come March.

Bother! I’ve just found out that, due to a misplaced marshall, we all ran about 500yds longer than we should have. The race organizer says “Knock 2min off your time!” Even so, I’m still outside my 7:30min/mile target, and it doesn’t change my dismal placing….

Lloyd’s Bank has just allowed internet banking for free (it was 10GBP per month) so I signed up for it and we can now see our account balances without having to go to an ATM and we can transfer money between accounts without having to go to the bank. Very nice. They contacted me last week to say that the small business service was open so I signed up for that, too, so I can see what the balance is on our E&E Tearle Consultancy Ltd account. We may even be able to transfer money into our other accounts, but I’ll have to see the proof first.

In the meantime, be cool!

Lots of love

Ewart and Elaine