WWI Era Postcard Shows Disaster Near Hatfield

Met up with several friends at the Shrewsbury charity gig, but one in particular - Hayley Easthope - has given me lots of postcards in the past and presented me with a bunch of World War One era postcards as we got together. I'll show them over several articles as there are a few different subjects - a collection of views of Amiens, a comic postcard booklet collection about the Mannequin Pis in Brussels and a handful with messages from the War and just after.

I'll start with this one though. The original is very faded and I expect was taken by a local photographer and hastily produced due to the topicality of the subject matter. Unfortunately the stamp has been removed which robs the card of its dated postmark, but it was removed without enough time or water as the stamp has ripped and the fragment remaining is a green halfpenny stamp of King George V, whose reign began in 1910.

The postcard was written in pencil which has also faded badly, but by scanning it and playing about with tone, contrast and brightness I think I've managed to decipher the tiny writing - the sender managed to fit quite a sizeable message on his card. Plenty of value for a ha'penny which in today's money is just £0.0020833 - only just over a fifth of today's penny.

I suspect the writer was training in the army as "leave" is mentioned and quite possibly was on placement working on a farm from a comment about working hours. They signed with a bit of a squiggle which I'm afraid I can't make out.

The card reads:

This is one of the victims of our storm. Two old people were sitting at the table when this fell down but marvellously escaped. Am at this place now, a little village called Essendon about 4 miles from Hatfield. This is the very first chance I've had to write since last, they work in country from morn till night.

Very many thanks for parcel duly rec'd awfully sorry couldn't come last weekend they stopped leave on Sat morning owing to the telegraph breakdown. I don't know yet if I shall be able to come this weekend, will write letter as soon as possible. Kind regards...

* * * * * * * *

By the time the photographer reached the scene to take his photograph the fallen tree has been chopped and sawn into several parts, but it is possible to get a good idea of the size of it and the damage it did to the house that it fell on. The old couple at their table had a lucky escape indeed!

Post Script: Hayley has messaged me to say - The sender was Edgar Pedley my dad's uncle. He served in the signals. (which explains why leave was cancelled due to the broken telegraph! - John) I have a photo of him in uniform.

Back to the Edgar Pedley Index

Relief at Last

No... not anything to do with the Siege of Mafeking, or shift work or massage parlours...

After 3 days of hell, the midge bites sustained during the garden party gig on Saturday are at last starting to go down! Phew!!!

The things are voracious! Whilst looking for ways of reducing the appalling itching I came across loads of surreal (and useless) tips. Dabbing toothpaste on them looks unsightly (minus one point) but does make your arm smell minty (plus one point) but does absolutely zilch to stop the itching (minus one million points...).

Also there was a mix of "use a mild acid like vinegar" and "use an alkaline like baking soda" - come on, make your minds up!

Then the really surreal ones - "Put an elastic band around the arm and snap it onto the affected area" huh? It went on to say, "...however the pain of this may not be preferable to the itching!". Well thanks for nothing! Minus two million points...

In the end I went into Boots for some antihistamines. The bloke ahead of me in the queue insisted on showing the assistant a couple of spots and whining how painful they were. I have at least 50 of the bloody things and was on the point of snorting at him when he finally decided to take the assistant's advice.

She looked at my arm as I asked for the same stuff and held out the money. "Now that does look like something to whinge about..." she commented.

Apparently it's only pregnant females that bite you but then are so overcome at your kindness in giving up a miniscule amount of blood that they immediately send out a signal to all other pregnant females who swarm around you and dive in for a snack.

And if you are playing guitar at the time it's not easy to brush them away or move yourself out of their vicinity!

Cat in the Dog House

I've been away in Newcastle since yesterday afternoon and tonight came back to find Jess had been giving Fran a somewhat "interesting" time.

Apparently this morning whilst she was in the shower she heard the merry crash of things falling...

A strange cat had had the temerity to jump onto the window sill outside the kitchen and look through the window into the room.

Jess, who had been sitting minding his own business in the plastic drainer on the sinktop was incensed at this wanton behaviour and showed his displeasure by leaping onto the window sill on the inside and doing a shadow boxing routine with the other cat, separated by the window glass, which stopped any injuries from being inflicted.

However, he did manage to fling every single item off the window sill bar one. The kitchen roll with its wooden holder, a couple of ornaments - all were rolling about either on the work surface or the floor.

The only one that remained on the window sill was a battery-powered liquid soap dispenser. Unfortunately, every time Jess flounced up and down the length of the window sill he passed close enough for it to register him and it faithfully dispensed each time a glob of soap... Fran was not amused...

