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The climb up St Mary's Church - past the bells and onto the roof is worth the view - even if you end up a bit dizzy.
Left: Papa at the door of the tower onto the roof. Right: Kings and Trinity Colleges. |
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| Looking across market square, The arrow is pointing to the Chimney beside our house - an 8 min bike into town. |
The day after we returned from Athens,
Papa landed at Heathrow and the next day he turned 70. We never dreamed we’d get him to visit us in
Cambridge all the way from NZ but Lo put the pressure on to celebrate the three
score n’ ten in style. It was perfectly lovely that she was able to visit her
first grandchild in Norway as part of the circle. After enduring my now well
practiced ‘Introduction to Cambridge Wander’ in low cloud, we had High Tea at
Harriet’s and in the evening took Charlie along to help celebrate at the Green
Dragon for the Birthday dinner. The cattle had free reign of Stourbridge Common so the easy
meander down the Cam to the bridge became a miss the cowpat skip – with
umbrellas. Drinks were raised to all the absent loved ones and a speedily
concocted b-day cake back at St Bart's rounded off the modest celebrations.
Turns out Papa’s last birthday was a bit like him, quietly confident,
undemanding, showy when required and lots of fun despite conditions.
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| Bits of fudge from the 'Fudge Kitchen' where they make fresh fudge a couple of times a day on a huge marble table and give out free samples; held the candles for an emergency birthday cake. |
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| Jesus Common on the second day rambling around Cambridge and watching the punts from the Magdalene Bridge |
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| Left: looking towards the town center Right: Lo convincing Papa not to try and unlock anything. Downstream to St Bart's |
M was delighted to be able to share
his favourite haunts with his Dad on the weekends. Bletchley Park got a
thorough going over and IMW Duxford was explored again with the extra special
experience of a flight over Cambridgeshire in a Classic plane. When M was back
at work Papa and Lo trained into London to see the sites. Sometimes M had to go to Portsmouth for work. Papa and Lo explored the naval yards and outlet stores then after work we hovercrafted over to the Isle of Wight for tea and scones before driving back to Cambridge.
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| The glee to be had from an air museum. The Mighty Duxford. |
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Left: The hovercraft with a deflated skirt waiting for passengers to climb aboard.
Right: Rather dismal furnishings but they let Charlie inside and served magnificent scones and clotted cream. |
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Left: Portsmouth's Spinnika Tower between the Naval museum and the Outlet Mall
Right: Papa trying to fit the huge cruise ship into his camera screen. |
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| The Isle of Wight is very busy in summer. We were too late to watch the annual Round the Isle yacht race - around 1500 boats sailing 93km last week of June in 2015 - but here is a You Tube clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25PbzO5fFxQ |
Poss and the girls arrived back from
their separate adventures so the next weekend we headed for Greenwich. Papa and
sailing easily fit together so the Maritime Museum and the Royal Observatory
were obvious targets. By the time we trained, tubed and river bused down from
Cambridge to Greenwich, we were all starving. A restaurant of the chain that
makes the best onion rings in Europe just happened to be at the end of the gang
plank off the clipper so we slipped upstairs for great river views and one of
Byron’s Proper Burgers.
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| Petal is sniggering because Papa trying to take a photo of them with 'Bug Bin' in the background as we wait to catch the Thames Clipper down the Thames to Greenwich. (approx 6 pound) As you can tell from Poss' reaction, it takes more to stop a Kiwi from talking than laughing at their version of the Queen's English. |
The queue to walk through and under (with a complimentary cup of tea) the Cutty Sark was enormous so we read the info plaques telling us that she is the world’s last surviving tea clipper (a super yacht that sped tea from the East for the desperately addicted English consumers in the 1800s). She also had the record for the fasted trip carrying a full load of merino wool from Sydney to the UK (73 days) in 1885.
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| The bow of the Cutty Sark is encased in this glass - Louvre like structure. The design of her keel made her fast and the underside apparently glow like gold. It has been in Greenwich in dry dock since 1954. |
This area of London is teeming with
places of interest and historical significance – you could easily stay three
days and still not have time to visit everything. We had to put our blinkers on
and stick to the plan so no to the Fan Museum (as in the ones used to cool
dancers and communicate a lady’s desires), no to the markets, no to climbing
the O2. No to Queen’s House which was built as an apology from King James I to
his wife, Queen Anne. He had sworn loudly at her in front of a large group of
people when she accidentally shot and killed his favourite hunting dog. The story
alone is a good reason to visit but it is also designed by Indigo Jones and is
Britain’s first Classical building, it is recently renovated and houses the
iconic Armada portrait of Elizabeth I. No
to the Royal Artillery Museum and the Thames Barrier, no to Eltham Palace,
Charlton House and many other architecturally significant buildings.
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| The red marker is significant for the Gardiner side of my maternal ancestors |
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| White building to the left is the Queen's House. The Brown looking structures mid right are the Thames barriers. |
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King George VI opened the new maritime museum before WWII broke out. The Dowager Queen Anne, Queen Mother Elizabeth and the future Queen Elizabeth II accompany him. 1937 - 10 yrs after Nana emigrated to NZ.
