Braving the frost and relishing Aussie sunshine. A blog of all seasons.

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The Roma Christmas was exciting again this year. The family congregations were spread over a few days and we indulged in more turkey, pudding and yummy goodies than required. We had Christmas day in London and then another gathering in Birmingham on Boxing Day. We have never indulged in so much kareoke in my life than in that one night alone! But it was fun for the kids and the 'grown ups' all singing along together, letting our hair down and dancing the night away. The occasional song brought a tear to the eye (not sure if it was the choice of song or the singing), and of course it was just nice to be able to be away from London and spend time with the family.

But after Birmingham our holiday started. We'd hired a car and spent the next week in Wales. We stayed 4 nights in a lovely B&B in Betws-y-Coed in the Snowdonia region. It was a small town and the B&B was about a 5 min walk into the town centre as we were a little further up the side of the hill across the river. It was lovely and warm and nice to be able to sleep in. We were really lucky with the weather as it stayed dry, rain free, and we had blue skies, although it wasn't above 3degrees the entire week! So each morning we had to use the credit card to scrape the ice off the car windows and of course we were wearing double layers of thermals when we went for walks.

We walked from Betw-y-Coed to the Swallow falls through the local forest. It was amazing to walk from the icy road in the town with the white frosted walls into the more protected forest where the frost seemed to disappear. It was a distinct line across the ground from white to green. Fascinating. But the walk was lovely, hardly anyone else in sight, and the falls at the end were lovely. Not the most amazing falls, but the black rocks gave a dramatic back drop. The frozen staircase down to the viewing platform also provided a fun skating opportunity, although a little more life threatening than anticipated.

We had a day out on the coast too and went to Caernarfon Castle which is where Prince Charles was inaugurated as the prince of Wales. The castle is not a working heritage site, however it is set up as a museum. The slate platforms that were created for the inauguration are still in place and the thrones and kneeling stools are in the museum. The coast line was quite pretty, a local quaint harbour with small boats and plenty of people strolling along. The same afternoon we went to the Llechwedd Slate Cavern, taking a funicular deep down underground 7 stories to view the chambers where slate was mined. Slate was the primary industry of Wales and so not surprisingly the skyline is filled with roofs tiled with it. There was an amazing cathedral room which was filled with water. Coloured lights were reflected from the water onto the slate lined walls, creating a magical effect.

We also managed to conquer Mount Snowdon, the tallest mountain in all of England, Ireland and Wales. We certainly earned our dinner. We took the miners track on the way up, as it was a very gentle track around the side of the base of the mountain before starting the very steep climb upwards. For the most part the track was lined with large boulders or rock steps, but there was one section where the path seemed to end but further up the mountain we saw the path again so we just scaled straight upwards only to look down from the top and see the path wind around at a steady pace. There were also sections of the path that were thickly iced over which were too dangerous and slippery to walk on so more scaling around the sides of the mountain were needed, with a few hairy sections causing some concern. But there were hundreds of others making the climb that day and everyone seemed to help each other out, reaching out with arms and making suggestions of diversions to take. It was a hard climb given the circumstances, but it was a wonderful atmosphere and it was an achievement to be proud of to make it to the top and marvel at the countryside around us. It didn't take long to cool down after our 3 hour hike up to the top as the wind was quite fierce and there was very little protection on any side. But we found a small rock to perch on and enjoy a bite for lunch and we watched the clouds stream over the top of the mountain ridges. On the way down we took the Pyg track which was much more undulating , and although gravity was on our side as we journeyed down, the track was undulating the entire way with large boulders making the track. It was not only a triumph to conquer the mountain in 7 hours, but to survive without an injury was an accomplishment also.

We traveled to Cardiff where we spent New Years Eve. It was bitterly cold and all available thermal layers were needed just to walk around the city highlights. There was a free family fire show in the Cardiff Castle grounds in the early evening, which was amazing as it was a story about a tiger who tried to eat some children but who's plans were spoiled by a monkey, a kangaroo and an elephant. Strange really. But the fire sparklers were pretty to watch. There was a Christmas fair which had sideshows and carnival rides. We took one, but perhaps was not Mark's finest hour as he managed to scream the entire time, including 'Get me off' and 'I'm going to be sick'. Luckily he survived, but no steady arms for firing ranges in the sideshows after that. But an even matched dodgem cars joyride lifted the spirits. It became so cold that by 9pm we could no longer stand the bone chilling cold and retired to the hostel. But that was no mood killer as we warmed up quickly and had some drinks in the bar. The bar was quite full and at the stroke of midnight we were all standing on the balcony watching the Cardiff fireworks. They only lasted about a minute so when they were over we all bustled back inside to watch the rest of the London fireworks on the television. A few hours on the phone to family and friends and the year was officially over. So our first new years on our own, and although we missed everyone dearly, it was refreshing not to wake up with a hangover on January 1!