Sand Yacht Racing at St Annes

I've got up to September 1982 in my scanning of my old black and white negatives.

This week I came across a number of photos that I took for an article for Lancashire Magazine in 1982 of the sand yachts on the beach at St Annes on Sea.

This is a huge expanse of sand, open to the Irish Sea although the tide here never comes close to the edge of the beach.

As such this is a very windy place! There are huge sand hills here, dunes that are held back by star grass - at one time there was a local law that families had to plant so much star grass every year to keep the sand from swamping the villages along the coast. Even now you regularly find huge piles of sand as far back from the "front" as the main road from Lytham towards Blackpool and Starr Gate.

This wind is what makes the sport of sand yachting possible.

In the September of 1982, there was a brand spanking new Coastguard Station on the front at St Annes and it's from around here that the sand yachts congregated and went off on their zig-zag courses out on the flat sands.

The Fylde International Sand Yacht Club was formed in 1951 and hosted several large national and international competitions at St Annes.

In 1953 Richard Denning and a number of friends broke the British and World speed records here on the beach in their yacht Coronation Mk II. Unconfirmed speeds of over 70mph had been achieved - and here I'm looking back at my notes of 1982.

However thare has been no sand yachting at St Annes since a blanket ban in 2002 after a racing yacht struck a member of the public, killing her as she walked with her two sons in 1982. The pilot of the sand yacht was cleared of manslaughter but the ban has been in place ever since.

Currently a three month trial of sand yachting is coming to a close with close scrutiny on public safety and the effects on local and visiting wild life, particularly the various bird populations.

Large verions of the photos: racing yachts, coastguard station, lone yacht, stationary yachts

Florence and The Duomo

8 August 2006. The day started really early. But the scenery as the Island Star sailed into the Italian port of La Spezia was well worth it as this 7:00am view shows. The reason for this early morning scurrying was that we are booked on an excursion to Florence - Firenze, as the Italians call it. The ship docks whilst we have breakfast and we troop off to join a coach. The fun starts straight away. First of all we find the tour operator is called Trumpy Tours which causes a ripple of very British humour along the coach. Next, no sooner have we all got on than there is a bang and a large German camper van swerves and weaves all over the road in front of us, trying to control his shock at having taken off the mirror stalk from the front corner of the coach. He's not stopping. However he's held up in a queue at some traffic lights. Our driver hairs off down the road towards him... but the lights change and he gets away. All this excitement and we haven't gone anywhere yet! Luckily the driver manages to fix the bits of broken mirror back onto the remains of the stalk with a huge roll of sticky tape! And off we go to Florence. There is no let up to the excitement of the day as the look on this young lady's face clearly shows. Here we are in Florence, still laughing at following this large Trumpy Tours paddle when there's a burst of laughter and gasps of disbelief coming from this group immediately behind the guide. The young lady is drawing my attention to the incredibly long underarm hair of the guide... It is long. Incredibly long. You get the idea from looking at the expression on the face of the lady on the right who is staring at it as though she can't believe it... Neither could we. It was at least a foot long. She could have plaited it... In entertainment terms we have had our money's worth from this trip already and we haven't seen Florence yet! This is the impressive facade of Il Duomo. Officially, the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore (...of Saint Mary of the Flowers). It has one of the most impressive domes of the Medieval world. A cathedral had stood here since the 5th century but it needed replacing entirely by the late 1200s. Building commenced on September 9 1296 and was to last another 170 years, interrupted at times by various project managers growing old and dying and a small matter called the Black Death in 1348. The facade is relatively new. Almost all of Florence seems to be constructed of white, green and red marble and the present facade was added only in 1876/87. The original facade had never been finished, never having gotten above the lower portion of the basilica and by the Renaissance was very old-fashioned in appearance. It was pulled down in 1587-88 and the front of the basilica remained bare for the next 300 years. Some say it is excessively decorated. We just thought it was excessively dirty. It was in dire need of a good wash and brush up. The guide took an incredible 3/4 hours to tell us all this, adding many names and dates that meant absolutely nothing to me and, to judge from the intense boredom on the face of our fellow travellers, to no one else either. If you were a scholar of Italian artists and architects it may have been interesting... We were, however, stuck in the queue to go in! Once inside we could see up into the interior of the dome. The figures were painted elongated so that they appear in the correct perspective when viewed from below. It doesn't look that big from below but it's a long way up to it! In fact the painting covers a massive 3600 square metres and took 11 years to complete. The original artist Giorgio Vasari started in 1568 and then selfishly died in 1574, leaving Federico Zuccari and a few friends to finish it off. There's lots more to see in Florence yet. The place is full of sculptures and statues including Michalangelo's statue of David and there's the famous Ponte Vecchio, the only bridge that the Germans didn't blow up on their retreat in 1944.

