Village Life

More photos from 1983, this time we've moved into the month of May of that year and have taken a trip up the coast to the village of Heysham, near Morecambe.

At that time during the warmer months there was always a little market down the main street and a few old fashioned reminders of a past way of life.

The huge brass beam scale allowed you to be weighed though, as people always tended to watch, it wasn't the most discreet way of finding out if you needed to diet! Worst case scenario was the operator muttering "I'll just have to nip inside for some more weights..."

Perhaps a little more discreet than the automatic talking weighing machine that shrieked "No elephants!" or "One at once!"

A little further down the street was a stall selling nettle beer. I tried some once - the most horrible concoction I've ever drunk... Though I have a friend who swears by it. She was brought up there and probably doesn't know any better... (I'm sure there'll be a comment sooner or later! Ha ha!) Anyway, I just swore at it...

Finally an "awww!" moment from further down the village.

To celebrate the first day of 2012, this is the first entry I've composed using Blogger's new interface. It handles photos and a few html bits slightly differently and there are a couple of extra things I can do that I couldn't before.

Large versions of the photos: scales 1, scales 2, nettle stall, stable door

Night Time in Kotor

Saturday, 13 August 2011. We are still in Kotor, Montenegro, 28 kilometres from the Adriatic Sea up the deepest fjord in southern Europe.

We are standing on the Promenade Deck of the Thomson Spirit cruise ship, waiting to sail out of Montenegro and back down the fjord to the sea.

As darkness falls the ancient city of Kotor comes alive - so much so that the full car park below us on the wharf has a long stream of cars queueing to get in. They each must wait until another car leaves.

Many of the cars are bringing people who have come to watch us sail. There's a sizeable number of people ready to wave at every slightest movement. It's still a very warm night and we wave back as the ship's crew continue their preparations to leave.

It's already quite dark, just a hint of a glow in the sky. There won't be much to see on our way down the fjord once we pass the lights of the last town.

The city walls that earlier had blended in with the mountainside which they climb, now stand out in floodlighting, showing just how high above the main city they reach. A crowd is now standing close to the gates to the dock area, waiting to see the ship leave the port. Young couples, older couples, entire families... they all stand or sit looking expectantly upwards. Then the startlingly loud blast on the ship's hooter. No wonder they are all out here with their kids - no one would have slept through that!

The crowd of people start to wave at the few of us who have come out to watch our own departure. "Goodbye! Don't forget to write!" Actually I don't speak Montenegrin... It could have been "You bastards! You woke the baby!" One chap looked slightly apologetic at the rail. Hmmm - maybe it had been "You bastard! You left me with a baby!!!" The ship moves away from the dock, turns slowly, then starts off down the fjord. We pass a few ferries, lots of small boats and a yacht, swinging slowly to its mooring.

As we move away from Kotor the lights dwindle until there are just a few houses here and there along the fjord's bank. There is not enough light to take photographs of the scenery by and we move towards the back of the ship.

From the rear of the Promenade Deck we stop to overlook the Lido Deck where people are enjoying a late dinner or snack and a drink.

We then climb up a few decks to Horizons Bar for a drink and to listen to the vocal harmony group, New Dimensions. We'll meet them properly later in the week.

It would be easy to drink yourself into stupefaction on a cruise ship - plenty actually do. Others set foot on the boat already pretty stupid... I'm not a good drunk. I have a short spell of feeling merry but, let's face it, most people wouldn't tell the difference anyway and then I just feel ill and fall over... Not good. I don't do it. People tell me they'd love to see me drunk but I'd just aim for them if they got me that way... So after a giddy pint, we finish our evening on the Lido Deck with a sedate coffee. The next day is our day at sea so in our next entry we will have travelled all the way up the Adriatic to call in at the top right hand corner into Koper in Slovenia.

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Farewell to Sorrento

Wednesday 24 August 2005. It's our last night in Sorrento.

Night time in the market streets of Sorrento. Whilst colourful by day, at night they have a special atmosphere! It's a place to see and be seen.

Whilst most holiday makers are dressed casually, occasionally a couple, a group of girls or an Italian housewife will stroll by, dressed to impress.

There were a large number of folk with rather familiar accents too - snapping up tiny bottles of Limoncella lemon liqueur, saying "Eeh, George, let's take some o' this back for our Florrie!"

