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England Weather as I Imagined it
Abbie and Brooke in the lovely Saltaire weatherI may have an odd accent - it’s a not quite New Zealand slash American-Australian-Canadian-South African or the opinion of whoever I am talking to at the time - but that is nothing compared to the myriad of odd names the United Kingdomites have dreamed up for the cities and towns across their fair land. In the last few days I have been through Blubber Houses, Ramsbottom and Killinghall to name a few and bizarrely enough not even a hint of a pun has been made on any of them. In New Zealand we have a little town called Bulls that takes every opportunity it can to make a pun on its name, shop fronts are adorned with “Afford - a - Bull” “Const - a - Bull” “Bank - a - Bull” and many, many more (for a full list-a-bull listing visit http://groups.msn.com/BullsNZ/abulldirectory.msnw) so when visiting a place such as Ramsbottom one would expect the community to indulge in at least one hilarious joke, but we get NOTHING. Stiff upper lip and all that. The closest we got was in Rugby, which avidly boasted that Rugby the game was in fact invented in Rugby, the town… Yes I am aware
Into the Opera
Brooke and Abbie in a Hockney Set that this is not at all funny but I thought it could be a piece of information that may be of interest to some New Zealanders.
Our time in Yorkshire was the last bastion of luxury before we start our Tour de Europe next week. Rachel and Barrie’s house had everything we could possibly ask for comfortable beds, hot water, internet, wine, fancy cheese - just like being at home really. Their hosting talents branched out into day planning also - resulting in some fabulous day trips that were aided greatly by us having a hire car. One of my favourite trips was to the Salt Mill in Saltire, and this is not because it had quite possibly the best gift stores I have ever seen. The Salt Mill had once been a very grand textile mill owned by the Salt family and passed through many generations. In the late eighties when the mill had long since become derelict, a young Jewish antique entrepreneur by the name of Jonathan Silver bought it and restored it to a set of office buildings and a permanent gallery for the works of Yorkshire artist David Hockney, a friend of Jonathans. Hockney’s paintings,
Squirrel Nutkin
Yes I am aware that all NZ and Aus tourists have one of these photos - but I dont care now do I? See look it has a nut! Isnt that sooooo cute!! drawings and etchings of the Yorkshire landscape are throughout the mill and featured on the sugar packets, menus and staff uniforms in the Salt Mill café. Upstairs is an exhibition of sets Hockney designed for operas, and the other three floors were gift stores - an art store, a particularly good book store - which mysteriously swallowed some of my money - and a home ware design store which didn’t.
A more relaxed day saw us negotiating my first English supermarket - which keeps a watchful eye on its trolleys and much to Tan’s dismay does not stock pre made falafel - to buy items for a picnic lunch and later a home made dinner prepared by us. Upon discovering nobody had any cash (this country does not have eftpos, I miss it deeply, but that’s a whole other blog in itself) I tootled off down to the local Bureau de change to exchange the last of my New Zealand notes into much smaller GB pound notes. The man exchanging the money asked if the weather was warm outside, I had to ask him “warm compared to what?” and then he made a quip about checking the currency rates
for both the north and the south island in case they were different - this was quite clever actually I had never heard that one before. Back at the supermarket with everything paid for and Tan seemingly calmer we packed it all away into the car and went to visit Ric’s dad Raymond at a nearby Rest Home. Raymond has Alzheimer’s but he remembered who Ric and Tan were and he could recall in great detail a trip to the South Island of New Zealand that he had made some years back. Rest Homes make me a little bit nervous and I didn’t know quite was my place was here, but according to Ric’s mother, Monica, who had visited Raymond the next day he was quite pleased that some young people such as Brooke and I had paid him a visit, which I guess makes it all worth it.
Back at Rachel’s we ate the lunch then worked it off in a cross-country walk around the bush at the back of the house. Rachel and Ric are an encyclopaedia of bird and plant types and were constantly pointing out different species of both to us. There was lots of mud for our unsuitably white shoes to avoid and many farm animals to coo over. In England the people have fought for their right to be able to walk through the country side no matter who owns the land so a good deal of our walk was actually through other peoples property. There are however some land owners who are unhappy about this - for example a rather passive aggressive Welsh lady we had encountered earlier that week who didn’t want us near her horses - Tan was concerned she was going to get out a gun - his reaction may have been a tad hyperbolic. As it was spring there were many cute lambs frolicking about the place, and it made Rachel laugh that a group of New Zealanders were getting excited about sheep, I maintain that where I come from - it is mostly cows and seagulls. Upon our return to the house we set about preparing one of Tan’s specialities - Vegetarian Curry. In the past I have not been very involved in curry making as there was never anything for me to do, however now that I have semi perfected the art of curried bananas as an unusual but delicious accompaniment to Tan’s curry I can now be of more use. The purpose behind this dinner was to prepare it to take over to Monica’s house in the next town over (which isn’t as far as one would think) where she would have a dessert waiting for afters. Both meals went down as a success and we retired to the living room for tea where Monica showed us some of her cross stitching, Ric showed us some of his art he had made when he was our age, and Monica’s cat who squeaks instead of meowing systematically snubbed everyone of us except for Barry. A very entertaining and tasty night!
On our last day in the north we visited the city of York. Tourist activities included the York Minster Abbey - another exercise in religion charging people through the nose - where we climbed 275 narrow dark steps to the tower for quite possibly the best view of York once we had caught our breath. You could see all 360 degrees of York through the suicide prevention netting - the rows upon rows of red brick houses, the beautiful cobbled streets, the park where I saw my first squirrel and our next destination - the Treasurer’s House for lunch. As the Treasurers house is a National trust site us newly fledged members were apparently allowed to dine in a member’s tea room, but as Rachel and Ric were not members we settled for the non member tea room. Treasurers House is a 17th and 18th century house that allegedly has the ghosts of the Roman Legion marching through its corridors - how about that. Its last owner a wealthy industrialist bachelor by the name of Frank Green, who had a passion for interior design marked out the precise placing’s for the furniture and threatened to haunt anyone who moved it, now that’s what I call a perfectionist - If I could just get him to haunt whomever moved my grandmother’s chair from my house at St Mary’s Bay.
From the Treasurers house we moved onto a narrow shopping street called The Shambles and successfully walked past the fudge store without buying anything, and then the inner child of Tan took us to the National Railway Museum, where we didn’t see Thomas the Tank Engine but we did see the carriages from the Royal trains - one of which displayed elegant Victorian splendour and the other disguised 1940s war time minimalism.
For our last dinner we went out to an Italian restaurant in nearby Patley Bridge. One of the waitresses nearly tripped over herself checking out Tan, I suppose she does live in a small town and cant really be blamed for it but I made with the customary glower nonetheless. Tan however was oblivious to all of this!
Wednesday was back to London via the aforementioned Rugby, and the dreaded Heathrow Airport to drop off the car - in the final leg of our journey we loaded our oversized packs onto our backs and jumped onto the tube - the Piccadilly line headed for Cockfosters
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Nicola
non-member comment
What's in a name?
You go on about Rugby and Ramsbottom for a century yet nothing on COCKFOSTERS! For the love of god, Gordon, please indulge me.