Return to Mediterranean Explorer 2006 Index

Bandol and Sanary-Sur-Mer

Tuesday, 17 May 2011. The Thomson Destiny docks in the French naval port of Toulon and we have booked an excursion out to two different resorts, Bandol and Sanary-Sur-Mer.

It took us a while to get to Bandol. First there was the problem of the two passengers who were somewhat wider than the door of the coach. The driver had to get off and push the two ladies on from behind... Then he had to push them up the steps... I've never seen a man in such an intimate position with a woman look so aghast... Once back in the driver's seat, the courier had to prod him before he could move himself to set off...

Then we immediately joined a traffic queue. A cyclist had been involved in an accident. 15 minutes later we had crawled past the accident enough to join another queue. This time it was a bus with a very flat tyre!

Eventually we reached Bandol about halfway from Toulon to St Tropez. It was a nice looking place, but we didn't see too much of it as all the women on the bus made a beeline for the market along the marina. It did have some nice stuff on some of the stalls. Mainly because it was French. I suppose the locals were mooching around saying "It's all the same as always isn't it?". Seeing the rolls of bin liners on Preston Market would have excited them no end. And their market did the same for us. Miss Franny called upon my meagre knowledge of French to buy a shawl styled top for a wedding later in the year.

We thought the crockery might have weighed a bit much, quite apart from the risk of opening cases in England to find it was now a 532 piece set... The bus returned - he had had to drive somewhere else as the road didn't have the space for him to wait. Or perhaps he just needed to settle his nerves before helping the two women back on the bus again. Anyway, it was no easier a time for him. They were late. Not just late but a quarter of an hour late.

A gendarme had created a space the coach could wait in and the two ladies eventually returned after the courier had almost torn his hair out, making lots of frantic calls back to the ship and the bus company. They had "had to go to the toilet"... So had most of the rest of us I presumed, but we had got back on time. Anyway the driver went through the same palaver as before, which took another good quarter of an hour and sat muttering feverishly about taking up his cousin's offer of fishing for sharks from a rowing boat in the mid Atlantic... He was not a happy homme...

Sanary-Sur-Mer turned out to be one of the most delightful places I've ever had the luck to find myself. I could easily have spent the full day there rather than the mere 45 minutes that we had.

Even that was long enough to walk the length of the Promenade and back, drinking in the sheer delight of the scenery. The buildings, the boats, moored against the sea wall and floating piers of the marina, the pavement cafes with the bright table umbrellas.

We bought an ice cream and sat on a bench, drinking it all in until the wind got up and one of the table umbrellas detached itself from its weighted foot and knocked over three tables, on a wild flight from its original spot towards us! Luckily it caught on another table and stuck, the pole bent and useless. The cafe owner rushed out in haste somewhere around ten minutes after...

We walked back to the coach the long way to stay near the seafront as long as possible. Our way took us through a small park with a formal garden with an oblong pond into which twenty fountains sprayed an arch of water.

Back at the coach the courier was consoling a weeping driver saying "It's the last time Jacques, the last time," in French over and over.

Return to Jewels of the Mediterranean cruise index

Wrea Green Windmill

Oho! The scanning of my old negatives has moved on a pace! We're now into 1982! On the 1st of April that year I was taking photos of various windmills for an article that eventually was published in Lancashire Magazine. We are well blessed with windmills on the Fylde coast. The famous ones are on the Green at Lytham and at Marton where you get off the M55 motorway to head into Blackpool on the old road before the link from the old end of the motorway to the town centre car parks was built. But then there's Marsh Mill at Thornton, there's one at Staining, one at Kirkam and another nearby at Treales, one at Salwick and there are a couple over Wyre at Preesall and Pilling.

This one is Wrea Green mill. Wrea Green, or Ribby with Wrea, is a small village just off the A583 as you head from Blackpool towards Kirkham. It has a small and olde worlde feel to the village centre that gathers around, but allows plenty of space for, the large village green complete with duck pond.