Our whole time in Cardiff was cold with a bitter wind cutting our faces. So we saw the highlights and took some respite indoors. We went 10 pin bowling, watched the movie Australia and did a little retail therapy. We made it home in time for Irene's 60th Birthday and to see Mark's English family.

So after our Christmas / New Years holiday which left us very refreshed we spent some time at home in London. We have been to the Alan Aldridge exhibition at the London Design Museum, we went to China Town for Chinese New Year, we have had an Australia Day / Chinese New Year dinner party, and of course, we were here for all the snow!

As we're sure you have all heard, there was the biggest snow storm in London in 20 years. Now, compared to the USA or Canada, or many many other cities in the world, this was a little pathetic, but for London it was a really extraordinary time. The whole city was crippled. People couldn't get to work, schools were closed, and for Kate it was a day where everyone pitched in to help that patients in hospitals as thousands of staff couldn't get to the hospitals for work. There was no therapy for a day as it was all hands on deck for nursing duties. We both managed to make it to work as we don't live too far away, but there were no buses at all running and although late, we did make it. But as thee was meant to be more snow on that first day, everyone was encouraged to leave to go home as early as possible so as not to be stranded away from their homes. Mark works close to the city centre and was fortunate to be able to get away early and walk past St Paul's Cathedral, to the millennium bridge and to see the houses of parliament and Big Ben with caps of snow! We also learnt how to roll a snow ball! Puts our previous snowman efforts to shame. But the streets and parks were full of snowballs and sow men, and families were outside playing around. I certainly don't have the words to describe the feeling of what this economic stand still did, but it was amazing in a wonderful way. The economic crisis seemed irrelevant for a moment and people just enjoyed the situation. There was a sensational article published in the Guardian which summed it up for us, so I've pasted it here for you, just to give you more of a taste of how London coped and how we all felt. I certainly can't take any credit for this so the credentials are here too! I hope you enjoy the article as much as we did.




London's day of innocence
The Guardian, Tuesday 3 February 2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/feb/03/london-snow-weather
Stuart Jeffries revels in the hush, the beauty, the joy and the anarchy of a city magically transformed

On the canal bridge just behind Kings Cross, a policeman took a huge snowball full in the face and - I couldn't quite believe this was happening - giggled delightedly (it must have really hurt). His three colleagues gathered snowballs and pelted the mob of school boys and girls, quite sensibly avoiding head shots (think of the lawsuits). But they were outnumbered and outgunned. And anyway, they were easy targets, these coppers in their fluorescent jackets. And the school children, those alleged dysfunctional products of our greed-obsessed, low-serotonin, broken-homed, intolerably lardy, TV-ruined society, were in a snowy wonderland where there was no school, no rules and nothing to worry about. I've never seen London secondary school kids look filled to the brim with such girlish glee. "See if you can knock his helmet off," I yelled at one girl (which probably made me an accessory to something but I don't care: the delirium is infectious) and she pitched a curve ball that would have hit had the copper not ducked.

It's a scene one barely witnesses in London: one of innocence, albeit momentary; of snow in a city that doesn't do extremes of weather; of hostile battle lines suspended and replaced - just for the day - by playful ones; of gratuitous wonders that fall from the sky and blindside you. Yesterday, London was filled with such wonders. The headline said: -5C and we're all going snowhere. Yesterday, London went on a trip to snowhere, which sounds like oblivion, but is infinitely nicer.

That sound snow makes as it packs under your boots! The velvety swish of car tyres on untreated side streets! That numinous glow that greets you as you open the curtains and realise that even though it's Monday, you are quite looking forward to walking to work, especially if you can make a snowman with strangers you meet on your journey! The way your fingers swell after throwing snowballs while wearing functionally useless woollen gloves! (We need poets to invent names for all these things and write sonnet cycles to their joys). And, above all, the snow's silencing of the great roar of London: usually, I keep my iPod on as I walk to silence London's racket: yesterday I didn't want to. Every side street I strolled down yesterday offered - if this doesn't sound too pretentious in a Karen Carpenter-meets-Immanuel Kant kind of way, which I know it does - an unexpectedly sublime kind of hush.