Image from http://www.rmg.co.uk |
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| The Gerkin shows how close the 'City of London' looks and the masts of the Cutty Sark rise above the trees |
But yes to the National Maritime
Museum.
This is free to visit and claims to be
the largest of its type in the world. It has lots of interactive things for
kids, including the odd climb in a box 3D experience for a few £. The uniform
that Admiral Lord Nelson wore at Trafalgar is on display – the fatal bullet
hole high on the left shoulder. A remarkable c1500CE map that shows 10° parallels
and meridians, cutting edge technology that allowed the British sailors to navigate
the globe and colonise so many new countries. They rotate their collection so
what is on display one year may be quite different when you visit a year later.
I enjoyed the figurehead display – some had been restored to show the original
bright paintwork. Up close, many of the wooden ladies were a little risqué.
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| Into the National Maritime Museum and onto the Royal Observatory |
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| A few of the attractions inside the Maritime Museum |
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| Prince Federick's Royal Barge. The quickest way of getting anywhere was down the river. This one had many oars men and went quite quickly from palace to palace. |
Behind the NMM, across Greenwich Park
and up a hill is the Royal Observatory which Petal and Willow were very excited
to see! I thought they would be thrilled to be able to have a foot in both the
western and eastern hemispheres at the same time.
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| On such a lovely summer day, Greenwich park was full of people - it was a bit of a climb to the observatory but under the shade of a long avenue of trees. Somewhere here is an ancient Oak that King Henry danced with Anne Boleyn under. |
One of Charles II’s French mistresses,
the Duchess of Portsmouth, told him about a French initiative to try and
develop a system for exploring sailors to know their East and West position.
The North star was used to measure how far south they were – until I presume
they sailed over the equator and couldn’t see it anymore, but there was no
reliable method or fixed point to measure longitude. Flamsteed was appointed
the first Astronomer Royal and he measured the speed of the Earth’s rotation to
make sure that this was constant before using the 24hr.? day to create the
Longitudinal lines. 360° ÷ 24 = 15° which means that every 15° around the pole
is one hour – and so the time zones were born. Lots more work was done at the
Greenwich Observatory that Charles II had constructed.
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Left:Louise de Keroualle
(1649–1734), Duchess of Portsmouth, mistress of King Charles II By Peter Lely
Right: Portrait by Charles
Whyt of King Charles II, c.1700. His father was beheaded by Parliament and he was exiled to France only to reinstated to the throne when Oliver Cromwell and his parliament puritans had sucked all the fun and cash out of everything - the people wanted a little bit of fun again - and they wanted to be able to celebrate Christmas again! |
The development of accurate
clocks that kept time regardless of temperature or movement was essential for
accurate mapping of longitude. The Equator is the 0 of Latitude but no natural boundary
line for longitude exists; at a conference in Washington DC the Greenwich
Meridian was voted to be the beginning of the global day – at midnight. New
Zealand is 12 hours ahead of this time so is one of the first countries to
celebrate the New Year and not far away, the Marshall Islands out in the
Pacific Ocean are one of the last.
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| Capturing time was the great technological quest in the 1800s. The lady on the left would set her highly accurate pocket watch by the super clocks in the Observatory then travel around London 'selling' the most accurate time to people on the street and wealthy householders to reset their clocks everyday. |
The exhibits are clearly explained but
an interest in navigation, time or astronomy will make the most of the £10 it
costs to get in. The time ball on
Flamsteed House is clearly visible from the nearby Thames and was used by all
the captains before sailing to set their time pieces so they could measure
their east west position accurately. At 12:30pm the ball was raised half way up
the post as a warning for people to take note. At 12:50 it was raised to the
top and at exactly 1pm it was dropped so everyone in the vicinity could check
the accuracy of their watches and clocks. This method was copied at ports
around the world. I remember being intrigued by the one at Lyttelton Harbour
over the Port Hills from Christchurch but never really understood its purpose
until this visit to Greenwich. Of course with atomic clocks now the balls are
redundant – we all have access to precise digital time.
Engineer Papa – a stickler for
accuracy of measurement, pulled out a GPS and checked the brass inlay
representing the 0 meridian against it. It didn’t match – we walked about 100m
away until the GPS measured 0 longitude. Later he discovered that this is
because the Earth is elliptical – not a perfect sphere and the GPS measurements
are taken from the centre of the Earth (I have no idea how that happens) and
the movement of the tectonic plates also alters the measurement. Apparently the
Greenwich brass meridian line is creeping closer to the GPS line by around 2cm
every year.
Sadly the day was drawing nigh; Poss
bought a pair of socks with east on one and west on the other for Gramps and I
bought something for Geography classes – they really do gift shops well in the
UK. We had decided to cross the Thames on the Emirates Air Line cable car. It
was clearly visible from high in Greenwich park and looked deceptively close.