In April 1982 the windmill at Wrea Green was little more than a ruin. The tower of the mill was there and the single storey building next to it, but the inside of the tower was empty and uncapped, showing signs of that all too common a fate for windmills - fire. The miller's skill was in regulating the flow of grain to the stones. Too fast and the grain wasn't ground properly so your flour would have hard lumps in it. Too slow and the stones would touch and spark and so you had a fire. Flour is combustible - and rather good at it! In this case however, the cause of the fire was an exploding steam engine!

Windmills make a bit of noise when working as you might imagine. Apart from the sails creaking round there are all those big wooden cog wheels clacking about inside and the stones spinning round and the sound of grain falling from hoppers... A neighbour was incensed when the mill was built. He planted a row of trees to block the wind. You can imagine how this may have led to a certain tense relationship between the miller and his neighbour... With the mill unable to use wind power, the miller turned to a recent invention: the steam engine. Now, what a noise that must have made! But alas for the miller and the bread lovers of Wrea Green - the engine blew apart and started a fire that gutted the mill.

Shortly after I took these photos the mill was converted into a home and now has a new lease of life.

Windmills, Wind Pumps Watermills Index

All White in the End

Amanda, one of the infamous Ladies-Over-The-Water, has sent photos of an accident that happened in South Africa. Luckily it seems not to have been a bad accident but the experience turned people white...

It turned out that the people in the blue car were carrying a 25 litre tub of white paint on the back seat at the time of the accident.

Apparently an ambulance driver refused to allow his female paramedic to leave their vehicle as she couldn't stop laughing...

It's nice when things turn out all white at the end though!

Family Transport 4 - Mostly Cortinas

The fourth entry in this series of car memories and first we'll deal with the only one in this entry that not only isn't a Ford, but isn't a Ford Cortina!

This is a Triumph 1300 and was bought in 1979. It was old (1968) and extremely battered. There was a dent in the roof as though it had been rolled at some time and the paintwork was marked and impossible to wash clean.

It was something of a gentleman's car though, with a walnut wooden dashboard and a refusal to change gear in a hurry. When it was giving signs of imminant death I sold it on through the local car auctions only for the police to come round a couple of weeks later... During the Conservative Party Conference in Blackpool, the new owner had abandoned it in the entrance of the Imperial Hotel - which was where Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her Cabinet Ministers were staying...

The new owner hadn't registered it and the police were playing catch-up from the last known owner which was me. At the time of IRA activity, the car was in considerable danger of being blown up by the army! The police officers did grin, but refused to give me a lift to the hotel so I could watch... In the end it wasn't blown up anyway

I had since bought this - a Ford Cortina Mk IV which was only 3 years old and the newest car I'd bought wholly with my own money. The Mark 4 was a relatively rare beast after a very short time. Distinguishable from the Mark 5 mainly because of the front and rear light clusters, they all seemed to disappear off the roads not long after the Mark 5 came out.

It was a bit of a disaster, this car. It had been used as a taxi and although it looked wonderful, we suspected it had gone "round the clock". Odometers at the time only had 5 digits and thus once they reached 100,000 miles they showed zero and started again. It was only recently that cars had been capable of travelling far enough to turn the clock over as the apparent resetting to zero was known. The engine started to smoke quite heavily, with no regard for it's own or any occupants' health! At the same time I was made redundant from work at a time when unemployment was a national issue (when is it not, I know...)

I remained without a car and a job for months that stretched into years. Although it didn't seem so at the time, this was the best thing that could have happened, as I used the time to learn computer programming on a Commodore64 home computer. I used that knowledge to write business software for the first college I worked for in 1985 and that shaped my career since that time and ongoing.

Whilst at that college, the Nautical College in Fleetwood, I bought this - an old Cortina Mark III which was absolutely wonderful. It had been tarted up with a two-tone respray using new Ford colours and was totally unique. It was 13 years old when I bought it and I had it for almost 4 years, being quite upset to lose it when it had an argument with the rear end of a lorry who slammed his anchors on hard for no reason other than to read a map, as I was overtaking the van behind him. Oncoming traffic meant I had to get in front of the van and I hadn't time to stop. The wings of the car were crumpled back over the wheels and I was lucky to walk away unscratched.

The car was a write-off. My friends, who had been in the habit of leaving notes under the windscreen wiper when they saw it parked anywhere, were as devastated as I was. It had been in immaculate condition. Even MOT testers drooled over it each year when I took it in. Whilst new parts were sometimes hard to come by due to its age, they were relatively easy (and cheap) to get from scrap yards! And it was fun doing that. I even bought an indicator stalk from a scrap yard in Norfolk after the steering column set on fire one day whilst on holiday in Great Yarmouth. Now why would that not be fun?!?