Yes, yes, I know so far this article this sounds a little like those photos of the Notting Hill carnival, with a white policeman dancing with a nice old Caribbean lady. A deluded paean to an interlude that misses what the real London is like, with its quotidian meanness, stabbings, lonely deaths, rapes, intolerance, greed and woe. But, just for a moment, cram your cynicism and yield, as London did yesterday, to the seduction of snow.

Other cities - Winnipeg, say, Moscow or Bergen - cope with snow, subdue it and go to work through impeccably gritted roads. London isn't like that: it rarely copes with anything; these days, it masters nothing. Equipped with a loveably tragi-comic public transport system, our capital fails on a daily basis. The poor suckers who live here get - at best - inured to this hopelessness. Yesterday London was so hobbled by the snow that the situation was even worse than hopeless: usually six million Londoners get to work by bus; yesterday there were no buses; the tube was even more spectacularly unreliable than usual. Even gnarly cyclists in all kinds of crypto-pervy winterwear were laid low (the nameless gent who I helped back on to his bike on Mecklenburgh Square after a comic slo-mo tumble really should have left his wheels under the stairs). Just for a day Londoners got hit by something special.

For a day at least, Londoners returned to a forgotten innocence. Yesterday the headlines howled about how £2bn would be lost yesterday thanks to public transport disruption. Two words: So. What. We're in the middle of a credit crunch and £2bn is the sort of money a hedge-fund trader might find in the lining of his Armani suit. Yesterday we stopped measuring our lives in coffee spoons, overdrafts and balance of payments deficits. It felt good.

We needed the snow to remind us of that innocence. We needed it to remind us of who we are. We are not just homo-economicus, we can't be defined by the size of our negative equity, the burden of our personal debt, or numbers of en-suites. We need something more this winter than cowering at home noting down how many times Gordon Ramsay swears on Channel 4. Our new year resolutions are broken, our jobs insecure, our pensions worthless, our spirits crushed by January's post-Christmas gloom. We needed something to lift our spirits, to give us the excuse to play to no discernible economic benefit.

And yesterday here it came, free as air, falling on to my bare head as I walked down the canal towpath. I was doing what a human being should do now and again: stare. A Spanish man and I watched a heron dive from the ice into water that is starless and bible black. Would it ever resurface? What could it find down there to eat? We did what London hardly ever allows: exchanged the conspiratorial glances and then resumed the satisfyingly economically unproductive business of staring.

In London, this doesn't happen often. We trust our dour reflexive, self-poisoning moaning as a lifestyle philosophy instead. We like it that way: strangers are strange and Britain, damn everything about it, doesn't work. Why don't the buses run on time? Why are we so hopeless? Why can't something be done (usually by someone else who we can blame for their shortcomings)? And this chorus of self-immolation is taken up countrywide: why, non-Londoners ask, is the capital brought to a standstill by a little snow? Why can't you southern ponces get your act together? And the cry is international too: as I walk through the St Pancras Eurostar terminal, a French couple consulting the warnings about the tube, roll their eyes as one. He said: "Typiquement anglais. Rien ne va plus!" They both laugh, as if to say their Gallic expectations had been confirmed.

And so we surrendered to delight. We found better questions to ask: how do you roll a snowman? Where the devil are my galoshes? What have you done with my sledge? Can one get to work by sleigh? Doesn't Prokofiev sound lovely when it's snowing outside? After leaving the canal, I walked down through virgin snow in quiet back streets nestling right next to the Eurostar train line. A snowy bucolic idyll at the heart of the metropolis. I looked from Camley Street through the snow to the gothic tower of St Pancras - a Caspar David Friedrich painting had suddenly leapt before my eyes.

Over on Tottenham Court Road, there was slush and crowds bustling. Here people were shopping and barking into mobiles, like they do every day. So I took the tube up to Hampstead. I remember an old cartoon depicting gents with handlebar moustaches and ladies in thick bloomers tobogganing (we don't use this word often enough) in Parliament Hill Fields, above the caption "Les Pistes d'Hampstead". I wanted to find out if these legendary pistes still exist. A voice on the tube PA announced: "Due to adverse weather conditions there will be delays on the Northern Line." Nobody on the platform batted an eyelid, except for one guy who said: "Delays on the Northern Line, eh. How very unusual". A ripple of giggles passed down the platform. At Hampstead, the lift that took us from the stygian depths to the winter wonderland was filled with giggling students. Everyone was jaunty, striking up conversations with strangers.