And so began a Papa walk – flat out in as straight a line as possible. It was
hot and long so we stopped in at a craft beer cafe and drank Coke! At the
bottom of the cable car is a flight simulator that M would have enjoyed a turn
in but it was all booked out.
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| My Nana was born in a terrace house on the street to the right but it has been knocked down for rather grotty looking flats. Her dad was listed as a worker in the Royal Arsenal (think artillery not football) Danger Buildings on her birth certificate in 1911. |
The other reason Poss and I were keen
to see this part of London is because our maternal grandmother was born there.
This was as close as we were going to be able to get – the terrace house she
was born in has been knocked down and replaced with apartment towers. Woolwich
was a working class part of town and her father was listed as an Arsenal worker
on her birth certificate in 1911. The Royal Arsenal was once called the
Woolwich Warren, a piece of domestic land that had supplied rabbits for the
nearby Tudor Palace. The dovecots were converted to store gunpowder for the
navy and so began a long history of storing and making armaments on the site.
In WW1 over 80 000 people were employed in the manufacture, storage and
distribution of weapons from this site. No wonder my great grandfather wanted
to emigrate to NZ when it looked like another world war was on its way.
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| Crossing the Thames back to the Light Rail at Canary Wharves on our way back home. Right: Poss looks back over Woolwich and the old Royal Arsenal grounds that are slowly being developed in to contemporary high rise apartments. Not much left of what our Nana would have remembered from when she left at 16yrs old. |
Across the river is Poplar – the
setting for the popular TV series – Call the Midwife. This area of
London was blitzed to smithereens because it is home to the dockyards where
shipping was maintained. If my ancestors hadn’t sailed across the seas Nana
would probably have never made it to motherhood. In 1912 a walking tunnel was
built under the Thames so workers from Greenwich could get across to the docks
for work without having to wait for or pay for river transport.
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| Right Bottom - The entry house on the Woolwich side that Nana and her family may have used. |
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| Tired with a long train journey ahead back to Cambridge. |
Back in Cambridge Papa and Lo enjoyed
another couple of days relaxing before their big trip via Canada home to NZ.
Willow and Petal dragged Papa out (or was it the other way around) on the daily
Charlie walks. Once they came home with a purple Charlie. The perimeter of
Stourbridge common is covered in wild blackberries that are picked and eaten by
anyone who wishes too. Apparently Papa did they ate lots of blackberries then
wiped their juicy hands on the dog’s white coat. Papa was grinning from ear to
ear telling all sorts of tales about how this happened and the positive points
of having a purple dog. Thanks Lo for making him spend the bucks – these are
precious memories.
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| Ahh the trouble is genetic I fear. Poor purple Charlie. |
With Papa and Lo gone it was time to
start the big pack up. Petal and Willow taped posters advertising the sale of
most of the IKEA furniture we’d bought to tide us over and took them down after
is sold. It felt awful sleeping on the air mattresses again after the container
removalists had taken the girls beds, the “Van Walla” (the buyer’s phrase
not mine) had hoisted our super King off the balcony. To escape this misery I
trained into London to meet Poss and spend a day with her exploring London after
her trip to Bath.
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| As Poss and I wandered down the Thames we came across Alex Polizzi interviewing someone - stared gawping for a few minutes until the stopped and told her how much we'd enjoyed her 'Secret Italy' food show. I had also enjoyed watching her 'Chefs on Trial' show on BBC 2 catch up TV as I made tea in the basement kitchen at St Bart's. It was amazing how many iconic places Poss and I managed to get to see in one day - easier when you know where they all are. The little robin snow globe Poss bought me in the VERY early Selfridge's Christmas dept. stays out all year and gets a shaking as I walk past. |
If a sorrow shared is a sorrow halved
I also think a joy shared is a joy doubled. We have been so lucky to have so
many of our southern hemisphere friends and family come and share bits of our
UK adventure with us. Being able to talk about our shared memories is so much
fun.
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| Charlie would desperately have liked to grab a swan by the neck - it may have been the last thing he did. |
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| So great that Granny could come and see our performance (with the Norwich Chorus, the Cambridge Phil Orchestra and two brass bands in Ely Cathedral - a bit of a thrill!). Bottom shot of my contralto buddies. |
It rained the day we drove out of Cambridge for the last time. If we weren’t heading for RevD and R’s place and then a U.S.A bite of the cherry before heading home I don’t think I would have been able to make myself get in the car. It was such a privilege to sing with the Cambridge Philharmonic and the wonderful friends I made there, teach at The Grove and watch dedicated teachers fight for every student in their care, cycle everywhere I needed to go in the beautiful town and watch the swans crash land outside our driveway in the Cam.
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| Just finished the big clean and had the property inspection - Car sold to a bloke out west - Bikes in the container heading home - more for sentiment than use in Sydney's Hills District! Thanks to the lovely folks in the St Bart's estate - so sorry that Charlie really hated your Labrador no.27. |
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