It follows that the next purchase was rather urgent and it was this: a Mark V Cortina, bought from a car dealer who turned out to be the father of a colleague. She was really worried we'd be disappointed but, given that I'd opened the boot on the test drive and found an empty can of paint thinners, I knew it had been tarted up and resprayed and in all fairness although it wasn't as exciting as the Mark III, it served us a couple of years which was as much as we could have expected.

In 1990 I had started a collection of pinball machines - as you do... The Ford Sierra Estate joined us, being 3 years old and again, strangely perhaps, this was a brilliant car to drive and own. We trundled pinball machines and jukeboxes about in it and it was our first car with the modern style of hubcap that hid all view of the wheel itself. Up until this time hubcaps just covered the central part of the wheel and the wheel nuts. So you see - there were two cars that weren't Cortinas...

Part 5 of this series will bring us up-to-date.

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Illnesses and Ailments 1950s Style

More from the now-vanished Nostalgia web site. My very earliest memory is of an incident that happened when I was two. We had moved from living with Nana and Grandad to a terraced house of our own in Albion Street, Castleton. My Dad was ill and in bed. He had had asthma from being a young boy and he was particularly bad at this time. I remember running up the stairs behind Mum and going into their bedroom and seeing him hanging out of the bed in a state of collapse.

That one scene fades into another where I am looking out of the window of "Aunty Sally" our next door neighbour, watching the ambulance come for him, emergency bell ringing.

Sirens did not come into use until much later and in 1956 ambulances, police cars and fire engines had an electric bell on the front to clear traffic. There was much less traffic anyway and very few of those very few cars had a radio, much less some form of personal music player in their car to block outside sounds out.

Dad's lung had collapsed with the strain of trying to breathe. He was taken to Rochdale Infirmary where the doctors said if the traffic lights had been on red he would have died on the way to the hospital. I only mentioned this memory to Mum when I was in my 30s or 40s and she said it explained why I used to have nightmares after that day for a few weeks. She said Dad's face had already turned blue. My memory is just black and white and I hadn't remembered that.

When I was seven I started to develop asthma myself. Trying to run more than a few steps brought on the most horrendous attacks of it. I could breathe in but breathing out had to be forced and I wheezed and gasped for breath. Aerosols were rare for any purpose - for inhalers they definitely were not in use. The remedy was to measure an amount of liquid into a glass bubble affair with a rubber bulb underneath. The bulb forced the liquid into a fine mist spray which came out the top of the glass bubble into a tube which led to a hard black plastic face mask which covered the nose, mouth and most of my cheeks and chin. It took around 20 minutes hard pumping on every inward breath to calm an attack.

It seems an incredible amount of time now when modern inhalers have an immediate effect but once the aerosol inhalers came in, the old type were still sold with the slogan "An overdose would be beyond the strength of an average man"! Asthma shaped my life from age 7 until my twenties. I was unable to do most sports so have never had an interest in them. Instead I took up music in the shape of the guitar at 12.

For a couple of years I went to a chest clinic at Rochdale Infirmary two mornings a week. I suppose I'd be between 7 and 9. All I can remember is a group of about 20 kids all around the same age, some of whom seemed to have nothing wrong with them and others who were the same as me, and one or two who wheezed and gasped all the time. We did gentle exercises, lay on mats for an hour's sleep then had a competition to see who could blow a bit of cotton wool the furthest along a table.

As a result of those exercises I now have a lung capacity in excess of most healthy people!

I seem to remember sitting with goggles on huddled around a very bright light, which would have been a sun lamp. Sunshine was thought to be good for all sorts of ailments. Some schools were built with special glass that didn't block UV rays - kids tanned as they sat in class... When Ventolin came out I was on it for 25 years, taking 2 puffs at least 8 times a day, more on most days.

An earlier visit to the infirmary came when I was 3. Dad was cleaning out the gutter at Castleton and looked down to see me rubbing my eye. He was horrified to see it bulging out of the socket and, unable to see the cause, took me up to the infirmary. I can't remember this incident at all, but he told me years afterwards that the doctors had taken from the back of my eye socket a long piece of string that had fallen from the gutter into my eye and my rubbing had wound it around the eye inside the socket.

All I remember about the event is that after coming from the infirmary he told me I'd been very brave and that he would buy me any record I wanted. I had no idea what I wanted but we went to one of the two shops in Rochdale that sold records and I stood looking in the window at a display of lots of 78rpm discs, pinned up on a display, pointed and said "That one..." What he bought me was Don Lang's "The Witch Doctor" which I still have in my collection of 78s from that time.