As I walked towards Hampstead Heath, I heard whoops and cheers. The heath was like Narnia (though with none of CS Lewis's unwonted Christian allegorising). My God, I told myself as I walked through a heavenly avenue with snow-laden branches bejewelling my steps, this is the most beautiful city in the world! (I was delirious, high on pheromones, snow bonkers, and in need of a good slap).

I stand on Kite Hill, looking across the London panorama below and remember the ending of Joyce's The Dead. "His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead." My soul was swooning (there, I admit it) yesterday as I stood and saw the snow falling, not on Joyce's Ireland, but on dirty old London, reborn as a thing of beauty. It was snowing from Epping Forest to Heathrow, Upminster to Uxbridge, on duke and dustman in a way that it hasn't for ages and probably won't for a good while. Savour it, I told myself.



What poetry! It always makes me smile to read Stuart's words.

But soon after the snow melted it was business as usual and we were preparing our holiday home to Adelaide.

Our trip home has only just ended and it seemed to fly by so quickly. We flew straight into Adelaide to be at Kate's brother Matthew's 21st which was a really fun night. He hired an upstairs room with a large balcony at the Coopers Alehouse and had a casual party with his friends. He has some lovely friends and everyone seemed to have a great night, with nothing getting out of hand. He had some friends give some funny speeches which gave a few funny stories away but all in good taste. Matthew was the only one who suffered at the end of the night when all of his friends had moved onto a club once the party ended and Matt hung around with us to help clear out the room with Kate's parents, only to crash, and details aside, his night ended there. We have huge admiration for his girlfriend who looked after him and ensured he was chipper for the following day's family BBQ with the Wilson / Ruys clan.

With only a fortnight to see everyone, we had lunches and dinners almost every day to fit everyone in. We stayed the first week at Kate's parents place, which included a visit to Murray Bridge to see Nanna and Poppa Wilson and all of our belongings that are in storage there. A special thanks goes to Nanna for putting on a Christmas roast complete with home made Christmas Pudding! We also had an afternoon at Glenelg to see a sandy beach for the first time since being home. It was a pity it was quite blowy, but we walked along the foreshore and in the marina and had champagne and oysters! MMmmmm. That had been a long time i waiting. The Adelaide Fringe Festival was on when we were home so we popped in to the Garden of Unearthly Delights for a drink. No time to see a show though.

We moved to stay with Mark's dad ready for the middle weekend which was almost a repeat of the first but with Mark's family as it was his sister Sarah's 21st. She had a more formal affair with a sit down dinner in a hall, followed by dancing to the loudest music ever survived on the face of the earth. But again, Sarah has some very kind friends who went to great efforts to give speeches and help with the setting up and bringing down of the room. And her friends were die-hard dancers who kept going till the very end and beyond in the city well in to the early morning. Sarah's only complaint the following day was being a little tired, but she was able to tell us stories the next day about her continuing partying at the BBQ the following afternoon with Mark's dad's family. We also got to meet baby Hannah for the first time, Sonia and Phil's baby girl. We have to say, the happiest baby we have ever seen, constantly with a smile on her face.

We also managed to get a night and day down at Hayborough and Victor Harbour at Mark's dad's holiday house. It was incredibly refreshing to have some fresh sea-side air. We rode our bikes from Hayborough to the Bluff and back, not realising we were getting quite sun burned. We went for walks on the beach and took a drive to Goolwa to see the astonishingly low water level. A bridge is almost no longer needed to drive from the mainland to Hindmarsh Island. There are lots of beached boats and the steamer is one of them. Plenty of local businesses are closed and the property market has severely fallen. It's a really shame but there are divided opinions as whether or not to raise the water level with salt water or not. But for now, it's vastly a changed environment, and it's all happening at an alarming rate.

We had a day on the Belair golf course with Matthew and Mark playing a round while Kate and her mum Jacky drove the golf buggy. It was quite a warm day and our sunburn from the previous day was rather uncomfortable in the sun so we darted around the course in the shade of the large gum trees that lined the fairways. We had more dinners with family and friends, we had a night at Mark's mum's house, and then it was time to leave.

It was a difficult farewell at the airport as we're really not sure when we will next be back, but hopefully we have planted the seeds with our family and friends to come to London to visit.

So that brings us up to date. We hope you are all well, and sorry for those of you who we coud not see when we were home, but keep in touch and we hope to see you soon.

Love
Kate and Mark

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