In fact we've still got a couple of said small bottles gathering dust on the shelf, contents separating and looking not quite as appealing as it did when we bought it that night...

Eventually even the ladies had had enough of the markets and shops. We started to head back towards the hotel, past this little park which looked completely different to how it appears during the day.

The hotel next door had a DJ playing loud music until the early hours. The DJ was indistinguishable from an English DJ actually. "Verberve buh vebberrev, ha ha ha! Beverber ha ha! beebussy cooooobah! Hey ho! Ha ha ha!" Yep... just like any DJ in England at weddings, in pubs, clubs, etc...

The next day we have a few hours before the coach picks us up to take us to the airport. The ladies make back straight for the market streets, so I have a wander inland and find I'm walking over a bridge across an immensely steep and deep chasm.

At the bottom are the ruins of a large factory and to take the photo I'm shooting almost vertically down from the roadway bridge. A quite awesome viewpoint.

Further inland I find some of the old city walls. I hadn't even known that Sorrento had a city wall until I wandered up this far and passed under the gate in the photo.

They are fairly solid chunks of masonry though as you can see. And these lengths of wall that I saw are so complete and seemingly in such good condition that I had to conclude that the rest of the city wall was deliberately demolished, probably to allow the town to expand.

I couldn't really work out what the three corner corbels would have supported... The wall above them is unbroken so they are hardly likely to have held a fighting platform - which would have been more use on the inside of the wall anyway. Perhaps they had some extremely large hanging baskets?

Then as the heat grows, I head back towards the market and harbour and find somewhere cool to wait for Fran and Mum. The little open space here looks like they have set up for an open air concert of some kind for tonight. Typical - the day we go home! Ah well...

Ahhh.... yes, that'll do! And that's about it. Now we are whisked off to Naples airport where my battered hat gets stuck in the X-ray conveyor to be eventually thrown out to a bemused person who couldn't remember putting it in... I forgot all about it until I was on the plane when I suddenly said "Where's my hat?" but it was far too late! And probably far too battered to make me care all that much!

And by way of coincidence, as I finish writing about our Sorrrento holiday, my mate Clive is about to set off on his Sorrento holiday, so have a good one, bud!

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Give Us A Suck Of Your Twister!

Do you remember Twisters? A refreshing (refreshing??? They had more kick than a Red Bull!!!) drink in either orange or cherry (I think - I only ever drank orange ones).

Here I am in 1980 with Gill who was most concerned that her dear old dad shouldn't go without his daily fix of orange Twister.

They were vividly orange in fact. Ah the good old days of additives E104 and E110, when a sip of this stuff or a suck at a Smartie or two could turn Gill into a virtual dynamo of unstoppable energy and had me staring at ceilings at night unable to sleep...

Even ice cream cones at that time were a uniform and almost pure orange colour due to the additives. Anything rather than have them appear to be unevenly baked...

Such stupidity is still amongst us of course - all these tomatoes on the vine... As anyone who has ever grown a tomato can tell you, they don't all ripen at the same time. Spray them with the right chemical and they will all turn red however...

Ring Pull Technology

I really can't remember why I took this particular photo - it must have been on some extremely boring afternoon in or around 1980.

The cans of drink have a new-fangled thing (probably not all that new by then actually) called ring-pulls. As can be seen clearly, they pulled totally clear of the can. To avoid dropping litter, the usual method of disposal was to drop the detached ring-pull into the can and then drink from it. Two minutes later your friends could practice the kiss of life (or CPR as the Ladies Over The Water might have it) as you stopped breathing due to "drinking" the ring-pull. Many an amateur tonsillectomy was performed accidentally during the act of removing one of these from the back of someone's throat...

Earlier drinks cans had no ring-pull or self-contained opening mechanism at all and required one of these fearsome weapons which hooked over the rim of the can so the pointy end could be levered down to puncture the tin. This, for any fizzy can of drink, caused a huge geyser of sticky sugary drink to fall all over the person standing opposite who up until that point had been enjoying the sight of you wrestling with it. The other, blunter, end is for taking the crimped caps off bottles of coke and other similar bottles. Sterilised milk used to come with such caps in pint glass bottles. I remember it tasted horrible and I could never understand as a kid why anyone's Mum would torture them so...

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