It was important to catch some of the childhood illnesses early. Mumps was a case in point - horrible symptoms in post-adolescent males! If you caught it, your Mum would tell all the other mums and that night after school you had all your chums round to play in a darkened room whilst the grown-ups sat anxiously waiting for the swollen glands to appear...

We had polio jabs and sometimes took the polio vaccine by eating a lump of sugar or a jelly baby that had been squirted with it!

At least some of the real child-killing diseases had been got rid of. As a child, Dad had caught Scarlet Fever. He had been taken into hospital and not allowed visitors at all as it was so contagious. "When it was visiting time all the parents would gather at the railings around the hospital," he told me. "Nurses would make you stand at the window and tell you to wave at your Mum and Dad. Even if they were there, they were so far away you couldn't make them out in the crowd, but you waved anyway... I was lucky - lots of the kids died."

Perhaps "nostalgia" isn't quite the word for this entry...

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Wharles the Heck Are We?

Last night we played a Steam Fair in Wharles, which is an area out in the Fylde countryside between Kirkham and the M55 motorway.

It was one of those all too familiar bewildering happenings.

We had a phone call from Jack, who does the steam fairs out at Chorley and he had told us it was Saturday night in Treales (which is an area out in the Fylde countryside between Kirkham and Wharles...)

Then David got a call to say it was Friday in Wharles and thought we wouldn't be able to do it because I was due to be working in Plymouth on Friday. However, having turned it down with the organisers, he phoned Fran on Thursday night and she was able to tell him I was on my way home (from Hertfordshire) because the event in Plymouth had been cancelled. (Following this ok?)

We loaded the car for the last time - I've swapped it in today for a new Mazda - and followed the SatNav as we weren't really sure where Wharles was.

It took us down a road labelled as a dead end, but we figured that as we were in a field it could well be correct. The road tuened into a track and the track turned eventually into ruts and potholes and after a mile and a half with 3/4 of a mile still to go the surface was getting me worried about the bottom of the car and I had to reverse a mile before we could turn round to go through Kirkham to get to it on surfaced roads. The SatNav woman refused to apologise and kept trying to make me turn back to try again...

"Turn around when possible" kept being met with a chorus of "P*** off"

Anyway, we found it in the end and had a great night with a smallish but enthusiastic crowd. It went pitch black outside. Going to the loo was a painful experience for one member of the audience as he walked into a 3-foot high metal pole that had been erected to mark out a pitch.

Fran was gingerly coming back from a visit, feeling the way cautiously in the dark when someone came out of the disabled loo and banged the door just behind her. "I'm gobsmacked you didn't hear me scream, I jumped out of my skin!" she said.

So to the garage who took my Mondeo in part exchange, I'm sorry about all the mud caked all over it...

Large versions of the photos: the band, car boot load (labelled)

A Day in Cyprus

Sunday 25 April 2010. The Ocean Village docked at Limassol in Cyprus and we had a lazy start to the day, waiting until all the excursions had left before heading for the gangway ourselves to go exploring. We found a mass of taxis and buses waiting outside the port entrance and hopped on a bus with several other cruisers for the trip into town. It was quite a way, I have to say. We'd been told it would be a 40 minute walk but we were on the bus for a good quarter hour!

Anyway the bus driver dropped us on a roundabout and pointed out the way to a castle, the way to the beach and offered to take us up into the mountains if we wanted. Only a few said they wanted to go and he arranged to meet them back at the roundabout in a couple of hours and - as we were looking round the nearby market at the time - he turned up and waited and none of the ones who had asked him to come back bothered to turn up.

We walked up to the castle and had a brief look around. There was a museum inside the castle, but we were too hot to think about it. Also an interesting snippet - this castle was where King Richard the Lionheart got married in 1191.

There was an old olive or lemon press in the grounds of the castle - I wasn't too sure which. There was a huge stone pit to collect the juice - you could have swum in it... We couldn't as it was empty... Come on pay attention - if it had been full it would have been obvious whether the press was for olives or lemons!

See! Lemon trees! That settles it then...

We went back to the roundabout - it being a sort of focal point - and headed for the beach area. After a wrong turning led us to the old port we found a pleasant Promenade along the sea front. An ice cream van was parked at the entrance to a wooden decked pier but for the moment our thoughts were more on walking than ice cream.

The sea was crystal clear. I love watching the sea flow over rocks and plants like this - I can do it for hours, totally hypnotised by it.

We had a stroll along the pier and sat down on one of the many benches. After a while a couple sat on the bench behind us, out of breath and speaking English. It turned out that they had walked from the ship, the "40 minutes" walk having taken them a gruelling two hours... We went back to the roundabout, bought some drinks and sat there to see if a bus would turn up to take us back to the ship. None did except for the go-it-alone excursion bus that the ship had laid on and we had no tickets for that.

We sat drinking our pop and watched several near misses on the roundabout until from the opposite side down the road off which we had found the seafront there came a loud crash. A van had ploughed into a couple of cars which had (correctly) stopped at a pedestrian crossing. One of our fellow passengers from the cruise went to have a look and related in great detail the damage, what had happened, that there were no injuries etc. I think it was the most exciting thing he'd seen in a while...

No buses were in evidence and in the end we grabbed a taxi back to the port which was a good move after seeing how far it would have been to walk!

We had a late lunch next to a window in the restaurant onboard the ship, watching a jellyfish in the harbour which was making heavy weather of the current. We watched it for a good half hour until the current had brought it right up under our window and then we realised the poor thing only looked to be pulsating because of the optical effect of the waves. It wasn't alive. In fact, it was a plastic carrier bag...

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Great Train Journeys

This week has been a train week. Monday down and up to London and back. Tuesday down to Plymouth. Now that is a train journey. From Blackpool it was a six and a half hour train journey that lengthened into seven and a quarter hours because of getting late into Birmingham, where my third train of the day had already left.

The trip had so far taken 25 minutes from Blackpool to Preston and around an hour and 40 minutes from Preston to Birmingham. The long haul comes after that. Birmingham to Plymouth is around three and three quarter hours.

From Bristol southwards I was on the GWR line, God's Wonderful Railway, as they would have it down there. But I was sitting in a DOP - the Devil's Own Pendolino, with my shoulder jammed against the wall of the train and the back of the seat in front around 3 inches in front of me.

It's a heck of a journey from Birmingham. Cheltenham then Bristol. Taunton where you think you must be getting close, but then another hour to Exeter and even then a final hour to PLymouth. But then, that includes the bit that makes it worth it.

As you come down the side of the River Teign the train runs literally along the river bank and then curves round at Teignmouth along the coast with the sea a few mere feet away. Unfortunately by now it was quite dark and so I could only just make this out. But I resolved to sit on the right side of the train for the return journey yesterday, which was undertaken at the start of the day.

I only had my phone with me to take photos on and in any case couldn't do anything about the reflections on the glass of the window, but it gives you some idea.

Luckily I didn't miss any connections coming home. Unluckily - for them as well as me and my fellow passengers - someone drove into a railway bridge between Crewe and Warrington and we sat at Crewe for 40 minutes before carrying on via Chester. So the journey home took almost 7 and a half hours. And of course, Fran was on an early shift today... (yawn) - oops, pardon me...

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Aaaaaghhhhhh!

Now my regular viewers will know that I seldom moan about my lot in life and try to see the funny side even when strangers throw food all over me on aircraft (last year, see here) but I have to say in all modesty and humility...

This bloody hurts!!!

And how long is it going to be before it grows out?!? No chance of not tearing it off duh... If anyone meets me and I have what appears to be a clown's shoe on my left foot it will be because that's the only thing that will fit because of all the cotton wool I might have to wrap round my toe to avoid more agony! Not looking forward to shoes and socks... But will have to knuckle down to it... toe the line... (Feeling a bit squeamish about saying hit the nail on the head...)

Saucy!!!

I'm in disgrace...

Not because I've been away from home for two days... I've been in Newcastle for a planning meeting with colleagues and Fran got used to me being away years ago.

No, it was that when I got back last night and she'd cooked a meal I reached for the bottle of tomato sauce and gave it a good shake. Ah... the top wasn't screwed on, was it?

There was a red intermittant streak from wall to wall in the kitchen. It covered the carpet. It covered the freezer. It covered the kitchen cupboards.

It covered me - the clean PJs that I'd just changed into, all down one leg, up and over the shoulder, across my glasses and up my forehead...

It covered Jess, one of our two cats... He was sitting on top of the freezer and caught quite spectacularly a large dollop all down his side. He immediately scarpered and took refuge on the window sill in the living room where he generously smeared it on the floor, net curtains, ordinary curtains and the door as he rushed through...

We had to wash him ... and the floor, the furniture, the curtains will have to come down today, the PJs etc. etc... I've been warned never to have ketchup again and never to shake anything until I've checked that the lid is secure. I was almost sent packing back to Newcastle... You know, women lose all their sense of humour at things like that, don't they? I think a change of kitchen carpet is imminent...

Gone To The Birds

Poor Fran. She had a bit of a testing day yesterday whilst I was "enjoying" myself in London for work.

Every year around this time we have a couple of weeks where birds nest in next door's roof space and raise their young. So for a fortnight we are woken early and there's nothing we can do about it but wait for the birds - thrushes I think, certainly not an owl - to rear their young and then they fly off and all goes quiet.

Anyway this year they have managed to get in our own roof space on the back corner and Fran was woken and was thinking the noise was louder than usual when Jess, one of our two cats, appeared from the hallway at the kitchen door with a bird in his mouth.

Cue screams, during which a very disappointed cat suddenly realised he wasn't going to be applauded for being clever and went to hide the evidence, reappearing a moment later with empty mouth and an expression that said "You just imagined it,Mum! Me? Catch a bird?"

Our cats are house cats - they don't go out, so the bird must have got in somehow. No windows were open. The attic hatch was closed... Fran phoned me to let off a few hysterics. Well, shock more than hysterics. Then she went off to search the house looking for the tiny bird that was certainly going to be terrified and possibly injured too. Jess, by now, was sitting quietly on the settee, ears flattened, waiting to be shouted at...

The bird was found in the toilet, cowering behind the toilet brush. Fran gathered it up and took it outside where it managed to fly off. All was well until later when she had sat down in the living room with a coffee to settle her nerves when TWEET!... from somewhere in the living room.

The cats politely raised their heads but were not going to budge after all the fuss of before. Two birds had managed to get in. The one from the toilet had been a second one and the one that Jess had managed to catch was now in the corner on the floor under my desk. So Fran had to get on hands and knees under the desk, banging her head as she jumped each time the bird fluttered anywhere near her.

She caught this one as well, in a tupperware box, took it outside, opened the box and watched in dismay as it took a brave leap - into the fishpond... The box was used to scoop it out and she put it somewhere as safe as she could to let it dry off and recover.

When I got home last night all the drama was finished with. I suspect the birds have nested on top of the wall of the house and the two small ones had fallen down the wall cavity and forced their way through a vent in the toilet which has a loose corner.

After the initial shock had worn off, Fran had been really brave and level headed about it. Not sure I'd have been any calmer actually!

Large versions of the photos: owl, ostritch (no large one of the vulture available) The owl and ostritch were photographed at Blackpool Zoo, the vulture at Chester Zoo.

Whoopsie in Cavtat...

Saturday, 2 May 2009. The coach arrived in Cavtat and we got out en masse, stretched our legs, wandered into the road and generally annoyed folk on scooters, in cars etc. What is it with tourists that they think because they are on holiday the rest of the world should stop as well - until they want something in a shop...

Our guide led us off away from the beautiful bay with its bobbing boats and at first I thought "Huh?" but then it quickly became apparent that Cavtat occupies a narrow strip of land between the sea and a large inlet bay and it was literally only a minute or so before we reached the sea front on the other side.

We were booked into a local place for a drink and had only about ten minutes before we were due there. We had a wander about up the waterfront - and I found the only example we saw of dog poo. Quite clever really... the odds were enormous... as was the pile of dog poo... So I spent the ten minutes with wrinkled nose, cleaning my shoe with tissues...

But for this one spot - spot?!? It must have been almost a mountain, how did I ever fail to see it until... Anyway, but for this one trap left by an obviously rebellious dog, the place was spotless. I put the shoe back on and walked through every puddle I could find, scraped my shoe against any edge of kerb or paving stone and feeling reasonably confident that I wasn't about to mess up everywhere I trod, we went for the drinks which were being served outdoors in a courtyard across the street from the cafe bar.

There were drink and nibbles. We didn't bother with the nibbles but I did go into the main tavern to visit the loo and it had a nice rough welcoming mat outside. I was fairly sure that my shoe was now free from any odious material, but the mat was a bit of added reassurance...

Following the tavern visit we took a stroll along the marble surface of the Promenade pausing only to eavesdrop on a boat owner who was taking umbrage at the charges for mooring his yacht alongside. He had two choices and he chose to sail off to try his luck a few yards further up the coast...

We walked most of the length of the short peninsula and I sat in the sunshine to sketch the tip of it, which curved to form the bay. A few people stopped to watch before making comments in Croatian like "That's the pillock that spread that dog dirt all over the place..."

On the way back towards the coach we had a look in a couple of shops and then met up with everyone else to mill about in the middle of the road until the courier shooed us onto the coach.

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